Roger O Green

A room with a view

“But you do see that bloc of rooms?” I asked.

Our program had its annual conference in lovely Lake George, NY, about an hour north of Albany, in mid-May.

The deadline to register with the office that was coordinating the conference was April 10. We were told we could spend an extra day or two at the conference hotel at the cheaper conference rate. However, while our folks coordinating the event had secured a bloc of rooms, they were not going to send up the list of names until April 24.

I wanted to take advantage of The Wife and me going up a day early, the Sunday of the conference being our wedding anniversary. But the person I first called, right around April 10 didn’t think it was possible, though she sent me to someone else, who gave me over to a third party who was to call me back but did not.

A week later, I called again, this time speaking to a young woman who had been working there only six days. She too noted that the bloc of rooms was secured but that my specific name wasn’t in the system yet.

“But you do see that bloc of rooms?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And are you likely to sell out for the night before the conference?”

“It certainly seems so.”

So she said she called me back, and, ten minutes later, she did. I had a room for the one night and a note in the system that I had three more nights in this mystery bloc.

Then she wanted to know if I wanted – and I forget the terms – but let’s say regular or premium. I asked what the difference was. The regular was in the two-story building adjacent, and the premium was the main four-story structure, which had a view of Lake George.

“What is the difference in price?”

“None.”

“I’ll take a room with a view!”

And on our trip, after The Wife dropped off The Daughter with The Uncle, The Aunt and The Twin Cousins, we got to the hotel. It was for four nights in the same room – so I didn’t have to move – and it was indeed a room with a view, a spectacular one that I enjoyed every morning.

Wear orange: end gun violence

“I will also Wear Orange on June 2nd for the other 30,000 lives lost to gun violence in our nation every year.”

It was only this year that I heard about the # Wear Orange movement. Thursday, June 2 is National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

“The color orange symbolizes the value of human life. Hunters wear orange in the woods to protect themselves and others. In 2013, teens on the South Side of Chicago asked classmates to honor their murdered friend by wearing orange.” And it has become a national movement.

I asked my friend Ruth Senchyna to write about it from her very personal perspective:

On Thursday, June 2nd, I will Wear Orange to commemorate the life of my beloved nephew Camilo Senchyna-Beltran, who was shot and killed in December 2014 in San Francisco, the city in which he lived. Camilo was 26 years old, had just successfully completed paramedic training, and was out on the town celebrating with friends. He was a bright, beautiful and loving young man, with his whole life ahead of him, but his light was extinguished by another young man with a gun. A young man who—we were to find out after his arrest—was himself a shooting victim just a year before.

Although Camilo grew up in San Francisco, he also loved Albany, where his grandmother lived. He spent many of his Christmas and summer vacations here, and especially loved whitewater rafting in the Adirondacks and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

I will also Wear Orange on June 2nd for the other 30,000 lives lost to gun violence in our nation every year. And for the countless others left behind to mourn the lives lost needlessly due to our inability as a nation to address this epidemic in any type of meaningful way.

Please join us on June 2nd in honoring Camilo’s life, as well as the thousand other lives cut short by gun violence in our city and our nation. I am grateful to Trinity Alliance of the Capital Region for providing the space and opportunity to do so. From 4 – 6 pm on June 2nd, we will gather at Trinity Alliance at 15 Trinity Place in Albany to observe National Gun Violence Awareness Day. We will also honor the life and work of Brother Yusuf Burgess on that day, who worked tirelessly to provide urban youth with positive alternatives to the cycle of violence that ensnares and destroys the futures of far too many young in our nation.

The mission of Trinity Alliance is to promote services to the community that will support and promote healthy families, adults and children. Their agency is dedicated to improving the neighborhood as a setting for family life, contributing to health and well-being, and promoting education and employment as a means of self-development. Albany Cure Violence and Leader Leading Troy’s Youth are anti-violence intervention and prevention programs run by Trinity Alliance.

Ruth Senchyna was born and raised in Albany, and currently resides in the South End. After stints in the Bay Area and southern Africa, she returned to Albany in 2009 and is currently employed by the NYSDOH/AIDS Institute. Since the loss of her nephew to gun violence in 2014, she has channeled her grief into activism, primarily through Everytown for Gun Safety. She is grateful to Trinity Alliance for providing the opportunity and space to develop a memory garden for those lost to gun violence on the Brother Yusuf Burgess Community Garden site.

