February 2017 - Page 5 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

MOVIE REVIEW: 20th Century Women

I feel as though, in real life, I actually had met characters like these once upon a time.,

If I were to say that 20th Century Women was a quirky film, which it is, that wouldn’t tell you much. So I’ll you what the woman sitting in front of me at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany told me when the lights came up: “You must really have liked the movie. You laughed a lot.” And I did.

The storyline is about a 55-year-old divorced woman named Dorothea (Annette Bening) trying to raise her 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and keep the boardinghouse she runs from falling apart in 1979 Santa Barbara, California. One tenant, the young photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), is dealing with a potentially devastating medical crisis, while another, the repairman William (Billy Crudup) is seemingly enigmatic to his landlady. Julie (Elle Fanning), the 17-year-old who lives down the road, is at this home more than her own.

While these are specific people, I feel as though, in real life, I actually had met characters like these once upon a time, or maybe I WAS a character like one or more of these, especially in that era. The film meanders at times, but the actors are universally solid, especially the Bening character, who tries to act as though she’s got it all together, unfazed, understanding almost to a fault.

Some stupid review in the National Review complains: “20th Century Women is really a politically correct emotional biography of that 21st-century anomaly: a non-gender-specific male.” In fact, Mike Mills, the writer-director who had made the lovely movie Beginners, was creating a film that was a reflection of his own growing up in a female-dominated household, as he noted on Charlie Rose in December 2016.

Some movies I can say, “I’m sure you’ll like it,” or not. This film I’m not that sure about for you, but I’m glad I went.

US: adopt rail transportation

Trains have inspired some of the finest music in the world.

The illustrious bard Jaquandor gripes:

What IS it with this country’s refusal to adopt rail as a serious method of transportation?

There’s a sign, less than two blocks from my house, that commemorates the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad that ran between Albany and Schenectady, one of the first in the nation. It’s clear that the transcontinental railroad created cohesion for the United States.

I’ve made it quite clear that I find passenger rail travel to be the only really civilized form of transportation. So why doesn’t the US embrace it more?

1) Freedom. The freedom of the open road, the myth sold by the car dealers decades ago, and now a part of the fabric of the self-definition of the country. EUROPEANS use trains and the metric system and socialized medicine, but that’s not what WE do. And it IS a big country.

2) Liberals. Most of the greatest concentration of potential train use, because of population patterns, is in the Northeast corridor from Boston to DC, and California. And do you know who lives there? LIBERALS, those arrogant prigs who fuss about energy conservation and don’t REALLY share American values. So screw ’em. We have the fix for the problems of some of the recent rail crashes, but we’re not going to spend money for THAT.

OK, that was exaggerated, but only slightly. There are also pockets of density in the eastern Midwest, and in parts of Texas suitable for rail transportation. Still, fixing the rails, usually shared by freight, and needing to defer to cargo, is considered “subsidizing” Amtrak. Fixing the roads is… oh, never mind, we don’t do that either.

And trains have inspired some of the finest music in the world. Here’s a list of 1000 songs. It’s MISSING at least two songs, both of which I own. One is Northern Bound Train by Pete Droge, which I’ve seen him perform. The other is Ridin’ the Rails by k.d. lang and Take 6, from the soundtrack to the movie Dick Tracy, a movie I’ve never seen.

Here are just a handful of my favorite train songs. Links to all.

500 Miles – Peter, Paul, and Mary
8:05 – Moby Grape
Big Train (from Memphis) – Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins

Casey Jones -Grateful Dead
Chattanooga Choo Choo – Glenn Miller
City of New Orleans – Steve Goodman

Engine Engine #9 – Roger Miller
Friendship Train – The Temptations
Hobo’s Lullabye – Emmylou Harris

Love Train -The O’Jays
Midnight Train to Georgia – Gladys Knight & The Pips
Northern Bound Train – Pete Droge

Ridin’ the Rails – k.d. lang and Take 6
Rock Island Line – Lead Belly

E is for the equator (ABC W)

The Earth’s diameter is wider at the Equator, creating an equatorial bulge.

Here’s something I actually had seldom thought about: what is the equator? Generally, it is “the intersection of the surface of a rotating sphere with the plane that is perpendicular to the sphere’s axis of rotation and midway between its poles.

“The latitude of the Earth’s equator is by definition 0° (zero degrees) of arc. In the cycle of Earth’s seasons, the plane of the equator passes through the Sun twice per year: at the March and September equinoxes. To an observer on the Earth, the Sun appears to travel North or South over [it]… at these times. Light rays from the center of the Sun are perpendicular to the surface of the Earth at the point of solar noon on the Equator.”

There are several countries that cross the imaginary line. Starting at the Prime Meridian and heading east:
In Africa: São Tomé and Príncipe, Gabon, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia
In Asia: Indonesia, several times, including Sumatra and Borneo
Oceania: Passing between Aranuka and Nonouti atolls, Kiribati (at 0°0′N 173°40′E)
In South America: Ecuador (of course!), Colombia, Brazil

Interestingly to me, Equatorial Guinea is NOT touched by the line. It gets as close as 3°45′N 8°47′E.

National Geographic provides more facts:

The Earth is widest at its Equator. The distance around the Earth at the Equator, its circumference, is 40,075 kilometers (24,901 miles).

