The Lydster, Part 96: Happy natal day

This year, it’s Pops or Popsy. Popsy?

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: when it comes to parenting, I have no idea what I’m doing, save for my basic intellect and common sense. Still, I guess The Daughter is turning out all right.

Lydia is at least four and a half feet tall. Ballet moves are created in our living room each week after her class. While she is still shy around grownups she doesn’t know, she’s quite good with children unknown to her. I believe she’s rather good at math, and she seems to enjoy spelling. The things she can do physically on the playground I could never do at her age; she is quite physically strong. She loves doing arts and crafts and singing. Her teacher knows she’s smart but wants her to raise her hand with the answer more often.

Last year, she called me Daddy, or Dad. This year, it’s Pops or Popsy. Popsy? We watched the second video here, and we got to pretend that we were on the roller coaster together.

I read I Did These Things as a Kid, But My Kids Won’t. Without waxing nostalgic, I have to think that parents, as a whole, are more protective these days, and I’m in their number. “Where IS is the line drawn between good protection (seat belts and not letting your kids drink bleach) and being overprotective to where it is stifling for them?” I think about this sometimes. FreeRangeKids is a fascinating read if you are interested in that sort of discussion, but I’M not there yet.

She’s still in the “hug daddy” stage; she hasn’t tired of me yet. And she’ll even tell me she loves me, unbidden. Suffice it to say, I tell her the same.
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A couple of songs that have caught her attention recently:
Istanbul (Not Constantinople) by They Might Be Giants
And this song, which she likes because of the instrumentation; she’s not on her own yet!

Aretha, QoS, is 70

RESPECT by QoS is one of the five greatest cover songs EVER.

When Aretha Franklin burst onto the music scene in 1967, I suspect many people thought she was an overnight success. In fact, she had been signed by Columbia Records back in 1961, but because of the songs she was given to sing (“Rock-a-bye My Baby With A Dixie Melody”?), the producers she had, and/or the label’s promotion, she was unable to break through.

It wasn’t until she moved over to Atlantic Records, and recorded with the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section, that her true gift came to fruition. And when her period at Atlantic came to an end, changing over to Arista Records in the early 1980s, had a few more hits.

Most of my favorites are from the Atlantic period, though one was from the Columbia era, and one was something else altogether.  Links to each song.

12. Spanish Harlem (#2 in 1971) – this is such a great reworking. And I love the word “BLLACK.”

11. You’re All I Need To Get By (#19 in 1971). The RESPECT reprise is great. (Couldn’t find a studio version; this is LIVE from 1978.)

10. Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves (#18 in 1985). With the Eurythmics. Love Annie Lennox and Aretha sharing phrases.

9. I Say a Little Prayer (#10 in 1968). Reworks the Bacharach-David tune to something playfully funky.

8. Eleanor Rigby (#17 in 1969). The first great thing – she tells it in the first person: “I’m Eleanor Rigby.” Secondly, the phraseology is SO not dependent on the original.

7. Rock Steady (#9 in 1971). Love the organ intro. “What it is, what it is, what it is.”

6. Chain Of Fools (#2 in 1968). The bridge is my favorite section.

5. Ain’t No Way (#16 in 1968). Heartfelt ballad with a lovely solo soprano by Cissy Houston, Whitney’s mom.

4. (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone (#5 in 1968). When I used to listen to AM radio in the day, the DJs would often talk over the musical intro, which irritated me greatly. No talking over THIS intro, which was one chord.

3. (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (#8 in 1967). The second appearance of this song in this blog in less than two months – previously in my Carole King post.

2. Sweet Bitter Love (1966). This title cut of a Columbia album was written by Van McCoy, who was better known for The Hustle a decade later. I first heard this song on a Columbia compilation album, Our Best To You: Today’s Great Hits… Today’s Great Stars, and loved it instantly. In the right (wrong?) frame of mind, it’ll make me cry.

1. Respect (#1 in 1967). Otis Redding, the original writer/performer of this song, famously said that Aretha “done stole [that song] from me,” making it her own. It became an anthem. One of the five greatest cover versions EVER.