T is for Traveling Wilburys

The two Traveling Wilburys albums were out of print for about a decade.

Everything about the creation of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, I love. From the website comes a story I already knew.

George Harrison was asked by the folks at Warner Brothers Records to put together a non-album B-side for a single from the ex-Beatles’ album Cloud Nine.

Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison had shared dinner, then went to Bob Dylan’s home studio in Malibu, California. George had left a guitar at Tom Petty’s house, and when he went to retrieve it, he invited Petty to join in the fun.

Harrison played the resulting track, Handle with Care, to the WB brass, who thought the song was too good to bury on the flip side of George’s single. Maybe it could become part of an album?

The five frontmen took on the persona of the Traveling Wilburys from this: “Referring to recording errors created by some faulty equipment, Harrison jokingly remarked to Lynne, ‘We’ll bury ’em in the mix’ Thereafter, they used the term for any small error in performance… Harrison suggested ‘The Trembling Wilburys’ as the group’s name; instead, Lynne suggested ‘Traveling’, with which the group agreed.”

The album was very well received and won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group in 1989. Unfortunately, “Roy Orbison died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988… Despite Orbison’s death, the remaining group members recorded a second and final studio album, which they intentionally misnumbered Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. It was released on October 30, 1990, and met with less success than the previous one.”

I had thought Volume 3 was a function of all the collaborations among them, but it was an acknowledgment of bootlegs of the original sessions featuring songs not on that first album.

The group talked about touring, but it never happened. I had heard rumors of Del Shannon replacing Orbison, but he died on February 8, 1990.

The two albums were out of print for about a decade, until they were re-released, with added tracks, in 2007, including Nobody’s Child, the title track for a benefit album. “The project was organized by Olivia Harrison, who created the Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation with the other wives of The Beatles (Barbara Bach, Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney) in April 1990.”

The singles

1988 “Handle with Care” (US 45, AUS 3, NZ 4, UK 21)
1989 “End of the Line” (US 63, AUS 12, NZ 11, UK 52)
1990 “Nobody’s Child” (NZ 9, UK 44)
1990 “She’s My Baby” (AUS 45, CAN 30, UK 79)
1991 “Wilbury Twist” (CAN 86)

You can find Nobody’s Child HERE. The remaining songs above, plus Inside Out, you can listen to HERE, and Margarita HERE.

For good measure, I Call Your Name – Ringo Starr, backed by Harrison, Lynne, Petty, and Traveling Wilburys drummer Jim Keltner on cowbell.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

Digital music

You may well have read the article Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously, in which the author writes:

“When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.”

My friend Steve Bissette wrote in response, quoting him with permission:

“I don’t use any of this crap for ‘my’ music, books, movies, anything. ‘My’ music—meaning, what I listen to—is on vinyl and CDs; ‘my’ books—meaning, what I read and my research materials—are in reach, on shelves, in my library; ‘my’ movies—meaning, what I watch—is on VHS, laser, DVD. It’s a home library, and I’ve lovingly curated it over decades.
I know it’ll all go away, be dispersed, or consumed: home fire, flood, or if I’m lucky I’ll lose it all when I can no longer stay in ‘our’ home. It’s the way of the world, of things. That’s OK with me.
“But I always considered this virtual/digital device world illusory, ephemeral, instant-access=instant-removal. Just how I’m hard-wired.
“I read these kinds of news and opinion pieces as artifacts of those who buy into the illusion anything on a device is ‘theirs’ or ‘my’ anything. It all goes away, can be made to go away, in a heartbeat, while you’re sleeping, when you’re awake.”

I suppose Steve’s reaction may sound like that of an old fogey – he is two years younger than I – and maybe it is. And I totally relate to it.

I have music in the “cloud”, probably more than I know, from some Amazon purchases. Still, there’s is something more gratifying to me about the physical object. And hey, one builds muscle schlepping those CDs to work.

