Roger O Green

Sunday Stealing: LEP Autumn

sharpening pencils

autumn meme The Sunday Stealing for today is LEP Autumn. LEP is the League of Extraordinary PenPals.

1. Do you decorate for Autumn?

There’s a pumpkin on our porch right now. The leaves aren’t swept, so that’s sort of decorative. One of our former next-door neighbors used to have banners for many occasions – Thanksgiving, St. Patrick’s Day, etc. I thought at the time that it was rather corny, but in retrospect, I liked it.

2. How often do you clean out your closets?

I don’t have a closet. When we bought the house, there was a closet in one of the spare bedrooms, but that space was converted into our daughter’s bedroom. (She subsequently moved to the other bedroom, which was larger.) So there’s an armoire in our bedroom for my shirts, etc. I hated it at first, but now I merely dislike it. And I’ve NEVER cleaned it out except when I pull a shirt out, and I decide (or more likely, my wife decides) it’s too worn.

3. When was the last time you planned a surprise for someone?

I used to do so regularly, but I can’t recall a recent time.

4. Are there foods you really don’t like?

Anchovies. Sardines. Most canned vegetables (spinach, beets…) Cucumbers. Watermelon. Any candy that has the faux flavor of watermelon or bananas, though I do like real bananas.

Diversity?

5. What is something you recently learned?

Charles Curtis, Vice-President under Herbert Hoover, was “the first Native American and first person with acknowledged non-European ancestry to reach either of the highest offices in the federal executive branch.”

6. Items you’re most likely to buy at a convenience store

Cough drops or Vitamin C drops, diet Pepsi.

7. Do you believe in the paranormal?

I don’t either believe it or not believe it. That’s a solid maybe, but I spend almost no time thinking about it.

Have you got good religion?

8. How would you describe your spirituality?

The idea of religion is quite appealing. But it’s too often ruined by its supposed believers. Some evangelicals called Jesus “liberal” and “weak, forgetting that Jesus hung out with pretty scuzzy people who heeded the call to follow Him. Others have mistaken Jesus for an ATM. No wonder Mahatma Gandhi famously noted: “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.” As a Christian, it alternately depresses and enrages me that some of my nominal fellow followers make it difficult/impossible for others to embrace the faith.

And I won’t even get into talking about the heretics of other faiths because it’s not my area of expertise.

9. Do you make plans far in advance?

I HATE doing things at the last minute. But FAR in advance? Aside from our trip to France, which had many moving parts, I avoid planning so far in advance that I can’t envision the end goal.

10. Do you like being scared for fun?

No. Not at all. I don’t see scary movies. Haunted houses are not for me.

11. What has been difficult for you lately?

Time management. Some of that is directly related to my wife’s job as one of the two employees of an afterschool tutoring program. One of the two became sick with COVID, so I spent about 15 hours helping her with simple tasks (sharpening pencils, taking out garbage, etc.) It was fine, but the things I had previously had on my docket got crunched.

12. Have you ever written or read fanfiction?

No; and a smattering.

Barren walls

13. What type of wall art do you have in your home?

This is a bit of a sore point. We have quite a bit of art we COULD put on our walls. My wife said she wanted to wait until the walls got painted before decorating. So they were painted over a decade ago, and still, no art on the walls. Now, you might say, “Why don’t you put them up yourself?” Mostly, I lack the artistic eye to ascertain what piece should go with another and at what height. Maybe I can get my daughter to help me at Christmas.

14. Are you more likely to be private or overshare?

I’ve thought about this a lot. When you have a blog you’ve written for 18.5 years, people think they know all about the blogger. This is not true, but I rather enjoy the myth.

15. What have you recently learned to live without?

Reading a daily newspaper. It tends to collect, and then I’ll pour through a week’s or fortnight’s worth in one sitting. I can skip the stories I already know about, but there’s always something I learn.

My top 5 rock albums

1966 to 1989

There was a question on Quora asking for people’s top 5 rock albums. What an inane question! How can anyone pick just five? So I decided to do it anyway.

First, some guidelines. I am not going to get into the definition of what is “rock.” I hear this every year when an ABBA, Nina Simone, or Joan Baez enters the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nor will I address the “best” albums because “best” has become an increasingly elusive term for me.

I could have picked Blue by either Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell, Who’s Next, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Abraxas by Santana, k.d. lang’s Ingenue, or approximately a zillion more, including at least three by Stevie Wonder.

I’m not selecting a greatest hits album; Sly and the Family Stone would otherwise be on the podium. There are no soundtracks, Broadway cast albums or compilations, so no The Harder They Come, Hamilton, or West Side Story. And if I do this in five years, three of these might be different.

The Eclectics

I decided on three of these because they are so eclectic.

Spike – Elvis Costello, which I mentioned back in 2009 in my 25 most influential albums. The All Music review calls it “maddeningly diffuse.” Its diffuseness may be why I like it because I don’t find it maddening at all.

