Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

Mom was about everyone else

This is my fifth Mother’s Day without my mom.

trudy greenAs I have mentioned, my mother had a miscarriage in April 1951, I believe in the second trimester; it would have been a boy.

When Mom told the story to me, or to me and one or both of my sisters – she tended to tell her stories more than once – it was in context of her explaining why my father was at arm’s length when I was born two years later: he was afraid I might die too.

But I don’t ever recall her mentioning how SHE felt about what I imagine must have been an incredibly emotional incident.

Now that I think on it, she did that a lot, explaining my father’s feelings about his growing up, or being in the military, or dealing with being wronged. Or describing her mother’s eccentricities.

She did note that she was a lousy cook because she was spoiled from being an only child living with at least four adults (mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle) when growing up. But there was never much about how she FELT about it.

In fact, the only time I can remember her talking about her feelings took place well after my maternal grandfather’s father (who even I called Father) passed circa 1960. He was a very strict, church-going pious man, who she admired greatly. When the family discovered booze and girlie magazines hidden away, she was devastated; the underpinning of her values were a bit shaken.

I wondered how she processed things. When I asked her about her theology back in the 1980s, she declared that she should be a good person; this was a bit loosey-goosey to me. She then proclaimed she followed the Ten Commandments. OK – so what does “Thou shalt not kill” mean in terms of the death penalty or self-defense? In several conversations, she never really described this.

My mother WAS a very good person, very outwardly focused, caring about others. Everyone thought she was a very sweet woman. Sometimes, though, I wished her had been a bit more selfish, figuring out what was important to HER. Being squeezed between the dominant personas of her mother and her husband may not have left enough room for her SELF.

This is my fifth Mother’s Day without my mom, and it still makes me surprisingly sad.

Music Throwback Saturday: Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?

“Would you greet me or politely turn away
“Would there suddenly be sunshine on a cold and rainy day”

NomanHurricaneSmithIn late January 2015, my family attended I attended one of those Deconstructing the Beatles lectures by Scott Freiman, “a series of entertaining multimedia presentations about the composition and production techniques” of the band.

Previously, the Wife and I experienced Looking Through A Glass Onion: Deconstructing The White Album, which also covered the recording of ‘Hey Jude’. Freiman “discusses the studio techniques used by the Beatles during 1968 and share many examples of rare audio and video of the Beatles in action.”

More recently, the three of us saw YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! Deconstructing The Early Beatles, in which Freiman traces “the birth of the Beatles from Liverpool to Hamburg. The journey continues from their initial recording sessions at EMI for ‘Love Me Do’ through their first several groundbreaking singles.”

At some point, Freiman mentioned Norman Smith, the engineer on all of the EMI studio recordings by the Beatles through Rubber Soul. As an avid reader of liner notes, I did recognize the name. After he stopped working with the Beatles, he produced early albums for Pink Floyd.

What I did not know, until Freiman played a clip, was that Norman became a recording artist under the name Hurricane Smith. His big hit, which I remember quite well, was “Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?”, “which became a US No. 1 Cash Box and a Billboard Pop No. 3 hit. It reached No. 4 in the UK Singles Chart in the Northern Hemisphere winter of 1972-73, when he was nearly 50.

I always thought the song had a certain melancholy, both in the vocal and the lyrics:
“Would you greet me or politely turn away
“Would there suddenly be sunshine on a cold and rainy day”

Hurricane Smith died in 2008.

LISTEN to Oh, Babe, What Would You Say? HERE or HERE or HERE.

Writing your way to happiness

‘I don’t know what I think until I read what I wrote.’

writingTo paraphrase Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street (1987): “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that writing, for lack of a better word, is good.” From an article in the New York Times:

The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.

It may sound like self-help nonsense, but research suggests the effects are real.

The comments are, in their own way, more interesting than the piece.

Most thought the article was helpful, sometimes amazingly so. More than one correspondent begged folks not to read the personal journals of others. Others suggested the power of the handwritten piece, as opposed to those typed on a word processor.

The Story Alchemy person notes: “The psychologist Carl Jung developed a technique of integrating problematic contents from within the unconscious with consciousness. It’s called Active Imagination. Since this deals with an individual’s internal conflicts, and since story primarily deals with conflict and resolution, it makes sense that when we concentrate on our life story we start to resolve some of the issues that trouble us.”

