1) Holidays here.
2) One more year.
3) One less year.
Happy 2015!
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Friday, December 19, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#133) "Sail On" by The Commodores - Among the greatest break-up songs of all time, Sail On's beautifully spartan arrangement and simple but smart harmonies make for a strangely subtle but still evocative ride on the emotional roller coaster that reliably comes when the end of a relationship is at hand - despair, bitterness, resignation, hope, proclamation, affirmation, it's all in there...emulsified by saltiness.
Yeah, Lionel Richie has saltiness on lock here...not bad for the guy who is best known for writing wet weepers like Endless Love, Lady, Truly, and Hello.
"Sail on down the line bout a half a mile or so / and I don't really wanna know where you're goin'..."
#134) "Whatever You Say" by Martina McBride - Aided by what is arguably the best vocal ability in all of country music (and in certain musically climactic moments, perhaps all of the known universe), much of McBride's work in the 1990s had an element of cinematic drama to it, and Whatever You Say is no exception. I love the feeling of precipitous urgency this song creates, which is truly set aloft by McBride's resonant pipes.
It's one of those songs that captures a moment in time that is happening simultaneously, in apartments, homes, restaurants and bars in countless little towns and big cities on any given night: an increasingly flustered woman trying to get through to her dismissive boyfriend or husband, who it would seem just wants to be left alone, and for his (lack of) effort, might soon be.
Of course, going by what I've seen of other people's relationships over time, too often the woman doesn't ever actually leave. She complains - rightfully so mind you - but sticks around in the end, no matter what the man says, bound by a sense of duty to all the things women are expected to care about more than men, still, 40-plus after women's lib: the stability of home, family and appearances. While the man can continue to be an uncommunicative douche, childish and disrespectful, if not outright abusive, it's the woman who feels obligated to guard love at all costs. Groundskeeper to the estate of their life together, she deludes herself that if she loves him hard enough, well enough, if she's a strong woman (and all that that implies), he'll change, he'll grow and evolve...and so the scenario revealed in Whatever You Say rewinds and plays again, over and over like an animated GIF, as days congeal into months, months gel into years, and years get trapped inside the hard amber of decades.
On a lighter note, the song also evokes vivid, and pleasant, memories of the country radio station I used to work at. In my mind, it still seems strange that so much of this mid and late 90s music is now found on the 'classic country' stations: Martina McBride, Shania Twain and Tracy Lawrence have taken their place in the hard amber, alongside Glen Campbell, Loretta Lynn and George Jones.
"I know you can hear me, but I'm not sure you're listening..."
Happy Holidays
And best wishes to all in 2015!
Friday, December 12, 2014
Barely a week without it proves (for better or worse) that a cell phone is no longer just an accessory...
Early in this blog, I wrote about the possibility of driving 1/48/50 - 1 drive through 48 states in under 50 years - with no Internet whatsoever. I considered bringing along a pre-paid cell phone for security purposes (mainly because public pay phones are a quickly dying breed and you really ought to have a ready connection to someone if you plan to be a thousand miles from nowhere for any amount of time), but leaving my big juicy smart phone at home, and refraining from using the Internet entirely - no e-mails, no texts, and especially no web surfing. I'd get my news from TV, or better yet from a newspaper the next day (maybe ditch TV as well...). If I was lost, I'd consult Rand McNally. If I was bored, I'd take a deep breath, take a look around, find something to look at. Or someone to talk to. Something to read, maybe. Or something to write.
Since that first post nearly two years ago, I've many times pondered the pros and cons of attempting such a test of discipline. And in various moments of deep contemplation, if the light outside was just right, if I was well fed and at peace enough to actually picture myself on this trip, I came to the conclusion that while disconnecting myself - er, so to speak - would get in the way of certain things (primarily my ability to keep a real-time account of my travels on this blog, which I'm really looking forward to), there's definitely something enticing (almost sensually so) about being disconnected for that long a period of time, and frequently thought, in an effort to convince myself: am I really seeking a nebulous life, or just throwing that word around...?
But recently I found myself for the first time in a long time without a 'big juicy smart phone', and now...now, I just don't know...
I spend a lot of time on these pages lamenting the world we live in, complaining that technology is dumbing down the experience of Life rather than lifting it up. I've stayed averse to, and skeptical of, the social media purported to be bringing us together, believing it leads mostly to false 'friendship' fertilized by insincerity. And I don't think technology - at least the digital variety - empowers the way Madison Avenue would have us believe. It provides the illusion of power, perhaps, of individuality. We all get a chance to yawp over the rooftops, as Whitman wrote, with our tweets, pics and posts...yep, we're yawping, that's for sure...all yawping our balls off, these days.
By that reckoning, it would seem obvious that a seminal trip like 1/48/50 should be spent eschewing at all cost the virtual world's fallacious interpretation of the word 'connected' and absorbing the real world like never before. In other words, I should be reveling in human voices rather than 'posts' as I go town to town, county to county, state to state (or perhaps just reveling in silence), absorbing natural colors through my imperfect eyes (rather than the unnaturally crisp and luminous hues presented to me in RGB). I should be pondering the uniqueness of the right angle and the architecture it enables, how birdsong has a way of stitching the day together, the fact that trees are a population of living things, clouds are rain in the making, asphalt, rather than automobiles, the reason we are able to drive so fast...the kind of random but important stuff I used to appreciate and ponder in idle moments before I could easily distract myself (from myself) playing Angry Birds, snapping a pointless selfie, watching old commercials on YouTube, or doing a rote (and almost always disillusioning) sweep of my Facebook wall, where, again, everybody is essentially saying and playing and snapping the same thing about everything, and yet for the most part saying, playing, and snapping nothing of import.
It's been pretty to think I would have no problem doing so, that it would be easy, and wholly satisfying moreover, to get back to myself on this trip.
But then last week my cell phone up and died on me...well, not died, exactly, but the charging port became corroded and gnarled inside, a little 7 mm wide nest of split plates and bent wires, into which the charger would no longer fit, thus the device could no longer be charged. I'm not sure just how the gnarling happened; to be honest, I'm tempted to cry foul. It's a top shelf phone, yet I think it's possible the port was defective on the day I got it last August. As to the corrosion, I don't remember ever exposing it to water, never dropped it in a puddle or into snow, never even allowed it to slide into my bathroom sink as I was brushing my teeth...although I guess it's possible coffee was spilled on it at some point, at least once.
Maybe twice.
But that's neither here nor there; the point is, I went three or four days without a phone while I waited for a replacement to arrive in the mail, and I'm not going to lie: living without it was like having to learn to walk again. It was maddening - maddening - the void that was created for having nothing to 'check', no screen to swipe in search of a text, an e-mail, a missed call. And the absence of digitally random but important stuff, like not being able to immediately know what time it is, or what the temperature is, or what the five-day weather forecast holds in store, conspired to create an unnerving sense of disorientation and disconnection, as though I'd woken up to discover the Apocalypse had happened while I was napping.
But the real surprise blow to my sense of ease came on Saturday, when I was faced with a situation that simply hasn't been an issue for a long, long time: driving an hour and half having to listen to the radio! You remember the radio, that 20th century relic that has largely gone the way of 8-tracks, VHS, vinyl, cassette and (any day, now) the compact disc.
How painfully quaint, how excruciatingly adorable, to have to find something interesting to listen to while I was driving! How very 1998 to be stuck enduring commercials, top of the hour ID's and news breaks...to wonder, with no input or control whatsoever, what song would play next, or what the topic of discussion might be, and with no fast forward or rewind options to boot. Yes, I suppose I could have brought along a few CDs, but they're all in storage now, destined to be donated to some second hand store in the not so distant future, where most will probably sit untouched for ages. My entire musical library exists digitally these days, in a world with no moving parts whatsoever, to which my phone is the primary - if not sole - portal.
I found myself flipping restlessly up and down the dial, 'seeking' out something that would be as satisfying - and pair as well with my coffee - as my customary menu of pre-arranged playlists and podcasts, stored on my phone, but now rendered inaccessible. It was a Sisyphean task; the radio landscape in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin is a barren tableau on the best of days.
And that's when it hit me. Control. That's the one tangible and inarguable thing the digital technology surge of the last fifteen years (now found wadded up in our pockets) has provided us, and it's a powerful stimulant. No, I'm not at all convinced technology brings us together. I'm pretty sure it doesn't edify us, or make us more creative, or necessarily smarter or - outside of rare instances - empower us in any manner of lasting influence. But it DOES offer us control over what we hear and see. It allows us to cook our entertainment and information down to a reductive stew seasoned specifically to our tastes, needs and impulses at any given moment. We can now, for the first time ever, experience only what we want to experience, and only when we want and are ready to experience it.
Who knows, maybe that is a form of empowerment after all. But in any case, it's a breakthrough whose monumental significance escaped me until it was suddenly taken away and I faced having to choose between listening to Last Christmas by Wham!, Grenade by Bruno Mars, or a farm commodities report, which even I - the man who likes to believe everything is worth knowing - found boring. I was left to shudder, remembering those dark days of yore (that nobody under 28 will understand), when listening to the radio was mostly sitting around waiting for something to happen, when summer re-runs were the only chance there was to catch something you missed on television, when you had to buy a whole album of throwaways just to hear the one song you liked...when a playlist was a 'mix tape', and kind of a time-consuming pain to do.
And the funny (or shocking) thing is, I still had Internet the entire time! I was never actually deprived the way I would be on my road trip. But merely not having ready access through my phone was, to say the least, jarring.
I'm not saying I won't try to disconnect on 1/48/50, but last week's experience has me thinking it might be harder than I was anticipating.
Maybe that's all the more reason to do it.
Since that first post nearly two years ago, I've many times pondered the pros and cons of attempting such a test of discipline. And in various moments of deep contemplation, if the light outside was just right, if I was well fed and at peace enough to actually picture myself on this trip, I came to the conclusion that while disconnecting myself - er, so to speak - would get in the way of certain things (primarily my ability to keep a real-time account of my travels on this blog, which I'm really looking forward to), there's definitely something enticing (almost sensually so) about being disconnected for that long a period of time, and frequently thought, in an effort to convince myself: am I really seeking a nebulous life, or just throwing that word around...?
But recently I found myself for the first time in a long time without a 'big juicy smart phone', and now...now, I just don't know...
I spend a lot of time on these pages lamenting the world we live in, complaining that technology is dumbing down the experience of Life rather than lifting it up. I've stayed averse to, and skeptical of, the social media purported to be bringing us together, believing it leads mostly to false 'friendship' fertilized by insincerity. And I don't think technology - at least the digital variety - empowers the way Madison Avenue would have us believe. It provides the illusion of power, perhaps, of individuality. We all get a chance to yawp over the rooftops, as Whitman wrote, with our tweets, pics and posts...yep, we're yawping, that's for sure...all yawping our balls off, these days.
By that reckoning, it would seem obvious that a seminal trip like 1/48/50 should be spent eschewing at all cost the virtual world's fallacious interpretation of the word 'connected' and absorbing the real world like never before. In other words, I should be reveling in human voices rather than 'posts' as I go town to town, county to county, state to state (or perhaps just reveling in silence), absorbing natural colors through my imperfect eyes (rather than the unnaturally crisp and luminous hues presented to me in RGB). I should be pondering the uniqueness of the right angle and the architecture it enables, how birdsong has a way of stitching the day together, the fact that trees are a population of living things, clouds are rain in the making, asphalt, rather than automobiles, the reason we are able to drive so fast...the kind of random but important stuff I used to appreciate and ponder in idle moments before I could easily distract myself (from myself) playing Angry Birds, snapping a pointless selfie, watching old commercials on YouTube, or doing a rote (and almost always disillusioning) sweep of my Facebook wall, where, again, everybody is essentially saying and playing and snapping the same thing about everything, and yet for the most part saying, playing, and snapping nothing of import.
It's been pretty to think I would have no problem doing so, that it would be easy, and wholly satisfying moreover, to get back to myself on this trip.
But then last week my cell phone up and died on me...well, not died, exactly, but the charging port became corroded and gnarled inside, a little 7 mm wide nest of split plates and bent wires, into which the charger would no longer fit, thus the device could no longer be charged. I'm not sure just how the gnarling happened; to be honest, I'm tempted to cry foul. It's a top shelf phone, yet I think it's possible the port was defective on the day I got it last August. As to the corrosion, I don't remember ever exposing it to water, never dropped it in a puddle or into snow, never even allowed it to slide into my bathroom sink as I was brushing my teeth...although I guess it's possible coffee was spilled on it at some point, at least once.
Maybe twice.
But that's neither here nor there; the point is, I went three or four days without a phone while I waited for a replacement to arrive in the mail, and I'm not going to lie: living without it was like having to learn to walk again. It was maddening - maddening - the void that was created for having nothing to 'check', no screen to swipe in search of a text, an e-mail, a missed call. And the absence of digitally random but important stuff, like not being able to immediately know what time it is, or what the temperature is, or what the five-day weather forecast holds in store, conspired to create an unnerving sense of disorientation and disconnection, as though I'd woken up to discover the Apocalypse had happened while I was napping.