Veronica, Chewing Gum, Last Boat Leaving

That’s A Plenty – the Pointer Sisters. I first wrote about this album in 2006. Then in 2014; unfortunately, only the links to Little Pony, Fairytale, and Black Coffee still work.

Salt Peanuts; Love In Them There Hills

Revolver – The Beatles. I picked this one over other Beatles albums because I hate Run For Your Life (Rubber Soul). Abbey Road has Octopus’s Garden, which is too much in the Yellow Submarine vein. I may as well pick the album with Yellow Sub. It’s not my favorite song, but it fascinated me because the single, in the last verse, has “As we live a life of ease (a life of ease),” but the echo doesn’t happen on the album version I had.

The 2012 post has lots of bad links.

Taxman, For No One, Got To Get You Into My Life, Tomorrow Never Knows

Two more

Still Crazy After All These Years – Paul Simon. As I noted here in 2016. “Inextricably tied to the Okie in my mind.”

I Do It For Your Love, Have A Good Time, Title song.

Peter Gabriel (melt)- Peter Gabriel. I mentioned Gabriel in 2011 and 2020. In this post, also from 2020, I listed my favorite Gabriel songs, and the links still work! The ones from Melt have a 3 after the title because they are on the third eponymous PG album.

Review: Joan Baez I Am A Noise

Also: Stop Making Sense

I know much about Joan Baez, a preeminent folk singer of the 1960s and beyond. But seeing the new documentary Joan Baez I Am A Noise, I discovered I didn’t realize the half of it.

Early in the film, we see an intriguing quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” While I knew a lot about her public life, her private life, including her relationships with her parents and two sisters and a romance I had not heard about, was revelatory.

As for the secret life, THAT was a heady and sometimes painful exploration.

To understand Joan, the moviemakers took illustrations and diary entries of her at 13. The teen, who grew up with a Quaker background, experienced a fair amount of prejudice growing up with Mexican heritage on her paternal side. Young Joan wrote: “When I think of God, I think of the earth as a very small thing then I think of myself as hardly a speck…might as well spend time making the less fortunate specks in the world enjoy themselves.”

So, when she started experiencing some success, she may have appeared calm and serene. Inside, she felt conflicted by guilt from her fame when so many others were far less fortunate. At the same time, it was fun, especially when she realized that her music was an entree into the activism she felt she needed to participate in.

Of course, there’s the Bobby Dylan section. Most folks don’t recall that she vouched for him on the music scene. They appeared together at the March on Washington in August 1963, but he was far less well-known then.

Save the world

Ultimately, she was addicted to activism in many forms. Her relationships with like-minded folks like David Harris (m. 1968-1973) could not work. She acknowledges that her son suffered from her being on the road so often.

One of the fascinating elements in her helping to develop the story was a shed full of tapes she visits. You can see it in this CBS Sunday Morning segment.

She eventually grew closer to her older sister Pauline (d. 2016) and younger sister Mimi (d. 2001), even as they investigated unpleasant fragments of their growing up. At 82, Joan Baez is more at peace now, accepting the lower range of her voice.

38 of 39 Rotten Tomatoes reviews were positive. The outlier was Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle” “The impression that comes through is that the filmmakers were too in awe of Baez to press her — or to seek alternate opinions — and so we’re left with a sense of not getting the whole truth.” I do not know what film he saw.

The audience score was only 80% positive because I believe this was not entirely the feel-good film they may have been expecting. Young Joan once wrote in a journal, “I am not a saint. I am a noise.” My wife and I saw the film at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

This ain’t no disco.

During the same week, and at the same venue, we also saw Talking Heads’ 1983 concert film Stop Making Sense. I cannot reasonably review this movie.

As I’ve said numerous times, that tour, which included a stop at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center about 30 miles north of Albany, proved to be one of my two most extraordinary musical experiences.

But I had never seen the Jonathan Demme film before. I can say that the first half of the movie transported me back four decades, with the attendant awe, from Byrne’s solo Psycho Killer to the pieces with the full band, including Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell, and Steve Scales. Honestly, I was joyfully exhausted by the band and backup singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry’s energy.

I met Lynn when she and my first niece Rebecca Jade sang backup for Sheila E. at the New York State Fair in Syracuse in 2019. It was all I could do to contain myself from rambling to Lynn about how great the show was that I’d seen 36 years earlier.

The next venue in the film brought me back to mere enjoyment, but it ended strong.

Lydster: my daughter’s cats

Midnight and Stormy

Midnight and Stormy are my daughter’s cats. Well, sort of. Ten years ago, she wanted them. She said she’d feed them and change their litter boxes. Actually, that doesn’t happen often. I generally nourish them, and my wife usually cleans the boxes.

