Month: September 2009

School, Beatles, and other things

Yesterday was Lydia’s first day of kindergarten. To say she did not want to go would be an understatement. She wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t eat when asked (then suddenly when it was time to go, was ravenous) and mostly, she lost the ability to talk – all she could do was grunt and it was up to her parents to decipher the guttural sounds. The obligatory pictures all having her looking forlorn when she actually faced the camera. But when I got home last night, she was all smiles. I think she was afraid she wouldn’t fit in, despite our best efforts to reassure her.

Not so incidentally, she’s not attending the neighborhood school this fall, contrary to plans my wife Carol and I had made, but rather the school where Carol teaches. Carol had called the school a couple weeks ago and had left a message to this effect on the answering machine. She also called the district office but was directed back to the school. We never got a call from the local school until someone who sounded like a truant officer called, noting Lydia’s absence.

We are disappointed that Lydia will not be able to attend the neighborhood school. The problem was that the school’s relatively late opening time, 8:45 a.m., made it it impossible to drop her off and get to work at anything approaching on time. If a pre-school program had been available, it is quite likely that our school choice for Lydia would have been the neighborhood school.
***
I can’t believe how sucked into the Beatles stuff I’ve gotten this week. I’ve taped every program and watched quite a few, although not yet the movies A Hard Day’s Night or Help! or six hours of the Anthology series yet. I did watch this Beatles video collection which I loved. Penny Lane wasn’t as good as I remembered it from when I was 13, but the version of Revolution (loud but with the do-be-do-wahs of Revolution 1) was great.

Some of these are being repeated through this weekend, if you want to tape them (times are Eastern, I assume, or maybe it’s accurate for multiple time zones) on VH1 Classic.
Beatles Video Retrospective – Th 9/10, 4pm; Su 9/13, 3 pm
A Hard Day’s Night – F 9/11, 7 pm; Sa 9/12, 2 pm;
Help! – F 9/11, 9 pm; Sa 9/12, 4 pm; Su 9/13, 1 pm
The Beatles Anthology Part 1 – Su 9/13, 5 pm
The Beatles Anthology Part 2 – Su 9/13, 7 pm
The Beatles Anthology Part 3 – Su 9/13, 9 pm

One segment that’s NOT being repeated, as far as I can see, is this 2005 special about the Bangladesh concert, which I watched. It featured the late Billy Preston, who died 6/6/06; my, he did not look well. BTW, his birthday was widely reported as 9/9, but according to Billy’s official website and some court papers, his birthday was 9/2, 1946.
***
The Ellie Greenwich Coverville cover story, which another fellow and I had requested.
***
Dateline:@#$!: Fred Hembeck Interviews Wonder Woman (Sept 8), featuring gratuitous mentions of the songs of a Motown legend. As Fred put it, “Take a look, should you be so inclined–it’s WAY shorter than ‘Watchmen’ and just as likely to be ignored by Alan Moore!!”
ROG

ROG

Number Nine Scheme


I’m always in favor of anything that gets the Beatles on the front cover of Entertainment Weekly, the Collectors’ Choice Music catalog and undoubtedly other publications. But today’s a mixed bag for me.

Since I’m not a gamer, the Beatles on Rock Band is an interesting sidelight. But what of the remastered box sets? As I’ve undoubtedly mentioned before, it’s tough to pull the trigger on buying the same songs for at least the fourth time (US LP, UK LP, CD). Some of those early US LP as I had to buy twice because they were stolen in 1972. And some songs show up on more than one album (Vee Jay’s Introducing the Beatles/Capitol’s The Early Beatles; UA’s A Hard Day’s Night/Capitol’s Something New) or on compilations (Rock ‘N’ Roll).

Yet, I had come to the conclusion that while I don’t NEED one (or both) of these box sets, I would WANT to have them, particularly the mono box. Checking out the description of the mono set, it does NOT include the Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums, “as they were originally recorded in stereo”, according to Amazon. But, if I understand correctly, the “double-CD set of mono singles, EPs and rare tracks… exactly mirrors the stereo ‘Past Masters’ collection, except it includes ‘Only a Northern Song; All Together Now; Hey Bulldog’, and ‘It’s All Too Much’ [the four ‘new’ songs from Yellow Submarine] and excludes ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko; Old Brown Shoe’, and ‘Let It Be’.”

