January 2018 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Lydster: the 11th-hour homework

In this matter, she is VERY much her own person.

The Daughter and I are alike in many ways. One of the way we are not is in the approach to homework.

When I had it, I tried to get it done as soon as possible, lest it hang over my head. Her attitude is more… relaxed.

Back on November 9, I asked her if she had any homework over the three-day Veterans Day holiday, but she gave me a rather enigmatic answer. It was HER homework, after all, so I was not going to worry about it.

Still, on Friday the 10th, I asked her again. This time, she said, “The marking period ends today.” And do you have homework? “Yes, social studies.”

Well, how was she going to get this assignment done THAT DAY, when there was no school? Why, she could send it via Google docs. So at 3 p.m., she starts answering four questions, about Reconstruction after the Civil War, robber barons of the second half of the 19th century, and a couple other topics.

She completed the assignments. “There, an hour and a half and I’m done.”

I should note that at least one of these pieces was given out back when she was ill the second week in October, and I know she had started working on it when she got back to school the following week. But it was only the impending end of the marking period that motivated her to actually FINISH the task.

It is very easy for a person to project him- or herself in a situation and say, “If it were me, I’d have been a nervous wreck.” But that’s the point; she isn’t me.

And she isn’t her mother either who, less often these days than before, would preach the value of having the homework put away the night before in the proper place. I’d be my inclination, too.

As I’ve indicated, in this matter, she is VERY much her own person.

In search of a blue tsunami

Just counting on disdain for the guy occasionally at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to translate into Congressional victory is a terrible plan.

My friend Carla, who I’ve known since high school choir, suggested:

I have an idea for your blog… or maybe just a title…. something like “keep it up Mr. President and the tsunami in November is going to be very, very blue”

What she means is that there could be be far more Democrats in Congress after the November 2018 election than after the 2016 vote.

My immediate reaction is that I’m not so sure that it’s true. Sure the Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has allowed drilling along all the coastline of the United States. And then excluded Florida because 1) Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, is probably running for the US Senate and Floridians HATE looking at off-shore rigs, like the rest of us do, and 2) Mar-a-lago, where Agent Orange likes to spend time, is in Florida.

And sure The Tweeter-in-Chief says stupid stuff on a wide swath of issues, from marijuana to immigration – I need to write on these more extensively – and I feel he makes the US a laughing stock all over the world.

He lies so much that I don’t think he’s even fully aware of it. When his trip to the UK was canceled, he blamed it on the Obama administration’s design of the new embassy even though it was arraigned by George W. Bush.

In short, he is an embarrassment.

Yet, if the stock market is up, and the tax bill cuts people’s taxes in the short term, and unemployment, which fell sharply under Obama, continues to do so, and stores such as Walmart raise wages (from $9 to $11 per hour, even as they slash jobs at Sam’s Club outlets), then some people will be satisfied with the status quo.

It is true that in the generic electoral ballots, Democrats are doing quite well. But one does not vote for a generic candidate, but for specific individuals. I’m pleased that over 30 Republicans have deigned not to run for reelection. An “open” seat is much easier to win rather than running against an incumbent.

Nevertheless, unless people go out and work these elections, getting people registered and then get out to vote, Democrats will not automatically win. It can happen, as it did in Alabama in December 2017, when Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for the US Senate seat that had not been blue in a quarter century.

Just counting on disdain for the guy occasionally at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to translate into Congressional victory is a terrible plan. But the blue tsunami IS possible.

Oh, I love this picture above. Read the story about its creation.

The “joys” of home ownership, kitchen edition

There are also the ongoing issues, such as the oven that you have to set higher than you want.

For all the advantages of home ownership, it does have its downside. In December 2017, for instance, we paid our property tax a month early in anticipation of the new US tax bill, which make itemizing our taxes less advantageous in subsequent years. Or so I understand, because of these things, MEGO (my eyes glaze over).

Our hot water boiler died in December. It actually lasted over 14 years, which, I gather, is a good long time, a decade being the usual functionality, or so I’m told. And the furnace ($4000) was also replaced in 2017.

The pipes to our kitchen sink are near an exterior wall of the house. When it gets really cold, as it did for several days in the past month or so. Our contractor discovered: 1) there’s a small hole under the sink that goes directly OUTSIDE, and 2) there is a heating coil on the piping that burned out. And that was a good thing, apparently, because, it could have shorted and BURNED DOWN THE WHOLE HOUSE. Yikes – not MEGO.

The dishwater has ceased to work. Oh, it still turns on and off. But the dishes don’t get clean because the water doesn’t drain properly. Or really, at all. I used a ShopVac to suck out the excess water a couple times, hoping that it would solve the problem; it did not.

Fortunately, my primary job as a child was Washing the Dishes, by hand of course. I didn’t really mind either because we used to get graded at school on “health” or some such. The space under my fingernails was always dirty UNLESS I had recently washed the dishes. Ah, soapy water.

So those are the immediate problems. There are also the ongoing issues, such as the oven that you have to set higher than you want, 350 if you want 325, 450 if you want 400, but if you set it TOO high, it doesn’t make it above 300.

Or our freezer door that hasn’t closed properly since 2007, when one of my relatives (not my wife or daughter), while I was putting away something in the lower refrigerator section, decided to get something in the upper freezer section AT THE SAME TIME. I didn’t notice, so I stood up and my head and shoulders rammed into the freezer door, making the seal less precise.