But the real surprise blow to my sense of ease came on Saturday, when I was faced with a situation that simply hasn't been an issue for a long, long time: driving an hour and half having to listen to the radio! You remember the radio, that 20th century relic that has largely gone the way of 8-tracks, VHS, vinyl, cassette and (any day, now) the compact disc.
How painfully quaint, how excruciatingly adorable, to have to find something interesting to listen to while I was driving! How very 1998 to be stuck enduring commercials, top of the hour ID's and news breaks...to wonder, with no input or control whatsoever, what song would play next, or what the topic of discussion might be, and with no fast forward or rewind options to boot. Yes, I suppose I could have brought along a few CDs, but they're all in storage now, destined to be donated to some second hand store in the not so distant future, where most will probably sit untouched for ages. My entire musical library exists digitally these days, in a world with no moving parts whatsoever, to which my phone is the primary - if not sole - portal.
I found myself flipping restlessly up and down the dial, 'seeking' out something that would be as satisfying - and pair as well with my coffee - as my customary menu of pre-arranged playlists and podcasts, stored on my phone, but now rendered inaccessible. It was a Sisyphean task; the radio landscape in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin is a barren tableau on the best of days.
And that's when it hit me. Control. That's the one tangible and inarguable thing the digital technology surge of the last fifteen years (now found wadded up in our pockets) has provided us, and it's a powerful stimulant. No, I'm not at all convinced technology brings us together. I'm pretty sure it doesn't edify us, or make us more creative, or necessarily smarter or - outside of rare instances - empower us in any manner of lasting influence. But it DOES offer us control over what we hear and see. It allows us to cook our entertainment and information down to a reductive stew seasoned specifically to our tastes, needs and impulses at any given moment. We can now, for the first time ever, experience only what we want to experience, and only when we want and are ready to experience it.
Who knows, maybe that is a form of empowerment after all. But in any case, it's a breakthrough whose monumental significance escaped me until it was suddenly taken away and I faced having to choose between listening to Last Christmas by Wham!, Grenade by Bruno Mars, or a farm commodities report, which even I - the man who likes to believe everything is worth knowing - found boring. I was left to shudder, remembering those dark days of yore (that nobody under 28 will understand), when listening to the radio was mostly sitting around waiting for something to happen, when summer re-runs were the only chance there was to catch something you missed on television, when you had to buy a whole album of throwaways just to hear the one song you liked...when a playlist was a 'mix tape', and kind of a time-consuming pain to do.
And the funny (or shocking) thing is, I still had Internet the entire time! I was never actually deprived the way I would be on my road trip. But merely not having ready access through my phone was, to say the least, jarring.
I'm not saying I won't try to disconnect on 1/48/50, but last week's experience has me thinking it might be harder than I was anticipating.
Maybe that's all the more reason to do it.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Reason #29 to Live Nebulously
I'd venture nobody is safe from this sort of thing...:-(
Sony Hack Reportedly includes 47,000 Social Security Numbers, Celebrity Data
Sony Hack Reportedly includes 47,000 Social Security Numbers, Celebrity Data
Friday, November 28, 2014
On Sports Logos On Bumper Stickers
I don't have a lot to say this week. Too much turkey, too much stressing over whether to actually go Black Friday shopping, so I'll take a break from my usual loquacious vibe, keep it simple with a little light talk about bumper stickers.
Make no mistake, there's a part of me that doesn't want any bumper stickers on 1/48/50; a part of me that wants to be completely incognito on this drive, a part of me that bristles even at having to have license plates, as if revealing something so day-to-day as the state in which I register my vehicle is revealing too much. Nebulous, right...? I want to exist, for those few months, mostly in the peripheral vision of the people I encounter.
But I don't want to take this trip, or myself, so seriously that I can't have a little fun, and there's something appealing to me about bumper stickers. To be clear, not the ones that try to be funny or clever, or insult other motorists, or wield some (usually radical) political statement. Actually, the only sticker with a message of any kind I'd ever consider brandishing on my bumper would be that old existential gem, Shit Happens, because ultimately that's all that needs to be said. Maybe, possibly, ones that announce where I've been, as well...although I don't think I'd ever go overboard upholstering the ass end of my vehicle with stickers from Boise, Bozeman and Brownsville, Dallas, Dubuque and Duluth, Albuquerque, Wichita and Saginaw. That's just tacky.
I do, however, enjoy the thought of giving a little glimpse of myself as I go, just a little impersonal Twitter post-caliber flash of who I am, and what I might be like, where I've been in the larger (existential) sense as I'm flying down the road at 80 miles per hour, and I see no better way of doing this than with sports logos.
Think about it, the teams we support, on whatever level (whether merely caring if they win or lose, or the super fan who dons the official team underwear), say a lot about us. There can be any number of reasons why a person likes a particular team, often having nothing to do with geography. Most of my teams have nothing to do with where I was raised or live currently, and those that do have a story behind them that is uniquely my own. I like the thought of another motorist being left to ponder what that story might be from just a short glimpse of my rear bumper as I pass on the left.
And so, in no particular order, I present - drum roll please - 'THE BACK OF MY VEHICLE ON 1/48/50':
(Truth be told, I'm dying to explain each of these, but then they'd no longer be bumper stickers...let readers ponder as motorists one day will.
Or not...that's okay too. ;-)
Make no mistake, there's a part of me that doesn't want any bumper stickers on 1/48/50; a part of me that wants to be completely incognito on this drive, a part of me that bristles even at having to have license plates, as if revealing something so day-to-day as the state in which I register my vehicle is revealing too much. Nebulous, right...? I want to exist, for those few months, mostly in the peripheral vision of the people I encounter.
But I don't want to take this trip, or myself, so seriously that I can't have a little fun, and there's something appealing to me about bumper stickers. To be clear, not the ones that try to be funny or clever, or insult other motorists, or wield some (usually radical) political statement. Actually, the only sticker with a message of any kind I'd ever consider brandishing on my bumper would be that old existential gem, Shit Happens, because ultimately that's all that needs to be said. Maybe, possibly, ones that announce where I've been, as well...although I don't think I'd ever go overboard upholstering the ass end of my vehicle with stickers from Boise, Bozeman and Brownsville, Dallas, Dubuque and Duluth, Albuquerque, Wichita and Saginaw. That's just tacky.
I do, however, enjoy the thought of giving a little glimpse of myself as I go, just a little impersonal Twitter post-caliber flash of who I am, and what I might be like, where I've been in the larger (existential) sense as I'm flying down the road at 80 miles per hour, and I see no better way of doing this than with sports logos.
Think about it, the teams we support, on whatever level (whether merely caring if they win or lose, or the super fan who dons the official team underwear), say a lot about us. There can be any number of reasons why a person likes a particular team, often having nothing to do with geography. Most of my teams have nothing to do with where I was raised or live currently, and those that do have a story behind them that is uniquely my own. I like the thought of another motorist being left to ponder what that story might be from just a short glimpse of my rear bumper as I pass on the left.
(Truth be told, I'm dying to explain each of these, but then they'd no longer be bumper stickers...let readers ponder as motorists one day will.
Or not...that's okay too. ;-)
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Friday, November 21, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#130) "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire feat. Krayzie Bone - A couple weeks ago, I lauded the satirical greatness of White and Nerdy by 'Weird' Al Yankovic, and I feel that recognition would not be complete without taking a moment to laud the greatness of its inspiration.
And yet, in doing so I feel self-conscious, feel like I'm going out on a limb. Too many times Ridin' has played on my phone at work and prompted someone to say, with eyes and mouth wide, "This song's on your phone? Really? Wow...!"
Yes, I'm 41, white, and Midwestern, mostly small town, have never had much direct contact with rap or hip hop culture, but by including this song on the soundtrack of my road trip, I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. I don't ride down the street with it blasting at top volume, slumped down in the driver seat, hand draped over the steering wheel, pants around my knees, hat cranked sideways, flashing symbols with my fingers. It doesn't perpetuate my image...er, wait, what image? I'm not the least bit fly for a white guy, and perfectly okay with that. ;-)
I just like the song, the way it sounds, and it's disheartening to realize so many think of music in such narrow terms. Culture, style and race mean nothing to me. If something is good, it's good. If something grabs my attention and holds it, I'm going to jam to it. If it moves me in some way, any way, I just might want to bring it along for 14,000 miles.
For my Midwestern white boy money, Chamillionaire sets the bar here for all rap music and rap artists. Ridin' is complex, at moments astonishingly so, the lyrics (especially Krayzie Bone's Verse 2) coming so fast they spin into an hypnotic kaleidoscope of sound that seems almost incoherent, but isn't. This, like what 'Weird' Al did in his parody, is not easy. Rapping well is not easy. Truth is, a lot of black artists are terrible at it. Why? Because it's not about race at all really, it's a skill like any other that not everybody possesses. It's relatively easy to merely assume the look and the style, wear all the right clothes and posture in just the right way. To be a wordsmith, as rapping was originally intended, and to insert those malleable words into music in such a way that creates an unforgettable hook that listening to feels like an experience, is something else all together.
Also, there's a message to the song, about racial profiling and/or police brutality, that shouldn't be ignored. Once again, in no way can I pretend to be able to relate, but as the nation waits tensely for the grand jury ruling in Ferguson, Missouri, I've been thinking more about my own unnerving experience with the police, long ago.
When I was a teenager, I had a long, flowing mane of hair hanging all the way down my back, and this attracted the attention of police. I would be cruising up and down the main drag in my 1977 Chrysler Newport minding my own business, completely sober, totally going the speed limit, my only crime perhaps searching for someone to buy me beer (and even then, when/if I found someone, I was conscientious, never drank in the car, never drove while intoxicated), and yet I would routinely get pulled over for no reason. They'd check my license, search my car, ask where I was going and where I'd been, then let me go without comment once they ascertained this long-haired, acne-ridden teen's only real offense was being unsightly.
This happened numerous times during the summers of 1989 and '90, enough for me to become aware of a pattern, to develop a Pavlovian response to the sight of a squad car pulling up behind me. Most of the time there was no problem. I wasn't a trouble maker, I just had long hair, and I've always found that 'Yes sir/no sir...yes ma'am/no ma'am' goes a long way with cops But one time, I was pulled over by an officer who revealed himself to be a true pig. Seriously, I'm a law and order guy for the most part, a supporter of cops and a proponent of the difficult job they do. But I went to school with this guy's son, and knowing what I knew of him, I guess it should have come as no surprise that his father would act the way he did on this particular traffic stop.
I knew something was up right away: when he first clambered out of the squad car, he slammed his door shut. The impact echoed off the houses across the street.
He came up to the driver side window, this big, neck-less barrel of a guy, and barked, License.
I handed it over (I had it ready for him), and he snatched it out of my hand. I looked at the person I was riding with and she flashed my look of concern right back at me.
Whose car is this?
I told him it was mine. I sensed he did not completely believe me, or didn't want to, but what else would I be driving at 17 but a car with rusted out wheel wells and rear bumper barely hanging on? Better question: why would I steal this thing?
This your current address?
Also a dumb question. I was still a kid. I'd barely had my license a year. But his tone of voice was surly, had this kind of juvenile hostility not unlike his son (although I would not realize this was his father until much later) and put me ill-at-ease.
I said yeah, it was my current address.
Those sunglasses prescription?
I should have lied, could have, I guess, and been reasonably sure he wouldn't rip them off my face to check. No, I told him.
You got a restriction on your license. That means you wear glasses when you drive. Do you understand that?
I said, I know.
Your glasses in the car?
I pointed to them on the dashboard.
Get 'em on your face! he yelled, loudly. A volume better suited for, Get on the ground!
As he stormed back to his squad, I reluctantly replaced my sunglasses with the eyeglasses I hated. My companion and I looked at each other again, surreptitiously, as if doing so was a crime. I wanted to think I was imagining all this, but every time I looked over, the look on her face confirmed I was not.
We sat there for several minutes, much longer than a run of someone's driver's license should have taken. Other motorists passed us slowly, giving a wide berth to the flashing cherries. Across the street a lady emerged on her front porch to water a hanging plant. A guy walked by with a dog, cast his own surreptitious (and seemingly scornful) look in at us. It was as if the cop was back there in his squad smoking a nice long cigarette, fleshing out our anxiety. When he finally came back, he asked a strange question. You been stopped by an officer before?
I replied, "Yeah, it's been happening a lot lately as a matter of fact."
That's all I said, and with no attitude at all. There was no need for attitude, it was just a truthful remark. It had been happening a lot lately.
His response was even stranger, and kind of outrageous. I bet it has, he smirked. And with his pointer finger and thumb, he flicked my license back at me. It hit my chest and landed in my lap.
He flicked my license at me.
I know it's a G-rated version of that kind of story, but it easily could have been much worse. And it happened, though I wasn't doing anything wrong (except driving without wearing my glasses), with no mention made as to why I was pulled over in the first place. That cop was loaded for bear about something that could not possibly have had anything to do with me. Any number of adult world stressors might have been eating him alive in that moment, and I was just unfortunate enough to cross his path at the wrong time. Maybe he was fighting with his wife, or his son was giving him grief (I'd bet). Maybe he was being foreclosed on, or hadn't had a drink yet that day, or maybe he just hated all kids because he wasn't one anymore.