Also, there’s a bit of Zen meditation when I alphabetize the discs and put them away, often stopping to check something on the liner notes.

An online friend of mine was complaining that he couldn’t play any Prince music just after the musician died, because it was blocked by the Purple One’s lawyers. I shrugged, as I pulled out my 2-CD greatest hits.

Now, I see the practical side of digital music. If you’re moving to New Zealand, or something, the shipping of an extensive LP or CD collection could be prohibitive.

I have read books on Kindle. Actually, it makes sense when traveling, especially since the airlines have imposed increasingly draconian limits on the weight and size of one’s luggage. And, of course, I use electronic sources for my research.

Still, nothing compares with pulling a book off the shelf to browse, finding a factoid faster, and more reliably, than online. A shelf full of books is visually appealing, which stimulates the pleasure centers in my brain.

And I’ve been really irritated by some of those book publisher licenses to libraries that suggest that the repository can lend the item only two dozen times or so before it goes away. Fie! One could theoretically lend a book hundreds of times, and then sell it or at least give it away.

I have lost items – some were misplaced, stolen, destroyed in a basement flood. On an episode of JEOPARDY! several years ago, one contestant gleefully explained how freeing it was when he lost everything in a fire. Host Alex Trebek was quite confounded by this. But I guess I’m hard-wired like Steve is.

There is a response article to the piece I started with, No, Apple Music is not deleting tracks off your hard drive — unless you tell it to. BOTH stories tout the value of backup. I’ve lost digital music too, and this makes it even more ephemeral. And now I read that music downloads may only have about four years left.

Once, and other thoughts

ROGER will provide.

The musical Once was playing at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady in May. The Wife and I got into our seats about 20 minutes before the 7:30 opening. Already there were a bunch of people, some singing and playing instruments, but others just milling around.

We ascertained from another patron that the audience members could go up on stage and hang out or even buy a drink at the bar. Why we didn’t I’m not sure, other than the desire not to climb over people to get in and out of our seats. But it was very cool to watch.

Then the audience members leave the stage, but the music continues. One man sings a solo. The house lights are still on. Then Guy (that’s the name of one of the characters) sings the first song from the show as the house lights begin to dim but not so much because Girl (the other main character) has to walk down one of the aisles to walk up the steps to the front of the stage.

I saw the movie Once, and I recall enjoying it. This iteration is somewhat funnier, especially the banter between Girl and Guy early on. All the other musicians stay on stage, taking on various roles, moving sets, and singing. The large mirror on the set was used to great effect.

It was such a wonderfully organic production that I may have failed to mention that it was very good. A review.

Bus hallelujah

I was riding the bus to work; the weather was messy. A guy gets on the bus, known to some of the other patrons, but not by me. He said he had lent his wife his bus pass. I used my 10-ride card to pay for his ride. Immediately, two or three of these women went “God is good!” and “God will provide.”

(When I told the story to a colleague, he said, “ROGER will provide.” I laughed.)

Later on the trip, after the man had departed, these good women were trash-talking about someone, not on the bus, with at least one of them using all sorts of four-letter words to describe the woman in question. It was quite surreal.

Hillary can’t be President

Apparently, there are people out there who believe that a woman cannot legally be President of the United States. This is because Article II of the U.S. Constitution begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected…”

I’d ignore this as linguistic silliness, except after the birther attacks on Barack Obama, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to make a legal case on this issue, as, in fact, someone tried and failed to do in 2008, the last time the former Secretary of State ran for POTUS.

One fellow has been badgering a local journalist about this topic, publicly on Facebook, concerned and frustrated that the mainstream media is ignoring this “important” issue.

And

*When my family rode our bikes home from the Pinksterfest on May 7, even as cars were stuck in gridlock, one of my church friends accused us of “gloating.” Untrue at the time. But after getting that reaction…

*When signaling about a potential poker game by email, someone wrote: “There will be lectures from Dr. Card on ‘Probability Theory and its Effect on Personal Finances and the Preservation of Quality of Life.'”

*Prince’s “Nothing Compares With You” was on the May 5 episode of the TV show Grey Anatomy, which I thought was amazingly quick, given the fact that he died on April 21. I imagine something was booted.