Which means if I DID get the mono set, I’d need to keep (or replace) those three albums (YS for the instrumentals) plus Past Masters 2. The calculations are hurting my head.

Ultimately, the reason I MIGHT take the plunge – when it’s back in stock, as it’s sold out until October – is this lost recollection. I got the first four Beatles CDs for free in 1987. My friend Broome bought them for me shortly after they came out. At the time I was resisting getting caught up in this new-fangled technology called the compact disc player until I was sure it would stick. Hey, I NEVER bought an 8-track!

Having four discs with NOTHING on which to play them he knew would drive me crazy, and it did. Ultimately, I got a CD player, and bought a half dozen other CDs (one couldn’t have a CD player with just four CDs, could one?) including greatest hits of Elton John and Billy Joel plus Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms.

So those early discs in particular I can ALMOST justify replacing. Wait a minute…honey, Christmas is coming and the ONLY thing I want is…
***

Being a Beatles fan is a curse as much as a blessing. Someone at work came up to me just last week to ask me on which US and UK albums Doctor Robert appears. It’s one of those things someone could easily Google, but it’s apparently more fun to Just Ask Roger. Oh, it was Yesterday…and Today, and Revolver, respectively. I remember it so well because I thought it strange when it came out that the US version of Revolver had only two songs sung by Lennon, She Said She Said and Tomorrow Never Knows; Harrison had THREE songs. Doctor Robert, I’m Only Sleeping and And Your Bird Can Sing were stripped from the US Revolver and put on the US-only release, Y&T.

Then I was on Amazon, drooling over the mono box when I came across someone confused by early Beatles chronology. Some helpful bloke replied, “Meet the Beatles was the first Capitol Album in the US. It took some cuts from the Please Please Me album and their single I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t entirely correct and as a librarian, I just had to reply:
“Meet the Beatles was comprised of 9 songs from With the Beatles, plus the single, US B-side I Saw Her Standing There (from Please Please Me) and the UK B-side, This Boy. With the Beatles and Meet the Beatles both have the classic black and white photo.
“There WAS an album on Vee-Jay Records called Introducing the Beatles, which came out BEFORE the Beatles were big in the US, and the Please Please Me album was the source of THOSE songs, as well as a Capitol album called The Early Beatles, which came out as their fourth or fifth Capitol album.”

It’s a curse, I tell you.

ROG

ROG

H is for Hate

I started writing this before, but I think I have now found an angle; thanks to Anthony North’s piece about greed and this response to it.

SamuraiFrog is a blogger I visit regularly. (For those of you who do not, he currently has a lovely young woman, nude, seen from the rear, prominently featured on his masthead, in case such things bother or entice you.) Anyway, he won some blogging award, and as part of the acceptance of same, he was supposed to tell something about himself.
I hate people who say things like “Well, I don’t actually hate anything/anyone/whatever you just mentioned hating, because [pick one or more: a. it takes too much energy to hate something, b. hate is too strong an emotion, c. hate is a relationship that places too much importance on something I dislike, d. it takes up too much mental space to hate something, or e. I try not to give in to baser emotional states].” What I really hear is “I’m better than you” and what I really think is “Go f*** yourself.”

Now, as it turns out, I don’t feel that I HATE anyone, and I was just going to say that in his comments and let it go at that. But as I thought more on it, I realized that I needed to examine just WHY.

Life magazine, 1960

As I reach back, I recognize that I DID used to hate. And the primary focus was Richard Milhous Nixon. I hated him for the lies he spread in his very first house campaign, before I was born. I hated him for surviving staying on Eisenhower’s ticket by the use of the 1952 Checkers speech, also before I was born; you should watch the speech, if you can, as it’s brilliant political theater. But mostly, I hated him because he said, after he had lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”, but he lied. He ran for President in 1968 with a “secret” plan to end the Viet Nam war and won a close election over Hubert Humphrey.

Actually most of my bile towards Nixon was over Viet Nam. Though not his war – LBJ had expanded it and JFK (or arguably, Eisenhower) had started it, I wasn’t seeing his positives, as I did with LBJ’s civil rights legislation and Great Society programs. So, when Nixon left as a result of Watergate in August of 1974, my schadenfreude was exceedingly high.

