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.

iTunes Meme

The meme: the last vestige of the desperate blogger. Thom wrote about the number of cuts from groups and solo artists that populate his iPod. well, I don’t have one, but I do have iTunes, so I thought I’d list those folks.

Unlike Thom, most, though not all, of mine are culled from albums. But it’s not a particular reflection of my whole collection. For instance, the Beatles, who I own extensively, only have 14 cuts, all from the Help! album. Sometimes I remember to add songs and sometimes not. Apparently I have more recently, since most of the artists represented have birthdays in the past five months. So this list might look quite different in a few months. Links are to videos of songs I like and I own.
1. Johnny Cash (Feb)- 153. I do love John R.
1. James Taylor (Mar)-153.
3. Frank Sinatra (Dec)-114. A couple box sets
4. R.E.M. (Michael Stipe: Jan)-110.
5. Burning Spear-101. This was a group that got downloaded from someone else’s list.
6. Aretha Franklin (Mar)-98. Largely from a box set
7. Temptations-95 (Eddie Kendrick: Dec; David Ruffin-Jan; Dennis Edwards: Feb)
8. Heptones-87. Likewise from someone else’s roster.
8. Elton John (Mar)-87. Same birthday as Aretha, BTW.
10. Marvin Gaye (Apr)-80. He also died in April, a day shy of his 40th birthday.
10. George Harrison (Feb)-80.
12. Eric Clapton (Mar)-79.
13. Supremes (Diana Ross, Mary Wilson: both Mar)-76
14. Neville Brothers (Aaron: Jan)-73.
15. Elvis Presley (Jan)-72.
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I mowed the lawn for the first time this season yesterday. When you have a push mower, timing is everything. The mower doesn’t work well on dewy mornings and I don’t do well in the heat of the day. So mowing at 6 or 7 pm is optimal, if it hasn’t rained.

I always listen to music when I mow. Today it was Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage. The title track also appears as the last track of a disc on a six-CD set Say It Loud, which covers 100 years of black music. On the compilation, the Hancock cut sticks and never gets past 4 minutes of the 7 minute song. When I listen to the Hancock album, I expect the same result, but of course it plays fine.
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Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program. Yes, THAT Charles Mingus, no joke.

ROG

ROG

The Lydster, Part 61: What She Watches (which means I watch too)

Lydia’s pediatrician has a real antipathy about children watching television or videos. While most guidelines suggest avoiding kids watching TV before the age of two, we waited until she was three.

Most of the first programs were actually videos – programs on something called VHS – which we acquired from my now-18-year-old niece, all circa 1994. Surprisingly, given the fact that Alex was obsessed with him in the day, there was only one Barney video. (I remember specifically being chastised by my parents for NOT buying her a Barney thing in the day; it wasn’t my antipathy for Barney, it was “What do you buy someone who seems to have everything already?” It’d be like buying me Beatles stuff until they put out new product.)

I DO have antipathy for this Barney DVD I got from my in-laws, a “live-action” game show with a studio audience of kids and adults. My wife said that I might applaud if I were in the audience; maybe, but I just don’t want to SEE grown-ups getting all excited about the antics of a purple dinosaur.

Another batch of videos features “the Magic School Bus.” Voiced by Lily Tomlin as The Frizz, and occasionally Malcolm Jamal-Warner in the ending segment, they were so successful with Lydia that she now has over a dozen books and a DVD.

Not much else really stuck, other than Arthur, the aardvark, though she was briefly enamored with this funky 15-minute (in English, followed by the same in Spanish) home safety tape with the catchy tune, “Code Red Rover, grown-up come over.”

Ultimately she found there were shows on TV for her. Her first great love was Little Bear, based on the Maurice Sendak-drawn books from a half-century ago. She was onto Little Bear, and Emily, her doll Lucy, Cat, Duck, Hen, Owl, Mother Bear and Father Bear every day for about eight months until we were seeing the same episodes for the third time. Still we read the books, which are direct sources for some of the episodes.

Lydia’s current favorite TV show is Franklin, which again has but one character with a name other than Bear, Fox, Skunk, Mr. and Mrs. Turtle and so on. She likes calling Franklin Frank; she thinks this is wildly hysterical. The theme song is by Bruce Cockburn of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (“some [s.o.b.] would die”) fame.; actually have a half dozen Cockburn LPs.

But she has branched out:
Angelina Ballerina: on once a week, has fueled her need to dance. Not to take lessons, mind you, just to twirl in front of the set.
Ni-Hao, Kai-lan, Blue’s Clues: doesn’t actually watch unless it’s on in real time.
Jack’s Big Music Show: a program I’d almost watch without her.
Dora the Explorer: she watches relatively little of this, but she has Dora pajamas, Dora Band-Aids, several Dora books and she got a Dora DVD for her birthday. Why does she, and her cousin Diego, seem to YELL all the time. “WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE STORY?” And they are so damn earnest, too.

