Month: November 2006

I’ve felt really sorry for Artie for a while now. He has a beautiful voice, sometimes achingly so. Yet, I think he’s perceived like, say, Andrew Ridgely of WHAM!, lost in the light of his more creative partner.

Certainly, I don’t have nearly the number of solo Garfunkel albums as I have of Paul Simon albums, though I do own Breakaway, and The Animals’ Christmas (with Amy Grant).

I’ve had relationships like Paul seem to have with Art, on (as Tom and Jerry), and off (Paul goes to London), and on (“Sound of Silence” breaks), and off (Art makes movies such as Catch-22, which I saw twice in one day – had to do with affairs of the heart) while Paul goes solo, then on (“My Little Town”), then off, then on (Central Park reunion in 1981), then off (the clash over “Hearts and Bones”), with occasional reunions since then.

Anyway, Art turns 65 today, less than a month after Paul. His current music seems to be gaining some acclaim, if not great sales. I wish him well.

Five will be chosen. Who do you pick?

The only one that’s a serious lock for me is R.E.M., a group that had both musical significance and commercial success.

As for the others: Chic had commercial success, and were quite influential musically. On the other hand, perhaps Nile Rogers should be in the Hall as a producer.

The Dave Clark Five rivaled The Beatles for a time. I think they’ve suffered because their catalogue can be hard to find.

Grandmaster Flash is clearly important with songs such as “The Message” and the first rap song I ever bought, “White Lines”. I straddle the fence. Chubby Checker had a song go to #1 in two-non-consecutive years, but isn’t, and shouldn’t be in the HoF.

The Ronettes had relatively few real hits, and were overpowered by their producer, unfortunately.

Although I own Horses, the debut album by Patti Smith, my sense is that she’s more important to the overall rock scene as a music critic and songwriter than specifically as an artist. But that could be my limitation.

Many claim The Stooges as inspiration. Certainly hooking up with Bowie helped their visibility somewhat.

Joe Tex wasn’t a big hitmaker on the pop charts often, but he has at least 10 top 10 soul hits, had a career that spanned 15 years and was well regarded. Moreover, his style presaged rap.

I own only one Van Halen album, and the group really isn’t my cuppa, but I gotta give props to a band who thrived with two different lead singers (with the third, not so much).

So:
1. Who would you vote to put in the Hall? I’d pick the Dave Clark Five, R.E.M., Joe Tex, Van Halen and…one of the others, not the Ronettes. I’ll flip a coin. O.K., Chic.
2. Who do you think will make the Hall? R.E.M., for sure. Stooges or Smith, or possibly both. Dave Clark Five and Joe Tex. Van Halen makes it only if the Stooges or Smith do not.

And on an entirely different topic:
3. How is it that a television show featuring an attractive African-American male and a woman in peril tied around deja vu, called Daybreak, with Taye Diggs is starting on ABC on November 15, while the movie Deja Vu with Denzel Washington is opening in theaters less than two weeks later? Or two movies about Truman Capote writing “In Cold Blood” are made at the same time, though released months apart?

BONUS QUESTION FOR FANS OF “LOST”:

How do you feel about Daybreak filling in for Lost? No “Lost” repeats; indeed, no “Lost” for several weeks.

Part 2: Something that has happened to me, or a variation of the same, quite often before.
Last week, I got off the bus at Madison and West Lawrence, as did this older white man at about 6pm, which was dusk. He went one block north, I went one block north. He started walking west, I did the same. He was walking fast enough that I couldn’t just pass him – not with my knee – but not so fast that I couldn’t easily just let him get ahead. He kept looking over his left shoulder every 20 or 30 feet at me. I peeled off to the right to go to the library, and he practically had to do a 360 to find me. This did not seem to relieve him overly much, since I was just returning some items in the night slot, but I turned right to head home, and he appeared relieved. Call me paranoid, but this IS something this apparently intimidating black male has experienced before.
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I was having lunch yesterday with someone who asked me what I thought of the President. I said something like, “He’s dreadful.” She said, “But he’s a Christian!” If you get into that kind of conversation, get the Sojourners Voting Guide. She’s getting a copy today.
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Fred Hembeck gives me props – mostly – as he answers my questions about one Tom Clay, the Binghamton-born DJ who created that bizarre WWTNNIL/AM&J cut I described recently. There’s a bit of Rashomon in the piece, some crime, a little punishment. The story has it all, including a couple goofs which may get corrected.
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Tosy did a post about the shortest and longest tracks in his music collection. I thought it was sort of funny/silly question, until I realized that my answers (Simpsons and Dylan, at least) were EXACTLY THE SAME. Then it just hurt my head.
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Eddie describes music he sent me and analyzes music I sent him.
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Check out the webpage in the first comment to this post of mine. Talk about warm and fuzzy.
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Our long national nightmare is nearly over. Senator John Kerry has apologized for his joke/misstatement/expression of his true feelings suggesting that our armed forces were stupid for being in Iraq. Now if the Administration would only apologize for sending them there in the first place, we’d be all set.
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Here’s an excellent animation on YouTube, explaining Instant Runoff (IRV) basics in a clear and friendly style. I’m really fond of IRV.

Also on YouTube, Michael J Fox on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, interesting because he explains how sometimes he’s “herky-jerky” and sometimes he hits a plateau.

I have this complicated feeling about k.d. lang. On one hand, she has a truly wonderful voice in two distinct genres, country and the songs of the chaunteuse. On the other hand, I identify her music with my ex. A LOT.