At the same time I was able to hate him, I was able to be easily enraged by others. Think of those people showing up at those American town hall meetings shouting down those who disagree with them. On Election Night in 1972, when Nixon won re-election in a landslide, there was one Nixon supporter named George and I wanted to throttle him over his glee.

I didn’t always DISPLAY the rage, and in fact seldom did; I was brought up too well. But the FEELING of the rage was there. And it was not working for me.

I was like Stanley, the black guy in the American version of the television show The Office. On the Super Bowl episode, he nearly had a heart attack, so deeply was his festering rage. He had to find another way to go.

So when another politician came along who I thought/think was even more contemptible than Nixon came along, while I found him politically anathema to me, it didn’t eat at me the same way Nixon did.

Life magazine, 1990

And a funny thing happened: I stopped hating Nixon. I saw the movie Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins, and found the guy more tragic than contemptible.

Moreover, I found that in retrospect, despite the war and the dirty tricks, there were some positives there. He formed the Environmental Protection Agency. He went to China; as a staunch anti-Communist, only he, not a liberal Democrat, could have pulled it off.

Moreover, and I did not remember this until after the death of Senator Edward Kennedy last month, one of Teddy’s great regrets was not accepting Nixon’s plan for HEALTH CARE, a fight that continues to this day in the United States.

I’ve deliberately have left out any discussion of how religion or spiritually has affected my feelings about hate, not because it’s not a factor, but because it was something that was already in process when all the faith stuff got infused into it.

So, Mr. Frog, sir, I leave it to you to decide if my reasons for not hating fall into one or more of your “hated” categories.

Note: Nixon pictures © Time Inc. For personal non-commercial use only

ROG

ROG

Laboring to Put Together A Coherent Blogpost

This blog post started innocently enough, just noticing how different the United States is than most other places. Many countries have Labor Day in May, but we have it in September because of an event in our history; fair enough.

But what’s with our resistance to the metric system? And don’t use medicine or track as examples; they were more or less required for international competition. You COULD mention the ubiquitous two-liter bottle, but what else has cut through?

I asked Nik, an expat from the US living in New Zealand the difference between the two countries. On the plus side for the US: “friendliness (I find Americans, while they can be loud, are more open-hearted sometimes).”

I found this troubling, because I’m finding Americans a pretty unfriendly lot sometimes, biting off a finger, shouting down a lady in a wheelchair, pulling their kids out of school because the President’s going to “indoctrinate” them, etc., etc. One guy heckling the wheelchair-bound woman said he did so because he didn’t want to hear her opinion on health care. I can only wonder what he thought his own position was; the “facts”?

Letters of comments have gone from expressing differences of opinion to becoming bile-infused rants. Jon Stewart joked recently that we used to feel apologetic to the rest of the world for our President. And now it’s our President who must apologize for us.

Oh, sure, the crude behavior doesn’t represent everyone. But I can’t help but wonder how we went from being a country that would watch Jerry Springer on TV to one that has brought Springer-Show tactics to the public debate. Perhaps race is part of it, and that GQ got it right.

WAIT a minute…GQ?

Well, specifically Jim Nelson’s editor page comment: Remember a long, long time ago – it almost seems like a recession and a half ago – when Barack Obama first came (via Kenya, of course) to power? Remember how certain hope-doped commentators predicted that his election would finally allow Americans to have a frank discussion about race?

Something different and less hope-inducing has happened. His presidency has allowed us to talk around race, to talk about it constantly and subliminal, without ever truly discussing it. And by doing so, we’re proving how much distance we have to grow up.

And my favorite:

“Everywhere you look, people keep making bats***-crazy comments about race and ethnicity, stream-of-consciousness-style, as if the election had unleashed some Freudian anxiety in the cultural air.”

And how did #uknowurblackwhen become the leading trend on Twitter yesterday? For every interesting note, there were five dreadful ones. Well, as far as I know; I’d read 20 and 75 more would be waiting.

Again, I know it isn’t everyone – I’d vote for the Roberto Clemente award for MLB community-minded players if it didn’t take so long to load – but I get the feeling that the fall will be as disheartening as August was.