Doesn't really matter; he had no right to take any of it out on me no matter what. But the scary part is he could have. With the law on his side, that silver badge punctuating his 'right', he could have escalated that traffic stop, and who knows where it might have led. Looking back twenty-five years later, I wonder how much separation there actually was, emotionally and mentally, between flicking my driver's license at me and grabbing me by my long greasy hair and pulling me out of the car onto the pavement, just because he felt like it, just because he was having a shit day?
I wonder how he'd have acted if someone else hadn't been with me.
And that experience was just a one time thing. It does not hold a candle to what many African-Americans, whether they're doing something wrong, have to deal with every day, the Pavlovian response they endure when they see that squad car pull up behind, hoping sometimes beyond hope the officer (s) will observe the thinly traced boundaries implied - if not spelled out - in their charge.
"They see me rollin' / they hatin' / patrolling they tryin' to catch me ridin' dirty..."
#131) "Women I've Never Had" by Hank Williams Jr. - This song also comes up fairly frequently on some of my playlists at work, and one time, a girl, in her mid-20s, listened to a few measures, looked at me with a kind of hybrid smile and roll of her eyes, and said, Is this your jam, Jared?
She meant it playfully. Women I've Never Had - musically at least (if I'm to go by what she played when she was allowed to plug her phone into the radio) - was nothing she'd probably ever heard before. She was no fan of country music in general, this was certainly not Brad Paisley, and she was goofing on me a little, as if to suggest that I might be as quick to strike a pose with this song as I would with Ridin'....only instead of anything 'gangsta', it'd be a huge pair of sunglasses, huge collar, jeans and a belt buckle the size of an old vinyl record...or maybe a polyester leisure suit, doing little gunshots with my fingers....er, something.
Without missing a beat, I looked her right in the eye and said, You may find this a difficult pill to swallow, but this is every man's jam.
She wasn't entirely thrilled with my response (I can't imagine any woman would want to hear that). It too was meant primarily as a joke, of course, but there's truth there, for sure. Common sense, a sense of decency, maturity, these things keep good men grounded in their lives, keep them from making mistakes. And the bottom line is, sleeping around, especially those who will sleep with anything that moves, doesn't do anyone any good, male or female. But the impulse made evident in this song? Speaking honestly and candidly? In the most fundamental sense? Oh yes, it's every man's jam. And in deep, unconscious ways, down where the stuff of human behavior that changes very little over millennia is buried, it's part of what enables our species to propagate successfully.
If nothing else, Women I've Never Had is an addictive song. Its whole New Orleans funeral horn section is kind of goony, but hey, humor is one cornerstone of sexy.
"I am into to happy and I don't like sad / I like to have women I've never had...."
#132) "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty - I suspect this is what people might think would be on my phone, although I'm okay with being pegged that way. Tom Petty - at this point - should be on everyone's phone. He's achieved living legend status, and really, how cool is his music from the late 80s and early 90s? Mary Jane's Last Dance is also very much 'every man's jam' at one time or another.
Tired of myself, tired of this town, indeed.
"Well I don't know, but I've been told, you never slow down, you never grow old..."
And yet, in doing so I feel self-conscious, feel like I'm going out on a limb. Too many times Ridin' has played on my phone at work and prompted someone to say, with eyes and mouth wide, "This song's on your phone? Really? Wow...!"
Yes, I'm 41, white, and Midwestern, mostly small town, have never had much direct contact with rap or hip hop culture, but by including this song on the soundtrack of my road trip, I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. I don't ride down the street with it blasting at top volume, slumped down in the driver seat, hand draped over the steering wheel, pants around my knees, hat cranked sideways, flashing symbols with my fingers. It doesn't perpetuate my image...er, wait, what image? I'm not the least bit fly for a white guy, and perfectly okay with that. ;-)
I just like the song, the way it sounds, and it's disheartening to realize so many think of music in such narrow terms. Culture, style and race mean nothing to me. If something is good, it's good. If something grabs my attention and holds it, I'm going to jam to it. If it moves me in some way, any way, I just might want to bring it along for 14,000 miles.
For my Midwestern white boy money, Chamillionaire sets the bar here for all rap music and rap artists. Ridin' is complex, at moments astonishingly so, the lyrics (especially Krayzie Bone's Verse 2) coming so fast they spin into an hypnotic kaleidoscope of sound that seems almost incoherent, but isn't. This, like what 'Weird' Al did in his parody, is not easy. Rapping well is not easy. Truth is, a lot of black artists are terrible at it. Why? Because it's not about race at all really, it's a skill like any other that not everybody possesses. It's relatively easy to merely assume the look and the style, wear all the right clothes and posture in just the right way. To be a wordsmith, as rapping was originally intended, and to insert those malleable words into music in such a way that creates an unforgettable hook that listening to feels like an experience, is something else all together.
Also, there's a message to the song, about racial profiling and/or police brutality, that shouldn't be ignored. Once again, in no way can I pretend to be able to relate, but as the nation waits tensely for the grand jury ruling in Ferguson, Missouri, I've been thinking more about my own unnerving experience with the police, long ago.
When I was a teenager, I had a long, flowing mane of hair hanging all the way down my back, and this attracted the attention of police. I would be cruising up and down the main drag in my 1977 Chrysler Newport minding my own business, completely sober, totally going the speed limit, my only crime perhaps searching for someone to buy me beer (and even then, when/if I found someone, I was conscientious, never drank in the car, never drove while intoxicated), and yet I would routinely get pulled over for no reason. They'd check my license, search my car, ask where I was going and where I'd been, then let me go without comment once they ascertained this long-haired, acne-ridden teen's only real offense was being unsightly.
This happened numerous times during the summers of 1989 and '90, enough for me to become aware of a pattern, to develop a Pavlovian response to the sight of a squad car pulling up behind me. Most of the time there was no problem. I wasn't a trouble maker, I just had long hair, and I've always found that 'Yes sir/no sir...yes ma'am/no ma'am' goes a long way with cops But one time, I was pulled over by an officer who revealed himself to be a true pig. Seriously, I'm a law and order guy for the most part, a supporter of cops and a proponent of the difficult job they do. But I went to school with this guy's son, and knowing what I knew of him, I guess it should have come as no surprise that his father would act the way he did on this particular traffic stop.
I knew something was up right away: when he first clambered out of the squad car, he slammed his door shut. The impact echoed off the houses across the street.
He came up to the driver side window, this big, neck-less barrel of a guy, and barked, License.
I handed it over (I had it ready for him), and he snatched it out of my hand. I looked at the person I was riding with and she flashed my look of concern right back at me.
Whose car is this?
I told him it was mine. I sensed he did not completely believe me, or didn't want to, but what else would I be driving at 17 but a car with rusted out wheel wells and rear bumper barely hanging on? Better question: why would I steal this thing?
This your current address?
Also a dumb question. I was still a kid. I'd barely had my license a year. But his tone of voice was surly, had this kind of juvenile hostility not unlike his son (although I would not realize this was his father until much later) and put me ill-at-ease.
I said yeah, it was my current address.
Those sunglasses prescription?
I should have lied, could have, I guess, and been reasonably sure he wouldn't rip them off my face to check. No, I told him.
You got a restriction on your license. That means you wear glasses when you drive. Do you understand that?
I said, I know.
Your glasses in the car?
I pointed to them on the dashboard.
Get 'em on your face! he yelled, loudly. A volume better suited for, Get on the ground!
As he stormed back to his squad, I reluctantly replaced my sunglasses with the eyeglasses I hated. My companion and I looked at each other again, surreptitiously, as if doing so was a crime. I wanted to think I was imagining all this, but every time I looked over, the look on her face confirmed I was not.
We sat there for several minutes, much longer than a run of someone's driver's license should have taken. Other motorists passed us slowly, giving a wide berth to the flashing cherries. Across the street a lady emerged on her front porch to water a hanging plant. A guy walked by with a dog, cast his own surreptitious (and seemingly scornful) look in at us. It was as if the cop was back there in his squad smoking a nice long cigarette, fleshing out our anxiety. When he finally came back, he asked a strange question. You been stopped by an officer before?
I replied, "Yeah, it's been happening a lot lately as a matter of fact."
That's all I said, and with no attitude at all. There was no need for attitude, it was just a truthful remark. It had been happening a lot lately.
His response was even stranger, and kind of outrageous. I bet it has, he smirked. And with his pointer finger and thumb, he flicked my license back at me. It hit my chest and landed in my lap.
He flicked my license at me.
I know it's a G-rated version of that kind of story, but it easily could have been much worse. And it happened, though I wasn't doing anything wrong (except driving without wearing my glasses), with no mention made as to why I was pulled over in the first place. That cop was loaded for bear about something that could not possibly have had anything to do with me. Any number of adult world stressors might have been eating him alive in that moment, and I was just unfortunate enough to cross his path at the wrong time. Maybe he was fighting with his wife, or his son was giving him grief (I'd bet). Maybe he was being foreclosed on, or hadn't had a drink yet that day, or maybe he just hated all kids because he wasn't one anymore.
Doesn't really matter; he had no right to take any of it out on me no matter what. But the scary part is he could have. With the law on his side, that silver badge punctuating his 'right', he could have escalated that traffic stop, and who knows where it might have led. Looking back twenty-five years later, I wonder how much separation there actually was, emotionally and mentally, between flicking my driver's license at me and grabbing me by my long greasy hair and pulling me out of the car onto the pavement, just because he felt like it, just because he was having a shit day?
I wonder how he'd have acted if someone else hadn't been with me.
And that experience was just a one time thing. It does not hold a candle to what many African-Americans, whether they're doing something wrong, have to deal with every day, the Pavlovian response they endure when they see that squad car pull up behind, hoping sometimes beyond hope the officer (s) will observe the thinly traced boundaries implied - if not spelled out - in their charge.
"They see me rollin' / they hatin' / patrolling they tryin' to catch me ridin' dirty..."
#131) "Women I've Never Had" by Hank Williams Jr. - This song also comes up fairly frequently on some of my playlists at work, and one time, a girl, in her mid-20s, listened to a few measures, looked at me with a kind of hybrid smile and roll of her eyes, and said, Is this your jam, Jared?
She meant it playfully. Women I've Never Had - musically at least (if I'm to go by what she played when she was allowed to plug her phone into the radio) - was nothing she'd probably ever heard before. She was no fan of country music in general, this was certainly not Brad Paisley, and she was goofing on me a little, as if to suggest that I might be as quick to strike a pose with this song as I would with Ridin'....only instead of anything 'gangsta', it'd be a huge pair of sunglasses, huge collar, jeans and a belt buckle the size of an old vinyl record...or maybe a polyester leisure suit, doing little gunshots with my fingers....er, something.
Without missing a beat, I looked her right in the eye and said, You may find this a difficult pill to swallow, but this is every man's jam.
She wasn't entirely thrilled with my response (I can't imagine any woman would want to hear that). It too was meant primarily as a joke, of course, but there's truth there, for sure. Common sense, a sense of decency, maturity, these things keep good men grounded in their lives, keep them from making mistakes. And the bottom line is, sleeping around, especially those who will sleep with anything that moves, doesn't do anyone any good, male or female. But the impulse made evident in this song? Speaking honestly and candidly? In the most fundamental sense? Oh yes, it's every man's jam. And in deep, unconscious ways, down where the stuff of human behavior that changes very little over millennia is buried, it's part of what enables our species to propagate successfully.
If nothing else, Women I've Never Had is an addictive song. Its whole New Orleans funeral horn section is kind of goony, but hey, humor is one cornerstone of sexy.
"I am into to happy and I don't like sad / I like to have women I've never had...."
#132) "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty - I suspect this is what people might think would be on my phone, although I'm okay with being pegged that way. Tom Petty - at this point - should be on everyone's phone. He's achieved living legend status, and really, how cool is his music from the late 80s and early 90s? Mary Jane's Last Dance is also very much 'every man's jam' at one time or another.
Tired of myself, tired of this town, indeed.
"Well I don't know, but I've been told, you never slow down, you never grow old..."
Friday, November 14, 2014
On Water Towers
There was no water tower in my home town when I was a kid, I'm not sure why; maybe because I grew up on the shores of Lake Superior, and North America's largest single supply of freshwater is what we drank from...lined up along the shore like zebra. (Just kidding.) The first place I remember seeing a water tower - that is, the top-heavy, sphere-shaped variety found abundantly across the Midwestern landscape - was Phillips, Wisconsin, not too far away, and for a long time, at least up to fifth grade (when I last remember making a joke about it to a couple of bewildered - and probably annoyed - kids on the playground), I thought that all water towers said 'Phillips' on them, like it was a brand name, or something.
Thinking like that, I guess it's miraculous they let me graduate from elementary school, but I've maintained a healthy fascination with water towers ever since. There is a water tower in my hometown now. Maybe there always was one, I'm not sure, but the one that now towers visibly over a large section of town was built in the 1990s, and I don't remember ever seeing one before then.
How a water tower operates will be interesting to any self-respecting info nerd (er, right...?); the water gets pumped up into the reservoir tank and gravity is utilized to push it down from the reservoir to where it has to go. Sometimes the water is potable, and sometimes it's not, used instead for fire protection, or industrial purposes. It's a concept that dates back to ancient times. The Romans really knew how to handle their water properly, doubtless contributing mightily to their success.
