Officially, it reached 86F that day, though the bank clock we saw read 87, around 30C.
A good day to get married?
This relatively early Easter reminded me that back on March 30, 1986, it was Easter Sunday. It was also the wedding day of my friend Miriam Isaacs; she was Jewish, and evidently unaware of this Christian tradition. An hour and a half before the wedding, I called for a taxi for my then-girlfriend and me. The dispatcher said it’d be there in 15 minutes. Thirty minutes later, I called, and I was told a cab was coming in 15 minutes. Thirty more minutes later, we took off on foot.
Officially, it reached 86F that day, though the bank clock we saw read 87, around 30C. By the time we got there in our fancy garb, we were sweaty. Worse, we had missed the wedding, though we did make it to the reception.
This is just one of the reasons I avoid taxis in Albany.
I’ve long lost track of Miriam, who had moved to Israel some years ago. Happy anniversary, a day late, to her, I hope. To others of you, Happy Easter! *** And please, would this Christ not rise from the dead. That is terribly disruptive. I agree with the original writer on some points, but I suspect I have a somewhat different theology overall.
Chuck Miller: Every day you survive, every day you thrive, every day you achieve and succeed, is a big eff ewe to the haters.
I may have mentioned (once or twice?) that it was my birthday this month. Thank you for the 70-odd comments (some VERY odd) on Facebook, and a couple of tweets, not to mention comments at this blog. Dustbury cited my March 8, day after my birthday, post.
He also linked to a couple of my posts, AND he wrote a whole post for me. Yay! The first YouTube clip in his piece features Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as Roger, and others, in a wonderful comedy segment from the movie Airplane!
Steve Bissette: “Your Tax Dollars At Work for Disney Dept: So, NY state tax breaks are going to help the next Marvel/Disney SPIDER-MAN movie get made—while Marvel/Disney merrily fleeces Steve Ditko yet again. A Modest Proposal at MYRANT from guest columnist Richard Gagnon.
STRIPPED: The Final Kickstarter Push for a feature documentary on the world’s best cartoonists: Talking about the art form they love & where it goes as papers die.
Frankly, I think retailers are crazy to maintain these “senior” discounts.
I find it mildly amusing that when someone gets to be 60, i.e. a sexagenarian, some young people seem to get all weirded out that people so OLD are still HAVING sex. Of course, the baby boomers never want to be getting older. “Sixty is the new forty,” and all that. Back in the 1970s, there was an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show called Mary and the Sexagenarian; I’m not remembering it specifically, but I’m sure there was a joke or two that today’s sixty-somethings would consider ageist.
There are all these nifty benefits to getting older. The thresholds vary, but one can get lots of stuff at a savings, especially services, such as at restaurants and transportation. (But are they legal? Apparently, even though they are discriminatory against the younguns.)
Frankly, I think retailers are crazy to maintain these “senior” discounts. The boomer generation is HUGE in numbers in the United States and will likely live longer than their parents, to boot; this must be an economic drain on some businesses and will continue to be so for quite a while. (Dustbury wrote on this topic recently.)
I LOVE 60, as a number. It has prime factors of 2, 3, and 5, and is evenly divisible by 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 as well. And time is based on 60 – seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour; gotta be SOMETHING to that.
This coming decade SHOULD be the one in which I leave my job. But I have an almost nine-year-old daughter; I may NEVER retire… *** Perennially hormonal
I continue to be moved by its chordal structure of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.
From last.fm, copied verbatim in the Wikipedia: “The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, is a piece of organ music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach sometime between 1703 and 1707. The attribution of the piece to Bach has been challenged since the early 1980s by a number of scholars, and remains a controversial topic.”
This piece of music has been used in dozens of movies (The Tree of Life, Gremlins 2, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, Fantasia, among others), TV shows, and video games. Check out this list of Bach music, and find the toccata references. The music is usually used to suggest something scary in a way that has become an unfortunate cliche.
I, though, continue to be moved by its chordal structure. Here’s one recording; you can find several others on YouTube. Listen to the segment that starts at 7:20; the chord at 7:45 just wows me. By those last three chords which are as intense as any power chords by a rock guitarist, I’m in tears of awe.
Somehow, it puts me in the right frame of mind for the latter stages of Holy Week.
There were two obvious candidates for a single from Sacred Songs, the first two songs on the album.
Recorded in 1977, released in 1980
My old blogging buddy Johnny Bacardi was on Facebook, and I could see that he was on Spotify, one of those online music channels. He was listening to a song called ‘North Star’ by Robert Fripp [LISTEN], a founder of my favorite “progressive rock” band, King Crimson. The vocal, though, was, unmistakably, by Daryl Hall of the very successful singing duo Hall & Oates.
This got me to wonder what the relationship was between that song and the Daryl Hall solo album Sacred Songs, produced by Fripp, an LP that I own and love.
Sacred Songs has a complicated history. From Wikipedia, and confirmed in the liner notes of the CD: “Sacred Songs was recorded in a rather short span of three weeks [in 1977]. Most of the songs were initially recorded with Hall singing and playing piano alongside Fripp’s guitar work, followed by overdubs by Hall & Oates’ regular touring band…
“Fripp and Hall gave the album to RCA officials. Though still relatively pop-oriented, Sacred Songs was very different from Hall & Oates, and fearing the album might be unsuccessful and alienate Hall’s mainstream fans, the company shelved the record, and release was postponed indefinitely.” This, of course, ticked them off greatly, and so they “passed tapes… to music journalists and disc jockeys” to pressure the label to release the album, which they finally did, a couple of years later.
Meanwhile, Fripp’s solo debut, Exposure, had a bunch of Hall vocals as well. “However due to pressure from RCA and Hall’s management, this was cut back to just two songs on the final release (‘You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette’ and [the aforementioned] ‘North Star’).” These two songs now appear on the CD version of the Sacred Songs album.
“Upon release, Sacred Songs sold fairly well, peaking at #58 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart; however, there was no hit single from the record. It has since come to be regarded as a high point in the careers of both Hall and Fripp.”
There were two obvious candidates for a single, the first two songs on the album, the title track, and Something in 4/4 Time [LISTEN]. When I got out this album, I loved it all over again. Oddly, I’ve recently had it stuck in my mind that some a capella group ought to cover 4/4 Time, complete with that Frippertronics in the bridge.
Listen to 30 seconds of each track of the original album HERE. *** Watch the 62nd episode of Live from Daryl’s House, in which Daryl and the group Minus the Bear perform NYCNY from the Sacred Songs album.
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