I already had 1987’s Angel With a Lariat on vinyl and 1988’s Shadowland and 1989’s Absolute Torch and Twang on CD when I was telling her about the new songs on the radio. At first, she didn’t know who I was talking about, even though “Constant Craving” was constantly on the radio. But when I bought 1992’s Ingenue, and she did finally identify her sound, she went k.d. crazy, playing her music heavily, and buying magazines, purchasing – or maybe I purchased for her, since I am an enabler – 1984’s A Truly Western Experience, a fairly obscure album that doesn’t even show up on some discographies, as well as the 1993 soundtrack to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Western ends with a song called “Hooked on Junk”, a strange song which seemed at the time to come out of nowhere, compared to the more traditional country tunes on the album. Think of “You Know My Name” by the Beatles, or some other song on an album you’ve heard and said, “How’d THAT get on?”

“I was really into punk and performance art and singers like Jonathan Richman and the Roches, which is very different from where I ended up going…on my 21st birthday, two different people gave me Patsy Cline albums as a gift…Patsy was also getting hip in the gay circles at the time.”

So, when we split in 1994, I got Angel, Shadowland, Torch and Ingenue, as well as the Roy Orbison album that features k.d.’s duet of “Crying” the superior version of the song, I think; Red, Hot and Blue (the beautiful but mournful “So In Love”), the Dick Tracy soundtrack (the fun “Ridin’ the Rails” with Take 6); and Tame Yourself (the hard-to-categorize “Damned Old Dog”). Z got Western, Cowgirls, and some Coneheads movie soundtrack, plus all the print stuff.

I’ve continued to buy k.d.’s music:
1995 All You Can Eat
1997 Drag
2000 Invincible Summer
2001 Live by Request
2004 Hymns of the 49th Parallel
Plus she has a duet on the Tony Bennett MTV album, another on the new Bennett Duets album, and a whole album of their duets together, 2003’s Wonderful World.
But now she has a retrospective album of her country period, Reintarnation, featuring songs from those 1984-1993 albums, excluding Ingenue, and it puts me right back in that period.

lang, a painter, showed up in a hand-painted shirt she made with the word ‘Patsy’ splashed across it in rough punk lettering as an homage to her new hero. It wasn’t until she got home after the audition and looked in the mirror that lang realized she’d misspelled and gotten the gig despite wearing a shirt that said ‘Pasty’.

The album cover, BTW, is evocative of a famous Elvis cover: go to this website, which you might have read about in Fred Hembeck’s post of April 2, 2005, and go to 978 – as of this writing – items are added constantly- for Elvis, and 980 for k.d., (oh, and 992 for The Clash).

In any case, I think I’ll wait to buy her NEXT album. Now YOU might consider getting this if you don’t have a lot of her country albums. It’s fun music that confounded the country music establishment of the time. No, it doesn’t include “Hooked on Junk”.

As lang put it, they couldn’t figure out if this shorthaired gal from Canada was making fun of them or trying to add some sizzle…

And the album has great liner notes, some of which I’ve copped.

Got one of “those” e-mails that was supposed to remind me of the “good old days”, which I might have just read and deleted, but which somehow penetrated my mind:

About ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

Well, my mom didn’t drink or smoke, and in any case, fetal alcohol syndrome is a real problem that some kids didn’t survive.

Plus they took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

81 mg of aspirin daily except the week before I’m about to donate blood.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Yeah, we DIDN’T die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, luckily.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.

Seat belts almost certainly saved my life at least once.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we
rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

To this day, I wouldn’t ride my bike without a helmet; it reduces the chance of brain injury something like 80%.
I DID used to hitchhike regularly until about 1979, but I had a few peculiar encounters.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

Yes, I did do that and survived not falling out.

We didn’t cough into our elbows, we forgot to wash our hands sometimes, and never used a sanitizing gel to get clean.

Actually, I wonder about the efficacy of sanitizing gel. Where do the germs GO?

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

I AM astonished about the bottled water industry. Some comedian – why do I think it was Carlin? – pretty much asked the same question. So, were we all dehydrated for years? Probably.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle
NO ONE and actually died from this.

As far as we know.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because …

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

Well, I WAS overweight as a kid, though I was, in fact, always out playing.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day.
And we were O.K.

Largely true in my case, actually, though I was always likely at Valley Street park, the Ansco ball field past the cemetery, or on the school playground.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down
the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

Well, it wasn’t go-karts, but I did ride my bike with bad brakes down a steep hill into bushes. I survived in spite of that, but I was lucky a couple times.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms…….
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

I had friends, but I also had a lot of solitary pursuits as well.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.

Always need the requisite lawyer-bashing in these things.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

Well, no.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,

Ditto.

made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

The first half IS true.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang
the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Not in my neighborhood, even then.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

This DOES resonate a bit.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They actually sided with the law!

Except when the law was a ass.

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

Implicit in this is that persons born later than 1979 will not be innovative and creative? Oh, please.

If YOU are one of them . . . CONGRATULATIONS!

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!

The whole premise of “the good, old days,” when the life expectancy was less, when people died of diseases that are now all but eradicated, with injuries that can now be treated is bogus.

But the other underlying theme, that we can now have GPS on our kids’ cellphones so we know where they are at every minute, almost literally, IS largely true. Even when I was a kid, I was cognizant of “bad people out there”. But IS our reaction too much? I don’t know, but as Lydia grows up, I suspect I’ll find out.