But water towers are a bigger deal than just their size or their mechanics. I've always thought they help to punctuate a community, at least little towns. In cities they tend to get lost in the clutter of the skyline, reduced to a mere tank sitting discreetly on top of a building, looking much like part of the architecture. But in small towns they are often the tallest structure around, they help define the skyline, visible from a distance, and with the community's name painted on the side, they declare something vital. This is us, and this is where we live. We are here.
They let the traveler know where he or she is as well, perhaps not so importantly as in days before GPS, but still preferably. I'd much rather a water tower tell me what town I'm in than my phone.
The good news is, unlike certain other objects, technology is never going to snuff the water tower out completely, and to that end, I'm looking forward to spotting them, lots of them, on 1/48/50.
Thinking like that, I guess it's miraculous they let me graduate from elementary school, but I've maintained a healthy fascination with water towers ever since. There is a water tower in my hometown now. Maybe there always was one, I'm not sure, but the one that now towers visibly over a large section of town was built in the 1990s, and I don't remember ever seeing one before then.
How a water tower operates will be interesting to any self-respecting info nerd (er, right...?); the water gets pumped up into the reservoir tank and gravity is utilized to push it down from the reservoir to where it has to go. Sometimes the water is potable, and sometimes it's not, used instead for fire protection, or industrial purposes. It's a concept that dates back to ancient times. The Romans really knew how to handle their water properly, doubtless contributing mightily to their success.
But water towers are a bigger deal than just their size or their mechanics. I've always thought they help to punctuate a community, at least little towns. In cities they tend to get lost in the clutter of the skyline, reduced to a mere tank sitting discreetly on top of a building, looking much like part of the architecture. But in small towns they are often the tallest structure around, they help define the skyline, visible from a distance, and with the community's name painted on the side, they declare something vital. This is us, and this is where we live. We are here.
They let the traveler know where he or she is as well, perhaps not so importantly as in days before GPS, but still preferably. I'd much rather a water tower tell me what town I'm in than my phone.
The good news is, unlike certain other objects, technology is never going to snuff the water tower out completely, and to that end, I'm looking forward to spotting them, lots of them, on 1/48/50.
 |
| BOYD, WISCONSIN - What better way for Boyd, Wisconsin, population 552, to announce its presence to the world that with its water tower? |
 |
| YORK, NEBRASKA - Decorating water towers further distinguishes a community as unique (in a way the golden arches and the Arby's sign also visible in this picture can't possibly...) |
 |
| ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA - And then, sometimes things get ridiculous, but that's okay. What did Neil Simon write? "Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity." |
Friday, November 7, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#127) "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again" by Barry Manilow - Yeah, I know what you might be thinking. There's no more memorable ambassador from the land of flaccid love songs than Barry Manilow - standing in his polyester jump suit on a darkened stage circa March 1975, microphone clutched in his hands, golden locks clutching his head like an ill-fitting helmet, staring wide-eyed - and a little pie-eyed - out at the exit signs, his thin warble leaving frumpy post-hippie era girls in brightly patched bell bottom jeans inexplicably mesmerized.
Agreed. But a couple of things:
1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.
2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans. He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.
While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.
In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.
"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"
#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...
When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.
Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.
Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.
It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)
A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...
Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).
The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.
"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"
#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.
Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying. Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.
"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."
Agreed. But a couple of things:
1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.
2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans. He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.
While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.
In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.
"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"
#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...
When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.
Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.
Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.
It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)
A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...
Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).
The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.
"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"
#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.
Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying. Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.
"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."
Friday, October 31, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#124) "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos - Yes, Derek and the Dominos in '71, NOT Eric Clapton in '92. I don't know what he was thinking with that miserable acoustic version on MTV's Unplugged. (I guess sometimes the worst cover versions are done by the original artist.) Of course, this is the same guy that re-did After Midnight, turning the hot little boogie blues jam from the early 1970s into the blandest Miami Vice-sounding beer jingle ever in the late 1980s, a move that encapsulated, I'd venture, the collective story arc of his generation. I'm surprised JJ Cale, the song's writer, allowed that to happen, actually. Money is money, I guess.
Whatever. I don't really care about that. I'm not a fan of Eric Clapton, and I don't know much about JJ Cale. But I give credit where it's due, and there is but one Layla (or should be) in the great pantheon of rock and roll. The lyrics and vocals are neither here nor there for me. It's all about the musicality with this one. The squealing guitar and driving percussion are the factory sounds of memories being manufactured in sweet days of innocence, before money, and success, before any threat (or thought) of failure, when everything is still new, the country still undiscovered...before any impulse to re-do or re-mix wraps its spiny fingers around your aging neck. When it's all original.
And the piano coda (in which the guitar can still be heard squealing), is the sunny spaces above the clouds, where memories go to live forever.
"Like a fool, I fell in love with you / turned my whole world upside down..."
#125) "Fine Memory" by Bob Seger - Seger reveals his singer/songwriter side with this under-appreciated number from 1975's Beautiful Loser. Fine Memory is one of those quiet, compact songs that constructs a single moment in time and resides within it. And it's one of those songs that makes me wonder if there's a specific woman it was written about and if she's still out there somewhere, and where or when the exchange might have happened.
And there have been moments through time when I thought it might have been written for me. I've been there. I can't think of any encounter with a woman in my past that was anything less than a fine memory, and oh the suns I've watched coming up through the trees.
Er, not always after a night with a woman...but still... ;-)
"And I'll take it far as I go / I'm gonna take it far as I go..."
#126) "Life in a Northern Town" by The Dream Academy - I grew up in a 'northern town', and I remember hearing this song for the first time around the age of fifteen and being blown away for how accurately it seemed to reflect the emotional hue of my childhood. From the spacey, drifting arrangement to the melancholy, sometimes bleak, lyrics, this is what my hometown felt like, and sounded like.
It wasn't my life itself that was bleak. I had a relatively happy childhood (not perfect, but happy, all things considered). It was something else that I was aware of from an early age, something about living on a northern fringe (a micro rust belt, at that); maybe something in the air, or the water, or maybe the light in the sky in the evening...or the morning, that yes, sometimes did seem to last all day.
I was so moved by "Life in a Northern Town" the song, and so inspired by the video (which features some of the most haunting images I've ever seen), I made my own video for it. I had my dad drive me around town one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1988, and did my best to capture what I saw as the lonesome bleakness of it all. A girlfriend at the time watched the end result and said, You'll be glad you did this one day.
She was right. I'm very glad I have it to watch now and then, to be reminded where I come from.
And I gotta say, for having no good technology at my disposal (I could do no snipping or cutting and pasting, and just trying to get the music to play over the video had me switching 'in' and 'out' audio jacks like a 1940s telephone operator on crack), it turned out pretty good, an accurate illustration of the northern town I grew up in, awash in pale sunlight and dirty snow, wheezing its way drably and tiredly (but beautifully) through another winter of my youth.
Whatever. I don't really care about that. I'm not a fan of Eric Clapton, and I don't know much about JJ Cale. But I give credit where it's due, and there is but one Layla (or should be) in the great pantheon of rock and roll. The lyrics and vocals are neither here nor there for me. It's all about the musicality with this one. The squealing guitar and driving percussion are the factory sounds of memories being manufactured in sweet days of innocence, before money, and success, before any threat (or thought) of failure, when everything is still new, the country still undiscovered...before any impulse to re-do or re-mix wraps its spiny fingers around your aging neck. When it's all original.
And the piano coda (in which the guitar can still be heard squealing), is the sunny spaces above the clouds, where memories go to live forever.
"Like a fool, I fell in love with you / turned my whole world upside down..."
#125) "Fine Memory" by Bob Seger - Seger reveals his singer/songwriter side with this under-appreciated number from 1975's Beautiful Loser. Fine Memory is one of those quiet, compact songs that constructs a single moment in time and resides within it. And it's one of those songs that makes me wonder if there's a specific woman it was written about and if she's still out there somewhere, and where or when the exchange might have happened.
And there have been moments through time when I thought it might have been written for me. I've been there. I can't think of any encounter with a woman in my past that was anything less than a fine memory, and oh the suns I've watched coming up through the trees.
Er, not always after a night with a woman...but still... ;-)
"And I'll take it far as I go / I'm gonna take it far as I go..."
#126) "Life in a Northern Town" by The Dream Academy - I grew up in a 'northern town', and I remember hearing this song for the first time around the age of fifteen and being blown away for how accurately it seemed to reflect the emotional hue of my childhood. From the spacey, drifting arrangement to the melancholy, sometimes bleak, lyrics, this is what my hometown felt like, and sounded like.
It wasn't my life itself that was bleak. I had a relatively happy childhood (not perfect, but happy, all things considered). It was something else that I was aware of from an early age, something about living on a northern fringe (a micro rust belt, at that); maybe something in the air, or the water, or maybe the light in the sky in the evening...or the morning, that yes, sometimes did seem to last all day.
I was so moved by "Life in a Northern Town" the song, and so inspired by the video (which features some of the most haunting images I've ever seen), I made my own video for it. I had my dad drive me around town one Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1988, and did my best to capture what I saw as the lonesome bleakness of it all. A girlfriend at the time watched the end result and said, You'll be glad you did this one day.
She was right. I'm very glad I have it to watch now and then, to be reminded where I come from.
And I gotta say, for having no good technology at my disposal (I could do no snipping or cutting and pasting, and just trying to get the music to play over the video had me switching 'in' and 'out' audio jacks like a 1940s telephone operator on crack), it turned out pretty good, an accurate illustration of the northern town I grew up in, awash in pale sunlight and dirty snow, wheezing its way drably and tiredly (but beautifully) through another winter of my youth.
I wish I could share it here, but YouTube won't allow that ... and honestly, I respect that.
"And the morning lasted all day, all day."
Friday, October 24, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#121) "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne - Like many, I'm interested in the 1960s as a time of precipitous social change, some of it good, some of it bad. But I also consider the period to be, lamentably, the apex of our American society, and this defeatism is harder to admit openly because I am fairly patriotic; I don't want to think it. It was a critical decade when, relinquished from the repression of the past, and with so much changing all at once (but not yet changed irreparably), dreams and expectations could afford to - for short period of time - become idealized.
It's no secret that what was idealized was never actually realized. Something happened along the way. We took a wrong turn or forgot where we wanted to go, and now the society we live in - a violent, impulsive, image-obsessed world where ad execs are our philosophers and our artists and innovators are the ones programming our computers much more often than they are anyone using them - doesn't quite live up to even the most bare bone dream of the Baby Boom generation. It may have been inevitable, may have from the beginning been more of a delusion than a dream, but the let down, the extent of it, surely wasn't anticipated, and the fact that it happened almost entirely within the span of my life, haunts me a little.
The Pretender is very 70s - its mellow piano, vaguely disco rhythms and thick-shouldered orchestral accompaniment are unique musical artifacts of that time period. I really like the sound, but the song's genius, I think (that which supports my earlier assertion that Jackson Browne is to the 70s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s) is found in the sublimely illustrative lyrics, which paint an anguished portrait of an exhausted America, right at the critical crossroads of the post-Watergate era.
If Browne had written this song in 1986, or 1996, after the fact, when his generation had already reached middle age, when their music was already being called 'classic rock', John Lennon was already gone and it was obvious there remained no hope whatsoever that even a faint blip of 60s idealism had not been swallowed up by the cynicism, consumerism and commercialism that had once been thought (naively) to be conquerable, it wouldn't have meant nearly as much. But in 1976, this was pretty damn prescient. Browne predicted, and lamented, the replacement of 'hippie' ideals with yuppie ideals - and all that it would mean for us, as individuals and a society - years before it really got underway.
I'm gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender / where the ads take aim, and lay their claim, to the heart and the soul of the spender / and believe in whatever may lie, in the things that money can buy...
Are you there, Browne sings, as the bass gently wrings an exquisite despair worthy of the 1970s right out of the air (listen for it), say a prayer, for the pretender.
And I love the cover of the album. In myriad ways intentional or otherwise, it too is an accurate portrayal of the 1970s.
"And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor..."
#122) "Little Man" by Alan Jackson - A kind of thematic cousin to The Pretender, Alan Jackson's Little Man concerns itself with the vanishing American downtown, how 'Mom and Pop' has been snuffed out by big business in every form, from the grocery store to gas station, bookstore to the candy shop. How specialization has given way to one stop shopping, stadium-sized department stores where you can buy motor oil in one aisle and bed spreads in the next, and a six foot TV on the end cap. And don't forget candy for the kids, and grandma's pills, and her Echinacea, and the latest copy of People, and milk, cereal and ground beef, bleach, window cleaner and trash bags, diapers, fishing lures and a betta for little Jimmy, he really wants one...
It's a nice thought, a stellar rumination for Sunday afternoon, surely, to lament how impersonally (and overwhelmingly) global and corporate the world's become even in its most remote, far-flung corners...and it's completely true. I witnessed the demise of the little man first-hand, growing up. My parents owned a bookstore throughout the 1970s, a 'Mom and Pop' concern that even then was on borrowed time. My parents did some things to keep it afloat, tried to diversify. They sold art supplies, had candy and video games in one corner for the local school kids, even made homemade fudge for a while.,.but it didn't last too long into the 1980s, and the reason was simple. Even before huge bookstores came along selling more coffee than books, before anyone could imagine ordering something on a computer (or knew anything about computers), and long before the veritable witchcraft of Kindle, my dad explained it: The day the big department store at the edge of town started selling the Top 10 best sellers was the beginning of the end.