The Earth’s diameter is also wider at the Equator, creating a phenomenon called an equatorial bulge… The Earth’s diameter at the Equator is about 12,756 kilometers (7,926 miles). At the poles, the diameter is about 12,714 kilometers (7,900 miles). The Earth’s equatorial bulge is about 43 kilometers (27 miles).

The equatorial bulge means that people standing at sea level near the poles are closer to the center of the Earth than people standing at sea level near the Equator. The equatorial bulge affects the ocean, too — sea levels are slightly higher in equatorial regions than near the poles.

The equatorial bulge is created by the Earth’s rotation.

The slightly weaker gravitational pull and momentum of the spinning Earth make equatorial regions ideal places for space launches. It takes an enormous amount of energy to launch a satellite or other spacecraft out of the Earth’s atmosphere. It takes less energy (rocket fuel) to launch in lower gravity.

Book review: Never A Dull Moment

Jimmy Page explained, “The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away.”

I received the David Hepworth book Never a Dull Moment – 1971: The Year That Rock Exploded two days before Christmas. I finished the 286-page book before New Years Day.

The premise is that the pop period ended with the Beatles signing essentially their divorce papers from each other on 31 December 1970. Hepworth, who turned 21 in 1971, says that year saw “an unrepeatable surge of musical creativity, technological innovation, naked ambition, and outrageous good fortune that combined to produce music that still crackles today.” The era of rock was born.

Sometimes, he would make references to other cultural events of the time that seemed random, but eventually, it would somehow connect. Hepworth used a few Britishisms that I did not initially pick up on, but I figured out most of them in context.

The book is arranged by month. The albums referred to in that period might have been recorded then, or released then, or the artist was on tour. And not all would become internationally famous. In March, Led Zeppelin was doing tours in small clubs, because as Jimmy Page explained, “The audiences were becoming bigger and bigger but moving further and further away.” Meanwhile, Nick Drake was well-regarded but lacked the stage charisma to become the success his talent might have suggested.

The May chapter details the Rolling Stones’ move to France. “Sex and drugs and rock n’ roll” were never more true. The year Mick Jagger got married did not seem to alter his omnivorous appetites. Meanwhile, Carly Simon was linked romantically to Cat Stevens and others. Later chapters touch on unlikely pairings, such as Leonard Cohen sleeping with Janis Joplin, though he later regretted writing a song about it.

Many things we now take for granted were born in this era. The benefit concert was born with George Harrison’s efforts on behalf of the people in Bangladesh. Since it had never been done before, certainly on that massive scale, mistakes were made, and George became a resource for those planning similar ventures.

Greatest hits albums became much more lucrative, from the Stones and the Who, for instance, presaging the unlikely resurgence of the Beach Boys’ catalog a couple of years later.

I’d write more, but I’ve decided instead to write about some of the albums of the period, and my reaction to them, once a month – I’m already behind!

If you enjoy the albums of the period, and it’s likely that you probably do, even if you were born years after ’71, you’ll enjoy Never A Dull Moment, which has been positively reviewed everywhere I checked, after reading it, of course. I lived through the period and I learned quite a bit.

Music Throwback Saturday: Lonely People

“It was the channel five sign-off, featuring NASA Apollo Eleven astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing about on the moon.”

While I was in Charlotte, NC in early 1977, I was unemployed. I worked at the parents’ flea market several hours a week, but nothing else.

Charlotte was a TERRIBLE city to get around then if you didn’t have a car. It was what my father called a “big old country town”, growing by leaps and bounds. North Carolina law allowed a core city to annex any adjacent unincorporated territory, as long as the city provided fire, police, and water service. So parts of the city proper were virtually rural.

The bus system, such as it was, sucked, to use a word my wife hates. Everything went through the main intersection of Trade and Tryon. It was like going from Paris, France to Brussels, Belgium via London, England.

I watched television, a lot. The TV miniseries Roots was on, and I watched it all except for a half-hour we missed getting home from the flea market.

Back in those days, TV stations actually signed off the air at midnight or one a.m. They usually played the national anthem, often and overplayed one in which tape sounded distorted.

But on the cable in Charlotte, I could pick up WTTG, Metro Media channel 5, out of Washington, DC. The outro was a music video produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and “made available in 1972 to any television station who wanted it.”

Someone on Reddit wrote: “As a boy growing up in Washington D.C. I would purposefully stay awake for the sign-off on which occurred at midnight every night. If I stayed up late I could escape hopelessness late at night by watching what was for me a lullaby of hope and peace possible.

“It was the channel five sign-off, featuring NASA Apollo Eleven astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing about on the moon. And the song Lonely People by the band America playing during the film clips. This showed me a reality on the other side of hopelessness and so reminded me there is hope for me, and perhaps for everyone.”

Actually, it made me a bit melancholy: I was one of the Lonely People, who thought that life had passed me by. But I enjoyed the alternative to the Star-Spangled Banner.

WATCH/LISTEN to Lonely People – America

But it’s actually the version with the voice-over tag (also on the Reddit version) that I recall.

Incidentally, the piano “solo” is played together by America’s Gerry Beckley, and the song’s producer, the legendary, late George Martin.