When we first moved into the house in 2000, redoing the kitchen, especially the ugly and dysfunctional cabinets, was a goal. We got a new floor, and the aforementioned stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator have all been purchased since 2002.

There’s no money to buy them ALL again, let alone the redo because we didn’t win the lottery. (Oh, yeah, we didn’t PLAY the lottery.) The dishwasher will probably be replaced first since it’s most chronic.

So, to you new homeowners – you know who you are – THESE are the joys of being the landed gentry.

C is for Carol Kaye of the Wrecking Crew

It was good money for gigs that might be Henry Mancini in the morning, the Beach Boys in the afternoon, and Ray Charles at night.

Carol Kaye was the bass player on a lot of songs you’ve heard, even if you don’t know her name. She was part of a group of about 25 or 30 studio musicians from the Los Angeles area who played on records by artists ranging from Andy Williams to Frank Zappa. They were mostly men whose services were constantly in demand in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Only after the fact were they dubbed The Wrecking Crew. Most of them you’ve never heard of, though a few became successful recording artists in their own right.

For Christmas 2017, I received a massive book, which I’ve already finished, called The Sound Explosion by Ken Sharp (2015), from which I’ll introduce you to Carol Kaye. She’d been a professional jazz guitarist from the age of 14, in 1949. She, like several others, could see that the rock and roll revolution was eating into her live gigs, but offered opportunities for studio work.

She first worked with Sam Cooke, who she had never heard of at the time. Initially, she played guitar on a number of sessions from 1957 to 1965, but by 1963, she had “tired of playing fills and rock stuff. When the bass player didn’t show up for a date, someone elected me to lay Fender bass. I liked the bass role better and everybody liked my sounds and creativity and started hiring me. By 1964, I was the number one call on electric bass.

“Most early ’60s dates had no music… Your brought your own pencil to write your own chord charts with the licks and phrases you made up on the spot so you’d remember them for the take. we were fast because we were experienced musicians with great ears we developed from years of experience…”

The most famous story I know is that she took the boring bass line for The Beat Goes On by Sonny and Cher and created the iconic hook that defines the song.

Was it tiring? “Yes, you drank a lot of coffee.” But it was good money for gigs that might be Henry Mancini in the morning, the Beach Boys in the afternoon, and Ray Charles at night. “We were not interested in becoming stars. We were part of the process… to make people into stars.

“If I had time between my 2-5 PM date and my 8-11 PM date, I’d always make it home to North Hollywood. I’d check up on my three kids,help them with their homework, and eat dinner with them and our live-in nanny/housekeeper, and maybe take a quick 15-minute nap. Then I was back to Hollywood for date number three.”

She said there was no racial prejudice among the musicians, although she and others would push reluctant record producers to hire more blacks when they knew they were right for the part.

Here’s the massive list of her credits. She played bass on 3/4s of the classic Beach Boys album Pet Sounds. Just a handful of Some of her guitar credits:
La Bamba – Ritchie Valens
Summertime – Sam Cooke
Johnny Angel – Shelley Fabares
Unchained Melody AND You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling – Righteous Brothers
The In Crowd – Dobie Gray
Surfin’ USA – the Beach Boys (electric rhythm guitar, Billy Strange on solo lead)

Here’s a 70-minute Carol Kaye: Session Legend Interview

For ABC Wednesday

Movie review: The Post (Spielberg)

Jason Robards is a better Ben Bradlee than Hanks

After the family got to see The Post at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in January 2018, the Daughter asked, “What’s Watergate?” That’s because the end of the movie teases about yet another journalistic crusade for the Washington Post, running into federal governmental interference.

Except, the leads of the film realize, perhaps, more complicated. Editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) notes wistfully at one point that his close relationship with John F. Kennedy might have had him pulling a few punches.

Publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) is even more socially involved with the powerful. Her father, Eugene Meyer, had passed the paper down to her husband Philip Graham. When Philip committed suicide in August 1963, sordid matter only peripherally addressed in the film, Kay became titular head of the paper.

Quite telling is one scene in which the men start talking politics, and the women, including Kay, go off to chat about other things. She was good friends with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who supported her emotionally after Philip’s death.

The rival New York Times reported a blockbuster story about an extensive, confidential report written by Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) about the United States’ failed policy in the war in Vietnam. Moreover, officials such as McNamara KNEW it was likely an unwinnable conflict. The federal government got a judge to enjoin the Times from publishing more stories.

When the Washington paper, thanks to some sleuthing by Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk), gets access to the reports dubbed the Pentagon Papers, is the DC paper bound by the Times’ legal constraints? And how will this affect the financial negotiations that Kay Graham is involved with?

The Post is a good solid film, directed by Steven Spielberg. It is unfair, though inevitable, to compare it with the Watergate-era film All the President’s Men, but one does. Jason Robards is a better Ben Bradlee than Hanks, which I have read Tom acknowledged. And it wasn’t as taut as Spotlight, the movie about the Catholic priest scandal in Boston.

Ultimately, the biggest arc takes place with Kay Graham, and a lot of that is Streep. I also loved Odenkirk.

Still, I got a little misty-eyed with joy when Meg Greenfield (Carrie Coon) reads Supreme Justice Hugo Black’s opinion in the case. The movie has seemed very current, hitting on both the attack on the media and the role of women in the workplace. A must-see for a political junkie like me.