But there's another side to this saga. Yes, something has been lost in the last forty years as small towns have been slowly absorbed into the global economy - a sense of community, a sense of purpose and place, a certain identity. But the truth is that Wal-Mart is as much the great equalizer as it is the killer of downtown, structured to benefit everyone who once called downtown home. Wal-Mart stores typically have a regional (rather than local) reach, and can therefore provide more jobs and more hours...better pay, holiday pay, benefits, et cetera. Mom and Pop simply could not do this. Moreover, Wal-Mart's business model enables it to (truly) offer the lowest prices, and as there are other big box chains to contend with, an element of competition arises that didn't exist in days past. Before 'big box', the sad truth was that if you lived in an isolated small town, you paid whatever the 'little man' wanted to charge you, and endured significantly less selection.
And as for customer service? Well, I think the notion of the unconcerned Wal-Mart worker roaming the aisles like a zombie and providing no help or answers of any kind is a myth. If anything, the opposite is true. Wal-Mart generally goes out of its way to train its employees well, not only so that they're knowledgeable (sorry, but I've never received an inadequate response to a question in the electronics or garden department of Wal-Mart...), but also so they properly engage the customer. Some are better than others at this song and dance, of course, but it's at the Mom and Pop places that I have gotten hit with indifference - sometimes hostility - from the help. The various Wal-Mart department workers have answers. The Wal-Mart exit greeters flash me a smile and a 'hello' when I come in and when I leave, because they're trained to do so.
The worker at the dusty little store downtown looks up from his magazine and scowls at me for disturbing him. And think about it: it's the same "local" person working at both locations.
I think on balance the consumer and worker alike have benefited from the Wal Mart-ization of America,
"New store came where you do it yourself, you buy a lotto ticket and food off the shelf / forget the little man...forget about that little man..."
#123) "Summertime Blues" by Blue Cheer - When my brother and I were kids, we thought this was the funniest song, and Blue Cheer the funniest band, with the drummer's hair hanging in his eyes, completely obscuring his face as he ruthlessly punished his drums. I remember, we jokingly called him Cousin It, from the Addams Family, and I remember being as excited as I was amused by the band's look and sound. They were the embodiment of youth and rebellion to me from about 7th grade on, even though they came a full generation before. In the winter of '87, I actually got a little crap from classmates for digging Blue Cheer.
I don't know why. They are crazy good. I still think their version of Summertime Blues is a great - as in fucking awesome - interpretation of the Eddie Cochran original. Check out the drumming! Turns out 'Cousin It' really is a monster. :-)
Everything about this band was monster, really. Their whole album Vincebus Eruptum is fantastic. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
"I done told my congressman and he said, quote, 'dig this, boy...'
It's no secret that what was idealized was never actually realized. Something happened along the way. We took a wrong turn or forgot where we wanted to go, and now the society we live in - a violent, impulsive, image-obsessed world where ad execs are our philosophers and our artists and innovators are the ones programming our computers much more often than they are anyone using them - doesn't quite live up to even the most bare bone dream of the Baby Boom generation. It may have been inevitable, may have from the beginning been more of a delusion than a dream, but the let down, the extent of it, surely wasn't anticipated, and the fact that it happened almost entirely within the span of my life, haunts me a little.
The Pretender is very 70s - its mellow piano, vaguely disco rhythms and thick-shouldered orchestral accompaniment are unique musical artifacts of that time period. I really like the sound, but the song's genius, I think (that which supports my earlier assertion that Jackson Browne is to the 70s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s) is found in the sublimely illustrative lyrics, which paint an anguished portrait of an exhausted America, right at the critical crossroads of the post-Watergate era.
If Browne had written this song in 1986, or 1996, after the fact, when his generation had already reached middle age, when their music was already being called 'classic rock', John Lennon was already gone and it was obvious there remained no hope whatsoever that even a faint blip of 60s idealism had not been swallowed up by the cynicism, consumerism and commercialism that had once been thought (naively) to be conquerable, it wouldn't have meant nearly as much. But in 1976, this was pretty damn prescient. Browne predicted, and lamented, the replacement of 'hippie' ideals with yuppie ideals - and all that it would mean for us, as individuals and a society - years before it really got underway.
I'm gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender / where the ads take aim, and lay their claim, to the heart and the soul of the spender / and believe in whatever may lie, in the things that money can buy...
Are you there, Browne sings, as the bass gently wrings an exquisite despair worthy of the 1970s right out of the air (listen for it), say a prayer, for the pretender.
And I love the cover of the album. In myriad ways intentional or otherwise, it too is an accurate portrayal of the 1970s.
"And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor..."
#122) "Little Man" by Alan Jackson - A kind of thematic cousin to The Pretender, Alan Jackson's Little Man concerns itself with the vanishing American downtown, how 'Mom and Pop' has been snuffed out by big business in every form, from the grocery store to gas station, bookstore to the candy shop. How specialization has given way to one stop shopping, stadium-sized department stores where you can buy motor oil in one aisle and bed spreads in the next, and a six foot TV on the end cap. And don't forget candy for the kids, and grandma's pills, and her Echinacea, and the latest copy of People, and milk, cereal and ground beef, bleach, window cleaner and trash bags, diapers, fishing lures and a betta for little Jimmy, he really wants one...
It's a nice thought, a stellar rumination for Sunday afternoon, surely, to lament how impersonally (and overwhelmingly) global and corporate the world's become even in its most remote, far-flung corners...and it's completely true. I witnessed the demise of the little man first-hand, growing up. My parents owned a bookstore throughout the 1970s, a 'Mom and Pop' concern that even then was on borrowed time. My parents did some things to keep it afloat, tried to diversify. They sold art supplies, had candy and video games in one corner for the local school kids, even made homemade fudge for a while.,.but it didn't last too long into the 1980s, and the reason was simple. Even before huge bookstores came along selling more coffee than books, before anyone could imagine ordering something on a computer (or knew anything about computers), and long before the veritable witchcraft of Kindle, my dad explained it: The day the big department store at the edge of town started selling the Top 10 best sellers was the beginning of the end.
But there's another side to this saga. Yes, something has been lost in the last forty years as small towns have been slowly absorbed into the global economy - a sense of community, a sense of purpose and place, a certain identity. But the truth is that Wal-Mart is as much the great equalizer as it is the killer of downtown, structured to benefit everyone who once called downtown home. Wal-Mart stores typically have a regional (rather than local) reach, and can therefore provide more jobs and more hours...better pay, holiday pay, benefits, et cetera. Mom and Pop simply could not do this. Moreover, Wal-Mart's business model enables it to (truly) offer the lowest prices, and as there are other big box chains to contend with, an element of competition arises that didn't exist in days past. Before 'big box', the sad truth was that if you lived in an isolated small town, you paid whatever the 'little man' wanted to charge you, and endured significantly less selection.
And as for customer service? Well, I think the notion of the unconcerned Wal-Mart worker roaming the aisles like a zombie and providing no help or answers of any kind is a myth. If anything, the opposite is true. Wal-Mart generally goes out of its way to train its employees well, not only so that they're knowledgeable (sorry, but I've never received an inadequate response to a question in the electronics or garden department of Wal-Mart...), but also so they properly engage the customer. Some are better than others at this song and dance, of course, but it's at the Mom and Pop places that I have gotten hit with indifference - sometimes hostility - from the help. The various Wal-Mart department workers have answers. The Wal-Mart exit greeters flash me a smile and a 'hello' when I come in and when I leave, because they're trained to do so.
The worker at the dusty little store downtown looks up from his magazine and scowls at me for disturbing him. And think about it: it's the same "local" person working at both locations.
I think on balance the consumer and worker alike have benefited from the Wal Mart-ization of America,
"New store came where you do it yourself, you buy a lotto ticket and food off the shelf / forget the little man...forget about that little man..."
#123) "Summertime Blues" by Blue Cheer - When my brother and I were kids, we thought this was the funniest song, and Blue Cheer the funniest band, with the drummer's hair hanging in his eyes, completely obscuring his face as he ruthlessly punished his drums. I remember, we jokingly called him Cousin It, from the Addams Family, and I remember being as excited as I was amused by the band's look and sound. They were the embodiment of youth and rebellion to me from about 7th grade on, even though they came a full generation before. In the winter of '87, I actually got a little crap from classmates for digging Blue Cheer.
I don't know why. They are crazy good. I still think their version of Summertime Blues is a great - as in fucking awesome - interpretation of the Eddie Cochran original. Check out the drumming! Turns out 'Cousin It' really is a monster. :-)
Everything about this band was monster, really. Their whole album Vincebus Eruptum is fantastic. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
"I done told my congressman and he said, quote, 'dig this, boy...'
Friday, October 17, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#118) "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" by Billy Joel - I'm not sure exactly what, but something about this song has always stirred restlessness. Maybe it's the rolling waves of piano chords that sound like they're crashing on shore, or the lyrics alluding to that sense of futility that almost always precedes goodbye. I can't honestly say I relate to any of what the song is actually saying (nor that I'm entirely sure what that is...), but somehow it's always been easy to plug what it's not saying (or leaving unsaid) into my own life.
Whatever it is that appeals to me, it's found only in the live version, released as a single in the early 1980s and found on Joel's double Greatest Hits package from '85. The studio version, from 1976's Turnstiles doesn't pack nearly as much of a punch.
I wonder why that is...how can that be, really? It's the exact same song, and I'm not a fan of live music; yet for some reason, when I listen to the live version of Say Goodbye to Hollywood, depending on my mood, and the time of day, and if the light outside is just right, and/or I'm driving fast enough, I get chills. Chills.
The studio version....meh. Never gonna happen.
"Say a word out of line, you find out the friends you had are gone, forever....forever..."
#119) "Roadrunner" by The Pretty Things - I'm always squawking on this page about how the original version of any song is the best, but I'm not totally inflexible on that point. Once in a while someone comes along and does a worthy cover version, sometimes even eclipsing the original, and for better or worse, it's also true that sometimes what one considers the 'original', and therefore the best, is the first version one happens to hear. I know for a fact there are those walking among us who prefer The Dixie Chicks' version of Landslide, for instance, and Faith Hill's version of Piece of My Heart for that matter, solely because that's how they were introduced to the song, and that first musical impression can leave an indelible (if unfortunate) mark.
I guess I'm guilty as well. The Pretty Things' version of Roadrunner was for a long time the only version I knew. In fact, only recently did I learn it was a Bo Didley song, and in spite of The Originator's sacrosanct legend, I'm sticking with The Pretty Things when it comes to this list. Musically, their version might be considered just this side of sloppy, but the garage band bundle of noise wipes out what I think of as the cartoonish sterility of the original...you know, that goony sound that used to find its way into John Hughes movies a lot back in the day (think Uncle Buck...)...and lends a recklessness that befits the subject matter, further embellished by Phil May's petulant sounding vocals.
What can I say? Sometimes there's no message, no relating, nothing to relate to, really, and no point tearing something apart in order to examine it. Sometimes you just like the way something sounds. Sometimes music provokes an impulse rather than a thought, and that largely indescribable phenomenon is at the heart of rock and roll. I'd be willing to bet Bo Didley, of all people, knew this.
Whoever sings it, this song just screams for the open road. Hell yeah, for four or five months, I fully intend to not be kept up with.
"I'm a road runner honey, and you can't keep up with me..."
#120) "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones - Fifty years on, that simple but razor-edged guitar riff remains the first and last word in rock and roll. With Satisfaction, The Stones brought the rebellion first hatched by Elvis and James Dean in the 1950s one step closer to that place of madness and menace that would come to define the 60s.
In 1979, Jeff Bridges hosted a remarkably comprehensive rock and roll retrospective called Heroes of Rock and Roll, in which he very rightly says, "Unlike the Beatles, the Stones wouldn't be content to hold your hand."
Discontentment too is at the heart of rock and roll.
"When I'm watching my TV and a man comes on to tell me how white my shirts can be / But he can't be a man cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me..."
Whatever it is that appeals to me, it's found only in the live version, released as a single in the early 1980s and found on Joel's double Greatest Hits package from '85. The studio version, from 1976's Turnstiles doesn't pack nearly as much of a punch.
I wonder why that is...how can that be, really? It's the exact same song, and I'm not a fan of live music; yet for some reason, when I listen to the live version of Say Goodbye to Hollywood, depending on my mood, and the time of day, and if the light outside is just right, and/or I'm driving fast enough, I get chills. Chills.
The studio version....meh. Never gonna happen.
"Say a word out of line, you find out the friends you had are gone, forever....forever..."
#119) "Roadrunner" by The Pretty Things - I'm always squawking on this page about how the original version of any song is the best, but I'm not totally inflexible on that point. Once in a while someone comes along and does a worthy cover version, sometimes even eclipsing the original, and for better or worse, it's also true that sometimes what one considers the 'original', and therefore the best, is the first version one happens to hear. I know for a fact there are those walking among us who prefer The Dixie Chicks' version of Landslide, for instance, and Faith Hill's version of Piece of My Heart for that matter, solely because that's how they were introduced to the song, and that first musical impression can leave an indelible (if unfortunate) mark.