ROG

ROG

Mistakes Were Made


I was at our choir party Thursday night with my wife and daughter. We had a lovely time. Our organist showed Lydia how the organ worked. But somehow one of our co-pastors asked me about a television show called “My Mother, the Car.” Seems that one of them claimed that the show existed, while the other co-pastor said that it couldn’t possibly be so. Even when I noted that it starred Jerry Van Dyke and the voice of Ann Sothern (why was THAT sticking in my brain?), I was not believed. It was not until three others acknowledged that they too saw remembered the program that the first co-pastor and I were vindicated.

But I had forgotten until afterwards that not only did friend Fred Hembeck write about the show a few months ago, he found a link to five episodes, including the first one.

Fred wrote: Look, “Bewitched”, “I Dream Of Jeanie”, “My Favorite Martian”, and “Mr. Ed” were all of the same era as “My Mother The Car”, and all shared a central conceit with it–one character, and one character only, is aware of a magical totem right smack dab in the middle of things. A witch. A genie.A martian. A talking horse. All were big hits. All were just as fanciful as having your dead mother come back, reincarnated, as a talking car, maybe, but far more manageable, storywise. Viewers found the notion of a pair of attractive young women performing magical tricks, a faux uncle who’s really a man from outer space, and even a horse that talks, far easier to believe. For one thing, each of them could casually interact with those in the cast unaware of their special abilities, even the horse. But David Crabtree’s (Jerry Van Dyke) mother? There wasn’t much she (the voice of early sitcom icon Ann Sothern) could do but squawk at her son via the radio when he–and he alone–was sitting in the car. Sorta limited the plot possibilities…

Well maybe that was the problem but I think it was something more Oedipal: Dave Crabtree was riding INSIDE of his mother. Freud would have had a field day.And check out the lyrics:
Everybody knows in a second life, we all come back sooner or later.
As anything from a pussycat to a man eating alligator.
Well you all may think my story, is more fiction than it’s fact.
But believe it or not my mother dear decided she’d come back.

As a car…
She’s my very own guiding star.
A 1928 Porter.
That’s my mother dear.
‘Cause she helps me through everything I do
And I’m so glad she’s near.

My Mother the Car.
My Mother the Car.

Hadn’t really thought about it until the other day, but it has a real ick factor. Maybe that’s why TV Guide in 2002 named the 1965-66 program the second-worst TV show ever, behind only Jerry Springer Show.
***
So I’m reading my 2009 World Almanac – yeah, I’ve been known to do that from time to time – and I came across a listing of Cabinet officers. Cabinet secretaries are interesting in that sometimes they either go onto higher office (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, JQ Adams, Hoover to the Presidency; John Marshall and Roger B. Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court) or at least become well-known to this day (Daniel Webster, Alexander Hamilton).

I get to page 443 and the list of Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development (created in September 1965); they are listed:
LBJ- Robert Weaver, WA, 1966
LBJ- Robert C. Wood, MA 1969
Nixon- George W. Romney, MI, 1969
Nixon- James T. Lynn, OH, 1973
Ford- James T. Lynn, OH, 1974
Ford-Carla Anderson Hills, DC, 1975
and so forth

Then I look at the Secretaries of Transportation
LBJ- Robert Weaver, FL, 1966
Nixon- Robert C. Wood, MA 1969
Nixon- George W. Romney, CA, 1973
Ford- James T. Lynn, CA, 1974
Ford- James T. Lynn, PA, 1975
Carter-Carla Anderson Hills, WA, 1975
and so forth

The same held true for the Secretaries of Energy; Health, Education, and Welfare; Health and Human Services; Education; Veterans Affairs; and Homeland Security. The first person listed was always Robert Weaver, followed by Robert Wood. Now the President appointing always changed as was the year sworn in and home state. Weaver was appointed from VA for Energy in 1977 by Carter, for HEW from TX in 1953 by Eisenhower, from HHS from DC in 1979 by Carer, and so forth. And Wood and the other up to a dozen names followed. So it was ONLY the names that are wrong; the years, the appointing Presidents, the home states were all correct.

I found it quite bizarre.
ROG

ROG
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial