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Favorite topics: history, books, movies, music

100 $100 bills;

Another Sunday Stealing meme. This one concerns some of my favorite topics: history, books, movies, and music.

What period of history is your favorite to read about?

“Favorite” may be stretching it, but it’s the period in American history between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the beginning of the Civil Rights era of the mid-20th Century.

Reconstruction included several black legislators; Jim Crow, which largely undid the progress; the “scientific” rationalization of bigotry; the Red Summer of 1919; the civil rights leaders who were ahead of the curve.

Tomes

What is your favorite genre of fiction?

I like fiction rooted in real events. The only Stephen King book I ever read was 11/22/63.

Do you choose a book by its cover?

Sometimes. Or at least the book jacket. Does this tell me something I didn’t know AND want to find out? Incidentally, it is true: some librarians DO refer to books by their color. “Can you get me that tall green book, please?”

Where do you do most of your reading?

On the sofa, near an end so that I can put one arm up.

Without looking, guess how many books are in your TBR pile. Now, look. Were you right?

Hundreds. Yup, hundreds.

Films

How many movies are on your TBW list?

That’s quite a different calculation. There are tons of movies on various platforms that make the enumeration of the same to be quite impossible. Now, if you’re talking about movies I have on DVD that I have not watched, maybe a half dozen. But I also have lots of unwatched TV episodes and the like.

What’s your favorite genre of movie?

Quite possibly the documentary. Beyond that, comedy.

Do you still go to see movies in the theater?

Yes, but it’s much more difficult. Albany County is currently COVID-red, so my wife is reluctant to go, even though we both got COVID in August.

Moreover, I got out of the routine. When I went regularly, there were a lot of trailers that helped me decide whether or not to see that film in the future. Now, I know there are trailers online, but 1) there are so many that I don’t have the time, and 2) trailers on a computer are not the same dynamically as trailers in a cinema.

BTW, I dislike seeing movies on a computer screen, though I’ve seen several since March 2020. I’m trying to decide if I should get Roku or a newer, larger television set.

Money

You have $10,000 and no strings or obligations for one full day. Where do you go, and what do you do?

Let’s further assume I can’t give it away to a charity, a political campaign, or to random strangers (100 $100 bills; it DOES appeal to me). It can’t be something practical. The one-day limit is a hassle. What I’d LIKE to do is buy out a large theater with at least a 500-person capacity and show a movie that people might want to see on the big screen, such as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. But I don’t know if I could pull it off logistically.

Tunes

How many songs are on your favorite playlist?

About 3,753. I don’t know that I have a favorite playlist. The idea of hearing the same songs more than a dozen times a year is alien to me.

What method do you use to listen to music (Spotify, iTunes, Pandora…)?

I play compact discs. In fact, I’m playing the Psychedelic Soul album by The Temptations as I write this. Before that, I listened to Lyle Lovett, Rebecca Jade, Paul Simon, Tom Petty, Weird Al Yankovic, The Beatles, and Television’s Greatest Hits (TV theme songs).

I do have songs on Amazon, but that’s my fallback position.

Reshuffling the books in the house

Marvel Masterworks

I spent a few hours reshuffling the books in our house. As someone who has moved some 30 times in his life, you wouldn’t think I’d forget one fact, but I’ve been in my house for over two decades.

Books are heavy.

We have a bookcase in the living room. And there are some books there, especially some coffee table-sized tomes. Bit it also has my daughter’s homework, store catalogs (they are NOT mine), two clarinets, one tambourine (that IS mine), and miscellaneous otherwise homeless items.

Fortunately, the office where I write has almost wall-to-wall bookshelves. It is described in painful detail here. I had received a box of books on baseball which had belonged to Jack, who I saw at the Olin reunions almost every year. But there was no place to put them, unless…

The secret stash

I also have two bookcases in the attic. They are in use, and the contents are in a particular order. I have three Doonesbury collections, the four Elfquest volumes comprising the first series and a lot of books related to comic books and comic strips. It was clear. My Marvel Masterworks had to go upstairs. They JUST squeezed onto the available shelving.

I liked the look of them in the office. But, for the most part, I didn’t REFER to them. I might READ them. But the books I REALLY need in the office are the reference books. And I have a LOT of them. Music, television, movies, sports, the Bible. Some specific: Beatles, Dick Van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone, even the index of The New Jim Crow.