I guess I'm guilty as well. The Pretty Things' version of Roadrunner was for a long time the only version I knew. In fact, only recently did I learn it was a Bo Didley song, and in spite of The Originator's sacrosanct legend, I'm sticking with The Pretty Things when it comes to this list. Musically, their version might be considered just this side of sloppy, but the garage band bundle of noise wipes out what I think of as the cartoonish sterility of the original...you know, that goony sound that used to find its way into John Hughes movies a lot back in the day (think Uncle Buck...)...and lends a recklessness that befits the subject matter, further embellished by Phil May's petulant sounding vocals.
What can I say? Sometimes there's no message, no relating, nothing to relate to, really, and no point tearing something apart in order to examine it. Sometimes you just like the way something sounds. Sometimes music provokes an impulse rather than a thought, and that largely indescribable phenomenon is at the heart of rock and roll. I'd be willing to bet Bo Didley, of all people, knew this.
Whoever sings it, this song just screams for the open road. Hell yeah, for four or five months, I fully intend to not be kept up with.
"I'm a road runner honey, and you can't keep up with me..."
#120) "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones - Fifty years on, that simple but razor-edged guitar riff remains the first and last word in rock and roll. With Satisfaction, The Stones brought the rebellion first hatched by Elvis and James Dean in the 1950s one step closer to that place of madness and menace that would come to define the 60s.
In 1979, Jeff Bridges hosted a remarkably comprehensive rock and roll retrospective called Heroes of Rock and Roll, in which he very rightly says, "Unlike the Beatles, the Stones wouldn't be content to hold your hand."
Discontentment too is at the heart of rock and roll.
"When I'm watching my TV and a man comes on to tell me how white my shirts can be / But he can't be a man cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me..."
Friday, October 10, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#115) "Angie" by The Rolling Stones - Much like Wild Horses, Angie evokes very specific memories for me, of being a young adult overwhelmed by the adult world, of having responsibilities outpacing my means, of wondering how the hell I got where I was, and whether doing something different, or not doing something at all, might have made a difference. All of it at that age when we like to think our personal drama (especially romantic drama) matters in the great cosmic all more than it actually does, and so we hand-feed it, in a continuous and ultimately exhaustive process of nursing it back to health.
The acoustic introduction in Angie is like an emotional Tar-Baby, ensnared in which I can find every dreary Wednesday afternoon I ever sat through wishing I were somewhere else. And draped over the thin but broad shoulders of the orchestral accompaniment as the song climaxes, I can find every sunset I ever sat and watched while coming to the restless realization that is if anything was going to change in this big, daunting world - in my big, daunting world - something drastic needed to happen.
The acoustic introduction in Angie is like an emotional Tar-Baby, ensnared in which I can find every dreary Wednesday afternoon I ever sat through wishing I were somewhere else. And draped over the thin but broad shoulders of the orchestral accompaniment as the song climaxes, I can find every sunset I ever sat and watched while coming to the restless realization that is if anything was going to change in this big, daunting world - in my big, daunting world - something drastic needed to happen.
Haunting to this day, but gorgeous. Just gorgeous. For my money, Angie is one of the most expertly rendered ballads ever - vocals, percussion, instrumentation...it's all there (listen to that fucking piano!), and The Stones are certainly one of the most diverse rock bands ever. They stand second to no one.
"Angie, Angie, ain't it good to be alive...?"
#116) "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels - The lyrics leave a little to be desired...well, okay, they leave a lot to be desired. But Martha Davis' voice brings them to life...well, okay, maybe performs mouth-to-mouth. But the positively mesmerizing bass line, coupled with a middle interlude of bells, synthesizers and guitars that tumble down the rock canyon of my senses, creates a phenomenal mood, the kind of place, the kind of time, I would always prefer to find myself in love in.
And as to the lyrics, does love always - or ever - make sense? Or have to?
And as to the lyrics, does love always - or ever - make sense? Or have to?
"It keeps me standing still, it takes all my will..."
#117) "Free Will" by Rush - A long time ago, I made the mistake of engaging in a debate with a music snob, one of those people who set forth nothing less than a self-styled moral authority on what they consider to be good music and what they consider to be bad music, and always make sure to throw down names of musicians and bands nobody's ever heard of to inoculate their taste from the dreaded charge of mediocrity. This, whether they actually listen to or know the music at all. Often, for many, it's enough to be fashionable.
It's likely this guy wasn't a poser, however. He was a musician himself, a drummer, and I'm pretty sure he actually listened to and liked all that obscure, alternative music he spoke of. And that's fine. The problem wasn't that he was alternative anything, it was that he immediately dismissed the whole of Top 40 music spanning forty years as mere pap, and was quick to pounce when I remarked, mostly in passing, that a) Rush was a fairly innovative and talented band in their day, with a lot to say, and (especially) b) Neil Peart was/is a hell of a drummer.
It's likely this guy wasn't a poser, however. He was a musician himself, a drummer, and I'm pretty sure he actually listened to and liked all that obscure, alternative music he spoke of. And that's fine. The problem wasn't that he was alternative anything, it was that he immediately dismissed the whole of Top 40 music spanning forty years as mere pap, and was quick to pounce when I remarked, mostly in passing, that a) Rush was a fairly innovative and talented band in their day, with a lot to say, and (especially) b) Neil Peart was/is a hell of a drummer.
Whether Rush deserves to be remembered in the annals of music history is open to debate, I guess (I still think so), but if you listen to Free Will, Neal Peart's seemingly computer timed rhythm-keeping makes the song what it is, yet it was this very precision that the music snob took issue with. No, no, no, he said (definitely a 'three no' kind of guy...), Neil Peart's a little too tight, little too stringent. He flashed a patronizing (and totally stringent) smile. He doesn't really know how to interpret.
I didn't know what the hell he was talking about at the time, and I still don't. I think Neal Peart's drumming in all of Rush's music has a way of creating a melody all it's own.
Whatever. All I know is that in my fantasy band, especially when I'm driving down the road (as I will be for long stretches on 1/48/50), I'm almost always the singer, or pianist, or guitarist.
Unless I'm jamming to Rush, when I become the drummer (er, you know, in the richly decorated rumpus room of my mind...;-), the guy who keeps it all together, sitting mostly hidden at the back of the stage, stitching it all up nice and tight, and in Peart's case, doing nothing less than making the bleeding stop. ;-)
Whatever. All I know is that in my fantasy band, especially when I'm driving down the road (as I will be for long stretches on 1/48/50), I'm almost always the singer, or pianist, or guitarist.
Unless I'm jamming to Rush, when I become the drummer (er, you know, in the richly decorated rumpus room of my mind...;-), the guy who keeps it all together, sitting mostly hidden at the back of the stage, stitching it all up nice and tight, and in Peart's case, doing nothing less than making the bleeding stop. ;-)
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice..."
Friday, October 3, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#111) "Ride to California" by The Paper Tongues - A great road song, with restless rhythms and a fevered incantation pointing the way toward the spurious but irresistible promise of California living, Ride to California also showcases singer Aswan North's unrivaled ability to shred sideways through paper with his voice...er, tongue...?
"I can't wait to get a ride to California / 'Cause it makes sense to go to California..."
#112) "Take It On The Run" by REO Speedwagon - Once again, REO Speedwagon demonstrates an ability to wield an emotional weapon. Take It On The Run has a thin barbed tip, perfect for letting a little air out of their pudgy reputation as love sick warblers. And once again, Gary Richrath, who wrote the song, reveals himself to be a fantastic guitarist, with a sharp ear for composition.
"And you need never look back again..."
#113) "One in a Million" by Guns -n- Roses - Not everyone will agree I'm sure, but I think the B-side of the album GNR Lies, released in 1988 as a follow up to the wildly successful - as in generation defining - Appetite for Destruction, is Guns and Roses' best work. Maybe because it's the first time I remember getting excited by music that was considered new, feeling that I was marching in time to my 'generation', and feeling cool and current telling people about. I'll never forget a morning in February 1989, skipping 1st hour, hiding out in one of the band practice rooms with two girls named Karen and Cheryl. As we cautiously glanced out the window at the hallway scanning for any sign of authority (and as I tried not to gawk too much at Cheryl's ass), the three of us agreed that Guns and Roses did not sound good singing a slow song...("Patience", which earlier that week they'd performed at the American Music Awards).
All these years later, I think we were right. That very performance is available now on YouTube and it really isn't good, nor are many GnR live performances (aside from Axl Rose's frequent on-stage tantruming). But it felt good to be sixteen and sounding cool, skipping class with two hot girls in a band practice room, rebelling and having something to contribute to the conversation. (Until we ended up getting busted, which they blamed me for...yeah, I think I may have sneezed or something...). But Side B of ...Lies has a command presence all its own, and my praise for it includes "One in a Million", a song that caused controversy for its racist and homophobic lyrics.
It's an irrefutable charge, really. There's not a lot of room for interpretation. "One in a Million" spits out bile and ignorance in toxic quantities, no question.
At the time, Axl Rose was quick to defend the song, and himself, by saying it reflects a certain point of view, to some extent his point of view, his experience when he first came to LA from the Midwest. I have always accepted that explanation, and taken it a step further, in fact:
"One in a Million" is the larger experience of the disenfranchised, and disadvantaged, white guy.
First off, let's be very clear, am I that guy? Not at all. But I know him well. I grew up with him, went to school with him, used to avoid him on the playground, in the hallways, the cafeteria. When I was older, I drank with him at parties, took my beer to the other side of the bonfire when he (invariably) got too drunk and out of control, then, later, to the other side of bar.
As a young man with not a hell of a lot going on myself, I worked with him. Our paths regularly crossed pumping gas, flipping burgers and loading trucks. We competed for these jobs, and for hours, and favor with management, and I usually won because he was an asshole and/or never stuck around.
In recent years, I've hired this guy, fired him, and hired him back. He doesn't stick around any more now than he did twenty years ago, but he's not a bad worker when he's not distracted by trying to reconcile the shit hand life has dealt him with his own bad decisions, a currency he inevitably finds more worthless (and accepted at less places) with each passing year. Although even though I grow older, he never seems to...he's always somewhere between 19 and 28.
By no means is he right in his worldview, but he's part of the world nevertheless, embedded in every facet of our lives, populating the places most people strive to avoid, yet visit on a daily basis. He prepares our food, cleans up after us, does all those proverbial jobs "nobody wants to". And we would all be well-advised not to dismiss him any more quickly than we might the disenfranchised and disadvantaged African American, Latino, or whatever.
I contend that his ignorance makes him fearful, not hateful (an important distinction). I view the hostility in "One in a Million" as a defensive posture, and maintain that the song itself is a spot-on representation of his emotions, for better or worse, not his opinions.
Controversy aside, both Axl Rose's vocals and Slash's guitar work are pretty astonishing here, rising in intensity as the song progresses. Best vocals from Axl Rose to be found, I'd say.
"Radical and racist, don't point your finger at me / I'm a small town white boy, just trying to make ends meet / don't need your religion, don't watch that much TV..."
#114) "Tuesday's Gone" by Hank Williams Jr. - Another cover that does the original justice, lending it a sky-draped drama. This is the version I've turned to over time, time and time again, whenever Tuesday has gone.
"Now I don't know where I am going / I really wanna be left alone..."
"I can't wait to get a ride to California / 'Cause it makes sense to go to California..."
#112) "Take It On The Run" by REO Speedwagon - Once again, REO Speedwagon demonstrates an ability to wield an emotional weapon. Take It On The Run has a thin barbed tip, perfect for letting a little air out of their pudgy reputation as love sick warblers. And once again, Gary Richrath, who wrote the song, reveals himself to be a fantastic guitarist, with a sharp ear for composition.
"And you need never look back again..."
#113) "One in a Million" by Guns -n- Roses - Not everyone will agree I'm sure, but I think the B-side of the album GNR Lies, released in 1988 as a follow up to the wildly successful - as in generation defining - Appetite for Destruction, is Guns and Roses' best work. Maybe because it's the first time I remember getting excited by music that was considered new, feeling that I was marching in time to my 'generation', and feeling cool and current telling people about. I'll never forget a morning in February 1989, skipping 1st hour, hiding out in one of the band practice rooms with two girls named Karen and Cheryl. As we cautiously glanced out the window at the hallway scanning for any sign of authority (and as I tried not to gawk too much at Cheryl's ass), the three of us agreed that Guns and Roses did not sound good singing a slow song...("Patience", which earlier that week they'd performed at the American Music Awards).
All these years later, I think we were right. That very performance is available now on YouTube and it really isn't good, nor are many GnR live performances (aside from Axl Rose's frequent on-stage tantruming). But it felt good to be sixteen and sounding cool, skipping class with two hot girls in a band practice room, rebelling and having something to contribute to the conversation. (Until we ended up getting busted, which they blamed me for...yeah, I think I may have sneezed or something...). But Side B of ...Lies has a command presence all its own, and my praise for it includes "One in a Million", a song that caused controversy for its racist and homophobic lyrics.
It's an irrefutable charge, really. There's not a lot of room for interpretation. "One in a Million" spits out bile and ignorance in toxic quantities, no question.