One fellow wrote: “I write a blog about my experiences fighting oral cancer, and often, fighting the sleights of health and insurance administrators, fighting against marginalization as I can no longer speak, fighting against the infantilizing impulses people have toward terminal cancer patients.”

Someone noted: “An old quote with lots of truth: ‘I don’t know what I think until I read what I wrote.'” This is very true of me.

The Tony Awards 2015

Helen Mirran, Elisabeth Moss and Carey Mulligan are all up for leading actress in a play.

tony-award-nomineesWhen they recently announced the nominees for the Broadway awards named for one Antoinette Perry, to be broadcast on Sunday, June 7 on CBS-TV, I posted that I was one of maybe three dozen people who cared. The Tonys, in terms of the TV audience, is paltry, compared with the Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys It has only two things going for it:

1) It is the most entertaining program of the four
2) When these shows go on tour, and come to my neck of the woods – i.e., Proctors Theatre in nearby Schenectady, NY – I’ll be familiar with them. Not incidentally, I’m seeing Pippin in May and Kinky Boots in June at Proctors.

There was a lot of speculation about who would host this year’s ceremony. Neil Patrick Harris was a popular choice in 2009, 2011-2013, but he hosted the Oscars recently. Another possibility was Hugh Jackman, who had done a fine job in 2003-2005 and 2014.

If not them, speculation centered around James Corden, CBS’s late, late night host, or especially Stephen Colbert, who left his Comedy Central show about a half year ago, and won’t replace David Letterman for a couple more months.

The hosting choices turned out to be Kristin Chenoweth, a long-time Broadway actress nominated this year for Best Actress in a Musical for On the 20th Century; and Alan Cumming, probably best known for Cabaret on Broadway, and on The Good Wife on TV.

Here are the nominees. Some folks seem irritated that folks better known for TV or film hog the Tony spotlight. That’s true again this year, with Helen Mirren, Elisabeth Moss, and Carey Mulligan up for leading actress in a play, and Bradley Cooper and Bill Nighy as lead actors in a play.

I saw a couple of pieces on CBS Sunday Morning recently. One was about Cooper’s transition to the Elephant Man, and it was extraordinary. Mirran as Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience was quite funny.

From the New York Times:

The nominators were smitten with four musicals – “An American in Paris” and “Fun Home” (with 12 nominations each), “Something Rotten!” (10), and “The King & I” (9) – and ready to dispense with several others that received few nominations (“The Last Ship,” “Gigi”) or none at all (“Finding Neverland,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “It Shoulda Been You,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Side Show,” “Holler if Ya Hear Me”). The nominations are usually spread around a bit more widely: Is this year’s slate a reflection of the strength of those four musicals with the most nods, or the weakness of the rest of the pack?

I do have a rooting interest, and it’s for “Fun Home.” A coworker has a cousin in the cast. Here’s the whole soundtrack of the off-Broadway cast, prior to its Broadway opening.

And in year 11 of the blog

A new feature: Throwback Music Saturday, which will take some song by an artist I might not mention here otherwise.

post_toblogA little over a year ago, I promised/ threatened to cut back on the blog, once I hit the decade mark, and that seems to be the plan.

I’m going to repost some things I wrote in my first year when no one was reading my blog. But it hasn’t been as frequent yet as I thought it might be.

One post from May 2005 you’ll see in edited form in July 2015, and with a photo, which I didn’t know how to add at the beginning of my blogging career. Another piece, from August 2005 will show up, slightly altered, in August 2015.

I will do the linkage thing twice a month, instead of once. Heck, Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog do something similar once a week, so I shall be in good company. Besides, that list sometimes gets too long. Also, I’m less likely to post something on the 30th that I see on the 5th, because it might become more dated. In fact, the cumulative length of the two posts each month will surely be longer than the single EOM piece. I might include some of my favorite ABC Wednesday posts.

A new feature, which will last until it doesn’t: Throwback Music Saturday, which will take some song by an artist I might not mention here otherwise. Might be a one-hit wonder, or perhaps one of the few songs I like by that artist.

Back around my birthday, when I noted I need to do less, a couple of my friends asked if this would mean less blogging, and they weren’t limiting the discussion to this blog. In fact, those other blogs, the one at work, and the one for the Friends of the Albany Public Library, and the one for the NY State Data Center serve two functions: 1) to inform others, and, more importantly, 2) to create a place to put the information I might otherwise forget. They are tools against a failing memory.

And I might do some shorter posts, as this one started to be…

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