But then I had to further rearrange the shelves, because, and I’ve known this for decades: books are of different heights. One does not want a paperback on a shelf designed for a tall tome. And the opposite doesn’t work at all.

Now, a few books from here, some shifted from there, and my new baseball books are shelved without leaving a massive gap in the panorama of tomes that I gaze at on a daily basis.

BTW, yes, I could trade in some of these for Kindle copies. But those don’t bring me joy. The panoply of colors and sizes and fonts bring me joy, and I’m really into joy right now.

Fill-in for Sunday Stealing

FantaCo photographs

The Sunday Stealing is a fill-in.

1. I am currently obsessed with old photographs. I used to work at a comic book store in Albany called FantaCo from 1980 to 1988. Specifically, my old boss Tom is looking for old photos from that period. As it turns out, I took a bunch of pictures with cheap cameras. They are in photo albums, in some semblance of order. I will wade through the photo albums and mail them to him. He will digitize them, then send the pics and the digitized files back.

BTW, if you have some FantaCo or FantaCon pics, feel free to email them to me or send them via Facebook. If you can identify any people, that would be great.

Simultaneously, I’ll be hunting for photos of an ex-girlfriend to give to someone who knew her in the same time frame.

2. Today I am happy because I’m going to see some theater, not just today but eight productions over the next ten months.

3. The age I am is apparently inappropriate to some people. The age I feel depends on the part. For instance, my head is about fifty, but my left knee is about 100.

4. My favorite place may be my office. It has 70% of my books, and I have a device on which I can play music.

5. Something I have been procrastinating on is creating a Wikipedia page for my late friend, the artist Raoul Vezina, who worked at FantaCo. I have enough material, but I’ve never done one of these things before.

6. The last thing I purchased was almost certainly recorded music.

Books!

7. The thing I love most about my home is the built-in bookcases in my office.

8. My most prized possession – IDK. Maybe the metal file box with all of my important papers.

9. If I could be one age for the rest of my life, I would want to be 37; it’s a prime number.

10. My outlook on life tends toward the pessimistic. Global warming, gun violence, and certain political philosophies are involved.

11. If you want to annoy me, be a poor listener.

12. I am completely defenseless when it comes to bubbles.

13. The bravest thing I’ve ever done was run out into traffic to scoop up a toddler who had wandered out there.

14. Something that keeps me awake at night is: See 10.

15. My favorite meal in the entire world is lasagna.

Most awarded songs #1

Top Pop Singles

Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (Photo by �� John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

I bought Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles book recently. This is the 17th edition, very different from the previous iterations, most of which I’ve purchased since at least edition 12. For one thing, it’s broken into TWO books, one covering 1955-1989, and a second, to be published, for 1990-2022.

The previous version, covering 1955-2018, runs 1200 pages. The new one is 850. So what’s been added? Top 10 albums. The Pre-Rock Era hits of values, rhythm and blues, rock, and country.

Also The Most Awarded Songs. This covers a range of categories: ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, Rolling Stone magazine, plus Grammys and Oscars, and more.

150. You Are The Sunshine Of My Life – Stevie Wonder, #1 in 1973. Grammys, RS, RIAA. This is from the Talking Book album, which went to #3 for three weeks. Unsurprisingly, I own it on LP and CD. I was always taken by the fact that the first two voices are NOT Stevie but Jim Gilstrap then Gloria Barley.

149. Y.M.C.A. – the Village People, #2 for three weeks in 1979. Grammys, RIAA. I must own this on vinyl. This is a perennial at wedding receptions and other festive occasions. Incidentally, I was actually on the board of the Albany YMCA in the late 1980s. And I played racquetball there from 1983 until it closed in 2010.

The third of June

148. Ode To Billie Joe – Bobby Gentry, #1 for four weeks in 1967. Grammys, RS, RIAA. I belonged to the Capitol Record Club at the time, and because I did not send my negative option card back in time, I received the Ode To Billie Joe LP, which spent two weeks at #1. I still have it. Here’s a 2007 blog post I wrote, naturally on the third of June.

147. Le Freak – Chic, #1 for six weeks in 1978. Grammy, RRHoF. I have this on some compilation CD.

146. Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag – James Brown, #8 in 1965. Grammys, RS. There are over 100 hits in the book for the Godfather of Soul. When I was growing up, we used to get Jet magazine, put out by the same folks that put out Ebony. James ALWAYS dominated the charts in the 1960s, often with songs I had never heard. This song I have on the greatest hits CD.

145. Stayin’ Alive – the Bee Gees, #1 for four weeks in 1978. RRHoF, RS, RIAA. Of course, now known as the CPR song. From the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which spent 24 weeks at #1. I had it on vinyl at the time, and the son of my girlfriend at the time gave me considerable grief for owning a “disco” album. I now have it on CD.

144. Jailhouse Rock – Elvis Presley, #1 for seven weeks. Grammys, RRHoF, RS. My father hated Elvis, so my knowledge of Elvis was done rather surreptitiously. The video for Jailhouse Rock, from the movie, was oddly captivating. Now, I have the song on two different greatest hits CDs.

A seven-minute single?

143. Hey Jude – the Beatles. #1 for nine weeks in 1968. Grammy, RRHoF, RS. I actually have this on the single, the Beatles Again/Hey Jude LP (#2 for four weeks), and various CDs (Past Masters, blue album). This song ONLY went to #4 in the UK and #3 in Canada. Ken Levine is not a fan of the song.

142. Piece Of My Heart – Big Brother and the Holding Company, #12 in 1968. The Cheap Thrills album, featuring Janis Joplin, was #1 for eight weeks. Yes, I own that LP, as well as a Joplin greatest hits CD.

141.Sexual Healing – Marvin Gaye, #3 for three weeks in 1983. Grammy, RRHoF, RS, ASCAP. I hadn’t bought a Marvin Gaye album in a while. Then he moved from Motown to Columbia and put out the Top 10 album Midnight Love, which I bought. When Motown put out a Gaye boxed set, which I purchased, Sexual Healing was included.

I might not have gotten this book except that my MIL gave me a generous check for Christmas. I suppose I COULD have spent the money on paying bills, but that sort of violates the spirit of the gift, or so I’ve decided to believe.

The New York Mets are best worst

From first to third

New York Mets

Kelly reviewed the book So Many Ways To Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team In Sports, by Devin Gordon. You can read the review about what the heck that title means. But the 2021 season pretty much encapsulates this.

From Baseball-Reference.com: The Mets were in first place in the National League East for 91 days, if one counts only the days a team played and was in first at the end of the day, or 114 days if one counts all days of the season including off days. They topped their division as late as Friday, August 13. They ended up 77-85-0, 3rd place in NL East. It was in large part because of a season-ending injury to pitcher Jacob deGrom on July 18, he with an astonishing 1.08 ERA.

There’s a friend of my sister’s named MJ, who swears I turned her on to the Mets in the mid-1960s, after their truly awful early seasons, but before they won the Series in ’69. Curious, because I had thought of myself as a Yankees fan in those days.

There was a farm team in Binghamton (actually Johnson City) that was usually a Yankees farm team. I saw Al Downing, who as an LA Dodger gave up home run 715, I saw play there. The stadium was razed in the late 1960s to build a new Route 17 (now I-86).

1986

By happenstance, I caught the ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 Documentary “Once Upon a Time in Queens”. It chronicled the 1986 Mets season. But it also discussed the 1984 and 1985 seasons, and how they built to their improbable World Series victory. It includes many interviews, including Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, and Kevin Mitchell.

Executive Producer Jimmy Kimmel is correct. “The characters and events captured in this documentary are so outlandish it is hard to believe this documentary isn’t a work of 80’s-era fiction. Whether you are a New Yorker, a Mets fan or even a fan of baseball makes no difference. This is the definitive, must-see story of a team and a time whose antics and even existence now seem unimaginable.”

Back in 2012, I documented seeing the ’86 Game Six on TV, with my friend Cee dressed as Gary Carter.

NYCNY

When the Yankees and the Mets played in the 2000 Subway Series, I was a bit torn. The Yankees had won in 1996, 1998, and 1999, so I was thinking the Amazins deserved a shot. It was not to be. On the other hand, I had all but forgotten that they lost to the Kansas City Royals in 2015.

There’s now a stadium in downtown Binghamton. The team that plays there is the Rumble Ponies, the Double-A farm team of the New York Mets. I’ve only been there once or twice, but maybe next year, something the MLB Mets are undoubtedly saying right now.