At the time, Axl Rose was quick to defend the song, and himself, by saying it reflects a certain point of view, to some extent his point of view, his experience when he first came to LA from the Midwest. I have always accepted that explanation, and taken it a step further, in fact:
"One in a Million" is the larger experience of the disenfranchised, and disadvantaged, white guy.
First off, let's be very clear, am I that guy? Not at all. But I know him well. I grew up with him, went to school with him, used to avoid him on the playground, in the hallways, the cafeteria. When I was older, I drank with him at parties, took my beer to the other side of the bonfire when he (invariably) got too drunk and out of control, then, later, to the other side of bar.
As a young man with not a hell of a lot going on myself, I worked with him. Our paths regularly crossed pumping gas, flipping burgers and loading trucks. We competed for these jobs, and for hours, and favor with management, and I usually won because he was an asshole and/or never stuck around.
In recent years, I've hired this guy, fired him, and hired him back. He doesn't stick around any more now than he did twenty years ago, but he's not a bad worker when he's not distracted by trying to reconcile the shit hand life has dealt him with his own bad decisions, a currency he inevitably finds more worthless (and accepted at less places) with each passing year. Although even though I grow older, he never seems to...he's always somewhere between 19 and 28.
By no means is he right in his worldview, but he's part of the world nevertheless, embedded in every facet of our lives, populating the places most people strive to avoid, yet visit on a daily basis. He prepares our food, cleans up after us, does all those proverbial jobs "nobody wants to". And we would all be well-advised not to dismiss him any more quickly than we might the disenfranchised and disadvantaged African American, Latino, or whatever.
I contend that his ignorance makes him fearful, not hateful (an important distinction). I view the hostility in "One in a Million" as a defensive posture, and maintain that the song itself is a spot-on representation of his emotions, for better or worse, not his opinions.
Controversy aside, both Axl Rose's vocals and Slash's guitar work are pretty astonishing here, rising in intensity as the song progresses. Best vocals from Axl Rose to be found, I'd say.
"Radical and racist, don't point your finger at me / I'm a small town white boy, just trying to make ends meet / don't need your religion, don't watch that much TV..."
#114) "Tuesday's Gone" by Hank Williams Jr. - Another cover that does the original justice, lending it a sky-draped drama. This is the version I've turned to over time, time and time again, whenever Tuesday has gone.
"Now I don't know where I am going / I really wanna be left alone..."
Friday, September 26, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#107) "Downtown Train" by Rod Stewart - I've said it numerous times on this page, I'm not usually a fan of cover versions, especially covers of songs penned by remarkable talents. Tom Waits is a musical genius, a poet and innovator, even if his voice sounds like he's been gargling with Drano the last twenty-five years. For me, he is hallowed, and like The Beatles, I generally feel like other artists should just leave him alone. But every once in a while, it happens that someone comes along and does someone else's great song justice.
In 1990, Rod Stewart was enjoying not only a resurgence in popularity, but a kind of image makeover. He'd gone from semi-androgynous disco diva dude (which itself had been a departure from his original rock and blues roots) to pop music elder statesman in the blink of an eye; in other words, replaced sashaying across the stage in spandex tights singing Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? with riding in the back of a truck with a precocious five-year-old reflecting on Life in Forever Young. Downtown Train was part of this evolution into a more mature, sophisticated Rod.
In truth, the beauty of Downtown Train is self-contained and self-fulfilling. It's one of those dramatic songs that captures something larger than merely the moment at hand, encompasses whole pages of script in Whitman's powerful play all at once. But Stewart's version discovers - and frees - a certain restlessness locked up in Waits' version, concealed by spartan arrangement and Waits' limited vocal ability. Rod's powerful and compelling voice brings it all home in a way that - *sigh* - Waits, for all his genius, simply can't.
"All my dreams fall like rain..."
#108) "Wild Horses" by The Sundays - Here we have another example of a cover version that does the original justice, although in this case, Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones doesn't really need a lot of help. Among the most melancholy songs I've ever heard, it draws forth potent personal memories, makes me think of being young and dumb and in a relationship going nowhere, of first realizing adulthood might not be what I thought it would be when I was little, and the long, daunting days that plodded past dressed in gray. Keith Richards is quoted as saying the song is about 'being a million miles from where you want to be.'
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
The Sundays' version, from 1992, amplifies the emotional drudgery of the song by draping across it the strange hope that all that sickly melancholy is just a bad dream you'll eventually wake up from.
Of course it isn't. And you don't.
"Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them someday..."
#109) "Long Time Gone" by The Dixie Chicks - Natalie Maines doesn't necessarily have the best voice in country music, but for my money hers is the sexiest, and this is no more evident than in Long Time Gone. She's got pipes too, that is, like any country diva worth her salt she can bellow at 300 decibels if need be, but her music has never revolved around the fact that she can. Rather, she possesses a nuanced tonal quality that sets The Dixie Chicks, and herself as an artist, apart from all the rest in country, and which I find compellingly attractive. The strong, and nuanced, musicianship of the Chicks is also no better represented than in Long Time Gone.
"They got money, but they don't have Cash..."
#110) "Whip It" by Devo - The truth is, at the end of the day, don't we all just wanted to be remembered?
It's easy to sing the praises of someone's genius, to laud the Beatles, Stones, Floyds and Macs, the Axls, Kurts, Dre's, Em's, in our midst. But not everyone these days remembers - or gives a crap - about them, and as time goes by, styles and tastes change irreparably. It's a major pitfall of being the voice of a generation. That generation grows up, and old, and the next generation just can't or won't recognize...not in the same way. It invariably gets its own thing going.
But I don't think I've ever met anyone, of any age, who can't get down to Whip It. Silly and goony as it is, it nevertheless oddly transcends time, style and genre. It reliably gets everyone turning the radio up, jamming out, as it were, and that is an accomplishment not to be dismissed.
Plus, listen to the lyrics. Whip It is precisely the attitude with which to approach Life. :-)
"When something's going wrong, you must whip it..."
In 1990, Rod Stewart was enjoying not only a resurgence in popularity, but a kind of image makeover. He'd gone from semi-androgynous disco diva dude (which itself had been a departure from his original rock and blues roots) to pop music elder statesman in the blink of an eye; in other words, replaced sashaying across the stage in spandex tights singing Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? with riding in the back of a truck with a precocious five-year-old reflecting on Life in Forever Young. Downtown Train was part of this evolution into a more mature, sophisticated Rod.
In truth, the beauty of Downtown Train is self-contained and self-fulfilling. It's one of those dramatic songs that captures something larger than merely the moment at hand, encompasses whole pages of script in Whitman's powerful play all at once. But Stewart's version discovers - and frees - a certain restlessness locked up in Waits' version, concealed by spartan arrangement and Waits' limited vocal ability. Rod's powerful and compelling voice brings it all home in a way that - *sigh* - Waits, for all his genius, simply can't.
"All my dreams fall like rain..."
#108) "Wild Horses" by The Sundays - Here we have another example of a cover version that does the original justice, although in this case, Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones doesn't really need a lot of help. Among the most melancholy songs I've ever heard, it draws forth potent personal memories, makes me think of being young and dumb and in a relationship going nowhere, of first realizing adulthood might not be what I thought it would be when I was little, and the long, daunting days that plodded past dressed in gray. Keith Richards is quoted as saying the song is about 'being a million miles from where you want to be.'
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
The Sundays' version, from 1992, amplifies the emotional drudgery of the song by draping across it the strange hope that all that sickly melancholy is just a bad dream you'll eventually wake up from.
Of course it isn't. And you don't.
"Wild, wild horses, we'll ride them someday..."
#109) "Long Time Gone" by The Dixie Chicks - Natalie Maines doesn't necessarily have the best voice in country music, but for my money hers is the sexiest, and this is no more evident than in Long Time Gone. She's got pipes too, that is, like any country diva worth her salt she can bellow at 300 decibels if need be, but her music has never revolved around the fact that she can. Rather, she possesses a nuanced tonal quality that sets The Dixie Chicks, and herself as an artist, apart from all the rest in country, and which I find compellingly attractive. The strong, and nuanced, musicianship of the Chicks is also no better represented than in Long Time Gone.
"They got money, but they don't have Cash..."
#110) "Whip It" by Devo - The truth is, at the end of the day, don't we all just wanted to be remembered?
It's easy to sing the praises of someone's genius, to laud the Beatles, Stones, Floyds and Macs, the Axls, Kurts, Dre's, Em's, in our midst. But not everyone these days remembers - or gives a crap - about them, and as time goes by, styles and tastes change irreparably. It's a major pitfall of being the voice of a generation. That generation grows up, and old, and the next generation just can't or won't recognize...not in the same way. It invariably gets its own thing going.
But I don't think I've ever met anyone, of any age, who can't get down to Whip It. Silly and goony as it is, it nevertheless oddly transcends time, style and genre. It reliably gets everyone turning the radio up, jamming out, as it were, and that is an accomplishment not to be dismissed.
Plus, listen to the lyrics. Whip It is precisely the attitude with which to approach Life. :-)
"When something's going wrong, you must whip it..."
Friday, September 19, 2014
Reason #28 to Live Nebulously
Seriously, I know I've been kind of fixating on robots and drones this summer, but how could this not lead somewhere bad...?
How is this not part of a (our) dystopian future?
At what point does (will) this thing start thinking on its own?
How is this not part of a (our) dystopian future?
At what point does (will) this thing start thinking on its own?
Friday, September 12, 2014
Three Things That Always Stir Restlesness
1) Geese flying south
2) Wildfires out west
3) Talk of snow up north
2) Wildfires out west
3) Talk of snow up north
Friday, September 5, 2014
Three Things That Always Stir Restlessness
1) Change in temperature
2) Change in color
3) Everyone going back to school but me
2) Change in color
3) Everyone going back to school but me
Friday, August 29, 2014
Reason #27 to Live Nebulously
I can admit my objection to this might be driven more by irrational fear than a well-thought out indictment. Something like this could really benefit people living in isolated areas. But on the other hand, people have been living in isolated areas for thousands of years and doing just fine, and the stripping down of humanity, the perpetuation of the increasingly LESS interpersonal lives we've started leading in just the last twenty, is present and impossible to ignore, at least for me. I just don't want to interact with machines any more than I already do, and I'm pretty sure I still wouldn't, even if I lived out in the boonies (living nebulously, ironically enough...;-). I'd crave a chat with the delivery guy, or the mail person, even just once or twice a month, and would find it disheartening - to say the very least - to watch a drone hover over my yard and drop supplies down to me, to sign for it with my friggin' thumb print, then watch it disappear past the horizon, and keep watching long after I could no longer hear it.
What's more, as is usually the case with drone technology in the private sector, there are privacy issues at play here. And though it is true that I use several of the company's numerous products on a daily basis - from Gmail to Google Chrome to Google Earth to Google Keep...to this very blog site, come to think of it - it seems like Google has so many fingers in everything, so many irons in the fire, before long it could grow into something much larger than a mere 'company'...
That is, if it hasn't already started to happen. It would seem Google is well on its way to becoming the 21st century's first major monopoly, only with far more power and influence over - and knowledge of - our daily lives than Ma Bell could ever have imagined.
CLICK: Google drones tested in Queensland
What's more, as is usually the case with drone technology in the private sector, there are privacy issues at play here. And though it is true that I use several of the company's numerous products on a daily basis - from Gmail to Google Chrome to Google Earth to Google Keep...to this very blog site, come to think of it - it seems like Google has so many fingers in everything, so many irons in the fire, before long it could grow into something much larger than a mere 'company'...
That is, if it hasn't already started to happen. It would seem Google is well on its way to becoming the 21st century's first major monopoly, only with far more power and influence over - and knowledge of - our daily lives than Ma Bell could ever have imagined.
CLICK: Google drones tested in Queensland
Friday, August 22, 2014
Maine's 'North Pond Hermit' pretty much sums it all up
Below is a link to an article from the September issue of GQ about a man who lived as a hermit in the woods of central Maine for twenty-seven years. Chris Knight disappeared in 1986 at the age of twenty, and reportedly had no contact with the outside world until April 2013 when technology - in the way of a newly installed motion detector alarm system - finally led to his being caught raiding a lake camp for supplies, as he had been doing for nearly three decades. Over the years, he either unnerved or angered local residents, particularly the victims of his late night raids, and, perhaps unavoidably, was turned into the stuff of legend around campfires. Without knowing, or trying, or giving a shit, Chris Knight became the North Pond Hermit, a real person violating the law by habitually breaking into cabins, but also a larger-than-life presence in and around the woods.
I've always found these kind of stories fascinating. The lives of the likes of Tim Treadwell and Chris McCandless inspire a siren song in me. They get me thinking long thoughts about what it takes to actually commit to something so drastic - a little bit of madness, a little bit of courage, a whole lot of sheer will, I'd say, to actually disappear so completely your loved ones stop searching for you and your very identity becomes nebulous. Knight's story - unique in that, unlike McCandless and Treadwell, he survived - has me thinking about living nebulously, what it really means to me, and how committed I might be to taking my quest for solitude and soul searching beyond a mere road trip, making it a permanent lifestyle.