Her upcoming favorite is the Wonder Pets. a hamster, a turtle and duck get in their flyboat and save other animals. There’s always a costume change relevant to the location and some difficulty before they get going that turns out to be useful later on.

It was my wife, though, who noted the operatic stylings of the introductory piece:

Imagine if you can that, instead of Linny, it is a basso profundo singing: “The phone, the phone is ringing.” That octave descent alone would be stunning. Then a tenor, not Tuck, singing the second, a non-lisping contralto, rather than Ming-Ming, on the third. There’s a certain drama in the presentation.

The rest of the music is tied to the situation or the geography. Recently, WP saved the Rat Pack (three rats, one named Blue Eyes), a fiddler crab on the roof and a bluesy Louisiana bullfrog. This is award-winning stuff against stiff competition.

I figure that I’d better record this stuff now before she heads for school, for while I think I’ll “always remember”, chances are that I won’t. ROG

ROG

Being Alone QUESTION

My wife has this book called “The Daily Spark: 180 easy-to-use lessons and class activities!” They are journal writing warm-up activities. I was leafing through it when I came to an entry called “All Alone”:

“Mark Twain once said, ‘The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with oneself.’
“What do you think he meant by this? Does this idea apply to your own life?
Conclude your entry by explaining how you feel about being alone. Do you dread it, or do you enjoy having time to yourself?”

I think people have always thought of me as a social being. Yet, even as a child, I always enjoyed the comfort of my own room. It wasn’t the room itself, which was tiny. It was what the room represented, which was (relative) solitude. I’d read there, or create imaginary baseball games or look at my postage stamp and coin collections – where IS my postage stamp collection anyway?

I suspect that some of the difficulty I’ve had in relationships in the past is that my desire for alone time was perceived as some sort of rejection of the other.

These days, I try very hard to take off one day per month, usually a Monday. I can play racquetball a little longer than usual. Then I’ll come home, eat, read, watch TV, blog, whatever I want, in my own house. It’s the only time I can be in my own home by myself, especially since the child arrived. I used to go to the movies to see a film my wife didn’t want to see, but lately the desire for that has been outweighed by other needs. if it’s nice, though, I might trek to a park and read there for a while, if it’s quiet.

So do you have an inner Greta Garbo or an outer Ashton Kutcher?

ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: I Love You, Man

Here’s something that’s true; I can be a bit of a movie snob. I tend to go to movies that I expect to be good. Oscar-nominated films, films acclaimed at a film festival, and so on. Every once in a while – a GREAT while, given the more limited opportunities – I’ll go to see more popular fare.

Carol’s and my first night in Saratoga last week, we went to the Wilton Mall. I’d never been to the Wilton Mall before; it was mallish. Mallesque? One of the presents we got from one of my brothers-in-law for Christmas was a packet of tickets to any Regal Theater. This turned out to be our first opportunity to use them.

We had gotten there about 20 minutes before the film was scheduled to start, and bought popcorn. This was far inferior to the great popcorn I’m used to from the Spectrum Theatre in Albany. We were “entertained” by a package of “behind the scenes” pieces – one was for “Angels and Demons” the sequel to The da Vinci Code and again starring Tom Hanks. The segment was peppered with commercials: food commercials, car commercials, commercials for the U.S. Army.

Then it was the appointed moment. Time for…previews, the standard fare.

O.K., FINALLY, the actual movie. We’d heard some decent comments about the new evidently raunchy comedy I Love You, Man. It stars Paul Rudd, who we liked from The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, as a man named Peter, a real estate guy who early on becomes engaged to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones from Parks and Recreation, and The Office). The problem is that he doesn’t have any male friends, a real issue for Zooey’s friends.

Paul gets advice from his gay brother (Andy Samburg from Saturday Night Live) on how to meet straight men. But it is on his own that he meets Sydney (Jason Segel), a usually honest fellow – sometimes too much so, and they hit it off over a shared passion.

A movie like I Love You, Man can either work or not, depending on the writing and acting. I’m disinclined to over analyze it, except that it was less coarse than the last two Rudd movies I saw.

The verdict: while it has its flaws, including supporting characters that arrive but seem to get lost along the way and a joke or two that go on too long, I laughed, quite a bit actually. Ultimately, that’s all I really want in a comedy. My favorite joke, not a big ha-ha, but a knowing one took about an hour to set up. It’s a rather simple premise, but it worked for my wife and me, mostly because of the performances of Rudd and Segel.
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Not used in the movie, thank goodness, was the term bromance, though the commentator here used it to describe this movie. I happen to dislike the term intensely, though I can’t explain exactly why. Maybe because it seems want to have it both ways: a teasing, somewhat homophobic way to show show how non-homophobic straight guys can be. ROG

ROG
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