Old Fogey Music QUESTION

It’s not that I don’t buy ANY new music, it’s that I am more likely to buy tried and true artists.

I’m trying to figure out that moment when I stopped following current music.

Surely, I remember the start was when I was maybe three, in the 1950s. But the coming of age music was in the 1960s, with the Beatles and Motown, et al, and later Cream and Aretha, and the like. Still active in the singer-songwriter 1970s, and revived in the early 1980s with the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Police, and so forth.

Was it the 1990s when I didn’t “get” Nirvana initially?

No, I actually eventually purchased some Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And, even as my music consumption diminished, MTV was still actually playing music videos, so that I was vaguely aware of the hit songs. But now? I look at the charts and don’t even recognize most of the names, let alone the songs.

It’s not that I don’t buy ANY new music, it’s that I am more likely to buy tried and true artists. My favorite album last year? By Paul Simon. The albums I’m most looking forward to right now? By Bonnie Raitt (her first on her own label) and Leonard Cohen. Oh, and that album of Bob Dylan covers. Got Bruce Springsteen for my birthday, and picked up Lyle Lovett and Paul McCartney with a gift card.

I’ve purchased very few albums by artists whose recording career started in the 21st Century, and most of those tend to be singers such as Corrine Bailey Rae or Adele. There may be an outlier, such as Arcade Fire, but it is the exception.

If you are of a certain age, are you still buying new music, and if so, is it from newer artists or ones you’ve grown up with?

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

Thanks to Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, we now know that the progress that has justified the war during the Obama years is largely illusory.

Amy, the lovely singer/poet from Sharp Little Pencil, asked a few questions, only one of which I will address presently:

Do you think we should pull out of Afghanistan immediately to avoid engaging Iran if/when Israel sends the bombs flying?

Here’s the conundrum: one can appreciate the sacrifice that US military personnel make every day, and still have no idea what we’re fighting for in Afghanistan.

Joe Conason explains:
What keeps the United States engaged is a plausible concern that our departure will permit the Taliban to claim victory, and that our troops are making progress, slow but measurable, in recapturing territory from the enemy. There is no longer any illusion among Pentagon leaders or in the White House that foreign forces can permanently extirpate the Taliban, desirable as that would be. Instead, the real policy for the past few years, whether troops levels rise or fall, is to establish a basis for reconciliation between Kabul and its armed opponents, and to leave the Afghans prepared to defend themselves from extremism.

Thanks to Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, however, we now know that the progress that has justified the war during the Obama years is largely illusory. Generals like David Petraeus told the president and Congress that things are going well, but after spending a year on the ground, Davis discovered the opposite — and with great courage revealed his findings. (Watch this interview with Davis on PBS.)

I’m just not seeing a way out. After the Marines urinating on dead enemy combatants, then the Koran burning, which led to six American soldiers being killed, and then the massacre of 16 civilians – all revealed in the first ten weeks of 2012, no less – and I just find the situation all rather hopeless.

Moreover, as Ed Koch (!) points out, “Why do we remain when doing so causes the Afghan people to hate us more with the passing of each day, calling us occupiers, infidels, and murderers? The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is thought to be corrupt by many American observers.”

Can’t we declare victory and go home?

As for Iran, we can get sucked into a war there whether or not we are still engaged in Afghanistan. We’ll still have plenty of force in the region. I pray, literally, that we find a non-military way to deal with Iran. BTW, there is plenty of opposition in the Israeli Knesset to their country’s sabre rattling. I don’t think that it is inevitable, at least in the near term, that Israel will bomb Iran when it seems to have selective assassination in its arsenal.

Cartoon from The Bad Chemicals.com. Used by permission.

A Question of Murder

We have video games, which are as theoretically violent as the drones our government uses for real.