The answer: not too much. Assuming that the story is true (and I have no reason to doubt it, other than sometimes hoax happens), I simply don't have what it takes to do what Knight did. That siren song - of solitude, of peace, of a life that is wholly introspective and free of the covetous trappings and broad emotional pendulum swing of modern life - is there, and resonant, but its volume always gets turned down by a pressing need for physical comfort, for a sense of stability, and somewhat by the need (in recent years anyway) for companionship and connection with other people. I am not the loner I liked to pretend I was at twenty.
And the point of the article by journalist Michael Finkel (also assuming Finkel neither put words in Knight's mouth, nor took them out) seems to be that Knight had no siren song driving him. He was a true hermit, simply wandering into the woods, neither seeking out, nor discovering along the way, any grand insight. He didn't journal about existence while he was out there, or take pictures, or sketch, or write poetry, or his manifesto, had no interest whatsoever in leaving a record of his time in the woods and didn't care if anyone learned his story. It would seem he just wanted to be left the fuck alone, and was assuming he'd die in the wilderness, and we are only talking about him now because he was caught.
But whatever deep-seeded impulse drove him into the woods and kept him there for thirty years, enduring hunger and boredom and unimaginable physical hardship in the winter, there is a line in the article that really catches my attention, something Knight said as Finkel was interviewing him, not about his time in the woods, but the civilization he has been forced back into the last year and a half: "I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."
It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia.
About what drives me toward a nebulous life, even if only on the highway for a few months, nothing else needs to be said, really. The North Pond Hermit got it right the first time.
Without knowing, or trying, or giving a shit.
"The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit"
I've always found these kind of stories fascinating. The lives of the likes of Tim Treadwell and Chris McCandless inspire a siren song in me. They get me thinking long thoughts about what it takes to actually commit to something so drastic - a little bit of madness, a little bit of courage, a whole lot of sheer will, I'd say, to actually disappear so completely your loved ones stop searching for you and your very identity becomes nebulous. Knight's story - unique in that, unlike McCandless and Treadwell, he survived - has me thinking about living nebulously, what it really means to me, and how committed I might be to taking my quest for solitude and soul searching beyond a mere road trip, making it a permanent lifestyle.
The answer: not too much. Assuming that the story is true (and I have no reason to doubt it, other than sometimes hoax happens), I simply don't have what it takes to do what Knight did. That siren song - of solitude, of peace, of a life that is wholly introspective and free of the covetous trappings and broad emotional pendulum swing of modern life - is there, and resonant, but its volume always gets turned down by a pressing need for physical comfort, for a sense of stability, and somewhat by the need (in recent years anyway) for companionship and connection with other people. I am not the loner I liked to pretend I was at twenty.
And the point of the article by journalist Michael Finkel (also assuming Finkel neither put words in Knight's mouth, nor took them out) seems to be that Knight had no siren song driving him. He was a true hermit, simply wandering into the woods, neither seeking out, nor discovering along the way, any grand insight. He didn't journal about existence while he was out there, or take pictures, or sketch, or write poetry, or his manifesto, had no interest whatsoever in leaving a record of his time in the woods and didn't care if anyone learned his story. It would seem he just wanted to be left the fuck alone, and was assuming he'd die in the wilderness, and we are only talking about him now because he was caught.
But whatever deep-seeded impulse drove him into the woods and kept him there for thirty years, enduring hunger and boredom and unimaginable physical hardship in the winter, there is a line in the article that really catches my attention, something Knight said as Finkel was interviewing him, not about his time in the woods, but the civilization he has been forced back into the last year and a half: "I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."
It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia.
About what drives me toward a nebulous life, even if only on the highway for a few months, nothing else needs to be said, really. The North Pond Hermit got it right the first time.
Without knowing, or trying, or giving a shit.
"The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit"
Friday, August 15, 2014
Reason #26 to Live Nebulously
I am a complete and total bigot...against androids
Viewed from a distance, the story below is pretty amazing, and I know there's a very fine line between a healthy skepticism of technology run amok, and a Hollywood-caliber paranoia over a perceived threat that isn't necessarily an eventuality. Moreover, forty years in this life has taught me that in the end, you can get used to just about anything.
But I'm sorry, I don't like the thought of androids in our midst; maybe it's close-minded of me, maybe in the end I'll be one of those who gets passed by, or shipped off to a 'reservation' to live with the new savages in an increasingly mechanized and computerized world. But 'C-3PO', and all that he implies, is entertaining only on the big screen. I don't want to spend any time with him, nor come to rely on him in any scenario that involves face time. And I think the message of another sci-fi movie, 2001's 'A.I', should never be dismissed as mere Hollywood fantasy, as it would seem sometimes we are being hurled toward that eventuality.
Right now, amazing as it may be, I just don't want to see this frigging thing standing at my hotel door, nor do I ever want to have to reach down and grab my toiletries out of its head, or, beholden to a host of human etiquette it could not possibly care about, feel the impulse to lean forward and shout 'Thank you!', like an ugly American abroad. In fact, I'd much prefer to walk down to the lobby and get the items myself, so this concept is perverse on a couple of levels: not only might it be the start of the mechanization/computerization of our species, but also, for able-bodied individuals at least, it's certainly the perpetuation of a trend that's been going for at least three or four decades and has really taken root in the service-based society of the last twenty years: the notion, and expectation, that everything must be done for us, even things that don't need to be, or shouldn't be.
CLICK: Robot butlers to staff hotels, other facilities...
Viewed from a distance, the story below is pretty amazing, and I know there's a very fine line between a healthy skepticism of technology run amok, and a Hollywood-caliber paranoia over a perceived threat that isn't necessarily an eventuality. Moreover, forty years in this life has taught me that in the end, you can get used to just about anything.
But I'm sorry, I don't like the thought of androids in our midst; maybe it's close-minded of me, maybe in the end I'll be one of those who gets passed by, or shipped off to a 'reservation' to live with the new savages in an increasingly mechanized and computerized world. But 'C-3PO', and all that he implies, is entertaining only on the big screen. I don't want to spend any time with him, nor come to rely on him in any scenario that involves face time. And I think the message of another sci-fi movie, 2001's 'A.I', should never be dismissed as mere Hollywood fantasy, as it would seem sometimes we are being hurled toward that eventuality.
Right now, amazing as it may be, I just don't want to see this frigging thing standing at my hotel door, nor do I ever want to have to reach down and grab my toiletries out of its head, or, beholden to a host of human etiquette it could not possibly care about, feel the impulse to lean forward and shout 'Thank you!', like an ugly American abroad. In fact, I'd much prefer to walk down to the lobby and get the items myself, so this concept is perverse on a couple of levels: not only might it be the start of the mechanization/computerization of our species, but also, for able-bodied individuals at least, it's certainly the perpetuation of a trend that's been going for at least three or four decades and has really taken root in the service-based society of the last twenty years: the notion, and expectation, that everything must be done for us, even things that don't need to be, or shouldn't be.
CLICK: Robot butlers to staff hotels, other facilities...
Friday, August 8, 2014
Reason #25 to Live Nebulously
He seems like a nice guy, and he's obviously talented...and one might be moved to consider what he has done a technological innovation, but the longer I watch this story, the more skeeved out I get. This might very well be the start of something that shouldn't ever start.
CNN: Man 'hears' colors, claims he's a cyborg
CNN: Man 'hears' colors, claims he's a cyborg
Friday, August 1, 2014
On Roads While On the Road...
One of the biggest allures of this extended road trip will be...well, the roads themselves. No joke. I've always been fascinated by roadways, Interstates, state highways, country trunks, service drives and 7th Avenues alike; not just their construction and the equipment with which they are constructed (a rite of passage for every little boy and, I'd wager, more than a few little girls...), but also how they intersect, and where, what they cross over, and go under, how many miles they go, and with how many lanes. I enjoy thinking about the thought that must have gone into putting it all together, the careful considerations involved in the creation of an efficient system, which, when you consider the level of traffic burdening it these days and how smoothly it continues to function (for the most part), it can surely be argued our roadway system is. Once on a vacation when I was a kid, my dad said of our Interstates, "If the Russians ever invaded, we'd be done for. They'd have no problem getting everywhere."
And as I posted on this page more than a year ago, I've always been fascinated - as well as a little tripped out (in a pleasant way) - by the concept of direction. North, south, east, west...each point of the compass evokes a different emotional and psychological response in me, each has its own complement of memories and expectations.
When I was a kid, I loved globes and maps, and I still do. But that old Rand McNally road atlas doesn't hold a candle to the likes of MapQuest or Google Earth, or any form of GPS navigation. These things breathe new life into the process of traveling long distances to places I've never or rarely been. Rand McNally never bothered with many of the little details that seem standard issue with GPS. I like knowing that the overpass I'm racing under for just a fraction of a second is actually 275th Avenue, for instance. Or that the little shoestring running diagonally off to the southwest is Everett Road, or that the little body of water I catch a glimpse of through the trees as I shoot past at 75 miles per hour is Holcomb Lake, or Tanner's Pond, or whatever. Do I need to know these things? Not at all. Will I remember any of them ten years from now? Probably not. But in the moment, for the moment, they help complete the picture; they aid in familiarizing myself with a new region.
Plus, I will never be reduced to angry tears trying to fold up my GPS.
For a long time, I thought I was a lone dweeb when it came to all this roadway business, but have found there are others, many others in fact, a whole community of highway fans out there, building websites devoted solely to cataloging the roadways in their areas and posting pictures of certain routes, in various states of construction. They are called (er, call themselves...) 'roadgeeks'...and to be honest, I don't know if I feel better or worse for this fact.
At least, there was a thriving community online at one time. A lot of the sites I've found are old, as in c.2002-style old. Some haven't been updated since the mid 2000s, and some, of course, are simply dead links through a search engine - "Error 404 File Not Found". But those that have survived, even if they've grown moldy, offer pictures and interesting stats, and in some cases the history of certain stretches, which I find particularly interesting. Like names provided me by GPS, I like knowing when roads came to be, what determined their routes, why they may have been changed or re-routed over the years. In my own adopted hometown, I'm anxious to learn about a re-route of Highway 53 known as 'the by-pass'. Lamentably, information about its construction is hard to come by. Again, I don't know why I want to know; it's not going to affect my life one way or another to ever know. I just want to.
I guess I do believe highway history completes a chapter in the story of our development as a nation and society that should never be overlooked. It could be said our roads are almost as intimately connected to our evolution as a species as are our modes of transportation.
And as I posted on this page more than a year ago, I've always been fascinated - as well as a little tripped out (in a pleasant way) - by the concept of direction. North, south, east, west...each point of the compass evokes a different emotional and psychological response in me, each has its own complement of memories and expectations.
When I was a kid, I loved globes and maps, and I still do. But that old Rand McNally road atlas doesn't hold a candle to the likes of MapQuest or Google Earth, or any form of GPS navigation. These things breathe new life into the process of traveling long distances to places I've never or rarely been. Rand McNally never bothered with many of the little details that seem standard issue with GPS. I like knowing that the overpass I'm racing under for just a fraction of a second is actually 275th Avenue, for instance. Or that the little shoestring running diagonally off to the southwest is Everett Road, or that the little body of water I catch a glimpse of through the trees as I shoot past at 75 miles per hour is Holcomb Lake, or Tanner's Pond, or whatever. Do I need to know these things? Not at all. Will I remember any of them ten years from now? Probably not. But in the moment, for the moment, they help complete the picture; they aid in familiarizing myself with a new region.
Plus, I will never be reduced to angry tears trying to fold up my GPS.
For a long time, I thought I was a lone dweeb when it came to all this roadway business, but have found there are others, many others in fact, a whole community of highway fans out there, building websites devoted solely to cataloging the roadways in their areas and posting pictures of certain routes, in various states of construction. They are called (er, call themselves...) 'roadgeeks'...and to be honest, I don't know if I feel better or worse for this fact.
At least, there was a thriving community online at one time. A lot of the sites I've found are old, as in c.2002-style old. Some haven't been updated since the mid 2000s, and some, of course, are simply dead links through a search engine - "Error 404 File Not Found". But those that have survived, even if they've grown moldy, offer pictures and interesting stats, and in some cases the history of certain stretches, which I find particularly interesting. Like names provided me by GPS, I like knowing when roads came to be, what determined their routes, why they may have been changed or re-routed over the years. In my own adopted hometown, I'm anxious to learn about a re-route of Highway 53 known as 'the by-pass'. Lamentably, information about its construction is hard to come by. Again, I don't know why I want to know; it's not going to affect my life one way or another to ever know. I just want to.
I guess I do believe highway history completes a chapter in the story of our development as a nation and society that should never be overlooked. It could be said our roads are almost as intimately connected to our evolution as a species as are our modes of transportation.
 |
| JULY 2010 - There's not much to this pic on the surface, just a state highway (63) running southward through a pastoral stretch of north-central Wisconsin. But look a little closer and consider: everything you see here, from the grade down the little hill, to the roads and driveways intersecting along the way, to the the placement of the signs, the power lines, even the painting of the yellow and white lines that keep cars in the correct lanes and tell us when it's safe to pass...none of it happens by accident. It is part of a carefully thought-out (hopefully!) and on-going process that helps to ensure safe and convenient travel for our ever-restless species. If I ran for the highest office in the land, I would so be the 'Infrastructure President'. ;-) |
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