She did, however, have to tend to them when my wife and I were in France in May. Midnight always waited either outside of my bedroom door or my office, caterwauling at breakfast time. And at dinner time, she might be sitting on the sofa watching TV but they didn’t bug her to be fed. I worried that she might let them starve – not an issue, especially for Midnight – but she provided me photographic evidence.

My daughter does initiate tending to their other needs. She removed some fleas from Stormy. The next day, she held each cat in turn while my wife applied the salve.

Scrapping

The cats occasionally get into violent fights. Midnight usually initiates them, though Stormy will attack if she feels intimidated by him. The fur literally flies, and I have to vacuum it up. So it’s interesting that, at times, they will lie close to each other, on our bed, the floor, or the sofa.

The cats are not allowed on the dining room table. Midnight often violates the rule, whereas Stormy never does. My daughter walked over to the table, but Midnight did not react. She texted me the picture and I started walking downstairs; before I got halfway down, he abandoned the table. Apparently, he doesn’t like it when I say, in my sternest voice, “GET DOWN!”

Midnight likes to get into everything, especially anything shaped like a box.

We jokingly told her she could take Midnight back to college. No way we would inflict that feline on her new roommates.

Rebecca Jade, the first niece

A Shade of Jade

Since Rebecca Jade, the first niece, is having a significant natal day tomorrow, I figured it was time to write about her again.

She and her parents lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, NYC, for her first two years. I first visited her when she was a month old. For sure, I was at her first and second birthday parties. Then, her family moved to Puerto Rico.

Still, I’d see her on occasion. The picture above is after my Grandma Williams’ funeral at Trinity AME Zion Church in Binghamton, NY. It’s my favorite picture of us together, although the one of me walking with little Becky, when she’s wearing a red jumper, is cool too.

She, her mother, and I would converge on Charlotte, NC, for my parents’ anniversaries divisible by 5. We often had family photos taken. On one occasion, Rebecca had remnants of chicken pox on her face, which shows a bit in the photo.

I attended her high school graduation in El Cajon, CA. She played basketball for Berkeley, and I saw her play once at a road game in the NYC area; I also made it to her college graduation.

She was at both of my parents’ funerals in 2000 and 2011. My mom’s was the latter when she first met my daughter. But my daughter had seen Rebecca on television in a competition called Wipeout on ABC-TV in 2010. My niece placed second.

Rebecca attended my last wedding in 1999, and I attended hers to Rico in 2005. My family, Rebecca and Rico, spent Thanksgiving 2013 together at our cousin Anne’s house in New Rochelle, NY.

Cold Fact

The first musical recording of the first niece was a three-song demo when she was a teenager. However, one of her earliest albums was 2011’s The Jade Element, which one can find here.

There are two Rebecca Jade and The Cold Fact albums, the 2015 eponymous one and 2019’s Running Out Of Time. You can get the former here or here. The latter can be found here or here ,or on vinyl – vinyl! – here or here.

In 2018, I caught Rebecca and the Cold Fact’s gig in a San Diego club. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her perform professionally, but it was the initial time I saw her with her band. They won a humungous $5,000 check!

Peter Sprague

I’ve seen her sing with jazz guitarist Peter Sprague and his band several times during his Liveish sessions online. Even during the height of COVID, they performed by being in separate rooms or even outside. Check out It’s For You (2021), Are You Going With Me (2021), In My Life (2022), and Guinnevere (2023).

Peter and Rebecca recorded the excellent Planet Cole Porter in 2017, which you can get here. Check out the title song, the only one not written by Porter, live.

Being a bit of an RJ completist, I also have Sparks and Seeds by Peter Sprague and Randy Phillips (2018). Rebecca sings four songs, with additional tunes by Emily Elbert, Leonard Patton, Lisa Hightower, and Allison Adams Tucker

At home

During COVID, Rebecca did about a dozen Home Made shows. Some are on Facebook. Episodes 10 and 11 11 on YouTube.

She’s put together a great new album, A Shade of Jade, which one can get at her website, along with seeing more videos, checking out her upcoming shows, and the like.

In 2023, I got to see Rebecca thrice. On July 4, she was supposed to sing backup for Sheila E. as she had in NYC in 2017 and at the New York State Fair in 2019. A thunderstorm canceled the show, but my extended family and I got to talk with her at the hotel where the band stayed.

In August, she sang in a Syracuse park. My wife, my daughter, and I saw her before the performance. Afterward, we got to hang out with her, a couple of the musicians, and promoters. Then, in late September, I saw her, for 10 seconds, in the Charlotte airport as she rushed to her connecting flight.

I would have gone to see her on the Dave Koz Christmas tour this year, as I did in 2021, when I went down to Long Island, but in 2023, they are not getting closer than Cleveland and near Pittsburgh.

Happy birthday, first niece! I love you, but you knew that, didn’t you?