Chris Honeycutt, who interviewed me for the NYADP Journal, noted I wrote about Into the Abyss, about homicide and the death penalty, notes:

That’s the end I started from on the anti-death penalty work. I was more interested in crime and killers than just about anything else. Particularly their psychology: everybody covets. Everybody gets angry. Everybody has moments of blind rage. But some people are missing that fundamental “wall” in their mind that says “Don’t physically hurt someone.”

It’s lead me to other questions: if a man can hit someone out of rage, not in a sporting way or in a fight but just out of nowhere slug someone, is that on the continuum?

What about Matthew Perry, who apparently killed three people because he wanted a car? We’ve all wanted things; what drives someone to kill to take it?

On the other hand, Charles Manson at his trial brought up that in reality, he was no worse than the generals leading the war in Vietnam. He never raised a gun, just gave an order. Is the government that different when it says “Wow, I really want that oil…”?

I don’t have any answers to any of it and I’ve studied it quite a bit.

So I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts.

I hadn’t considered it until now, but, early on, most of the people I had heard of who was murdered, I had NO idea who the murderers were. Some you may have heard of: Emmett Till, the four girls in a Birmingham church, the three civil rights workers in Mississippi.

But others perhaps not: William Moore of Binghamton, NY, the namesake of the Congress of Racial Equality chapter in my hometown – William L. Moore chapter of CORE, to which my father belonged. And stuck in my mind, Viola Liuzzo, described as a “Detroit housewife”. I remember being specifically surprised by her death in 1965. I didn’t know the code in the segregated South would allow them to murder a white woman.

As for the murderers I did know about, I followed them with zeal. When excerpts of the Warren Commission Report, about the JFK assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald, came out in the local newspaper, I clipped the articles out and put them in a binder, which I may still have in the attic.

Generally, though, I was more interested in the mass murders. Charles Whitman, as I noted, really terrified me. I was also bewildered by Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Stranger, and by Richard Speck, killer of eight student nurses in Chicago. (Sidebar: the Simon & Garfunkel song, “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News” incorrectly notes nine dead student nurses; in fact, the ninth nurse hid under a bed and survived.)

After that, only certain cases really caught my attention: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Timothy McVeigh, for three. I even watched the TV movie about Bundy, starring Mark Harmon. There just became too many of the mass murderers; the guy who killed his family while dressed as Santa Claus in the past year or two – couldn’t name him. The difference is that, in the early days, I could assume that these people were just pathological or crazy; now, they seem too frequent to write off so cavalierly.

So, in answer to your question, yes, I think anger and rage are on the continuum of violence. And it seems that there just is more rage out there, not just on the road and on the job, but at things such as kids’ sporting events. It’s tied to an odd sense of “fairness”; it’s not “fair” that my kid isn’t playing? It seems that the immediate gratification of computers and the like may have made us way too impatient when they take more than a few seconds, yet information a decade or two earlier would have taken several minutes or perhaps several hours to find.

Who would kill for a car or a pair of sneakers or because someone dropped a pass in a cricket match? Is it an odd sense of entitlement? Perhaps. There have always been pathological folks; In Cold Blood was written a half-century ago.

I do think war plays into it. We in the US have been fighting the “war on terror” for over a decade, with no end in sight. We have video games, which are as theoretically violent as the drones our government uses for real; I wonder if the lines get blurred for some. Of course, we have often seen the increased violence of those in the war zone – from William Calley at My Lai, VietNam to a soldier in Afghanistan ON HIS FOURTH TOUR OF DUTY killing civilian women and children in their sleep. The violence comes home; see the number of suicides, homicides and addictions in our returning vets. The ones giving the orders have a huge responsibility. That’s why I find chicken hawks, those who would offer up American soldiers for our next folly, when they’ve never served themselves, to be generally contemptible.

But “the state” also promulgates violence on the homefront with overreaction to protest that, we are constantly told, is what the folks abroad, ironically, are fighting to let us do. Of course, there has long been the state-sponsored terror of people, even their own nationals. Yet it’s always easier, it seems, to somehow make people “the other” by ethnicity or religion; you can’t underestimate the impact of the tribe.

So my short answer: I don’t really have any answers either.

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