Rebecca Jade Archives - Page 14 of 16

Coverville: All-Beatles covers Thanksgiving show for the 12th year in a row! “Track by track tribute to Rubber Soul for the 50th anniversary of its release, as well as a tribute to Paris with a full set of French-spoken Beatles covers.”

Chuck Miller wants to be buried with Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July”, which I consider his last great album.

Funnies

AV Club’s favorite graphic novels, one-shots, and archives of 2015.

Mark Evanier continues to list the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968, including Paul Winchell (Tigger) and Howard Morris (Atom Ant) and Stan Freberg (Junior Bear), and Paul Frees (Boris Badenov, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, Poppin Fresh the Pillsbury Doughboy) and June Foray (Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale) and Daws Butler (Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Captain Crunch).

Buster Keaton – the Art of the Gag.

Smilin’ Ed Comics by Raoul Vezina & Tom Skulan. Hardcover on IndieGoGo.

GOOGLE alerts (me)

Time to Ask Arthur Anything. He answered mine about Prez and Veep candidates and Ranking the Republican candidates and The USA’s gun problem.

SamraiFrog’s 50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums.

Twing toustlers.

GOOGLE alerts (not me)

St Peter’s set for £1.2 million renovation. “Admitting to being “very nervous” about taking on the large-scale project, Friends chairman Roger Green, who this year won an award for his volunteering, has agreed to stay on and see through the changes, which are not likely to be complete until at least the end of 2019.”

Rehearsing with Leslie

As far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie and me singing.

My sister Leslie and I don’t talk that often on the phone, but when we do, it usually goes on for a while.

Recently when we were chatting, she noted that she has figured out the difficulty with singing in the various musical groups she has led or has sung with, over the years and currently.

It’s that, when we were growing up, singing with our father, it felt as though we never rehearsed. That was actually untrue: in singing in the car, at the dinner table, in the living room, and at the campgrounds, we WERE rehearsing all the time. It just didn’t FEEL as though it was rehearsing, because we never had to set time aside to do so.

One of the sad truths is that, as far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie, and me singing, or even of Dad solo when we were still living in Binghamton, NY in the 1960s.

She thinks that we, plus perhaps her daughter Rebecca Jade, ought to get together and work on some musical thing. The family being bicoastal – they live in the San Diego, CA area – I’m not sure how that would work. I did note that, if I get out there, and we were going to try to record something, we would – alas! – have to actually rehearse.

Happy birthday to the middle child.

Roger is 62; march on Selma 50th anniversary; Rebecca and Rico’s 10th wedding anniversary

I don’t really blog on my birthday, so I need to steal stuff from other people. Even myself.

How am I going to be able to remember how old I am THIS year, without doing the math?

Ah, the (19)62 World Series, between my two favorite teams at the time, the New York Yankees (Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford) and the San Francisco Giants (Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal). Great 7-game series.

Also, for some businesses, such as Amtrak, I’m a SENIOR CITIZEN.

Here’s a picture of me with younger sisters Leslie (l) and Marcia, probably from the fall of 1963. Virtually all the family photos come from Marcia scanning them, then posting them to Facebook.

When Arthur turned 56 (whippersnapper!) a month and a half ago, he wrote:

I’ve also become increasingly aware as the years pile up of how important it is to record all sorts of things that mark progress through life. Memory isn’t anywhere near as reliable as many people assume, but it tends to become less reliable as the years pass…

…it was through writing these posts that I realised just how highly I regard my birthday, not merely for the celebration or being the centre of attention… but because birthdays symbolise for me a fresh start, a new beginning, with the promise of unexplored territory ad, sometimes laying just at the horizon or maybe around a bend, but there all the same. Looking back, then, has reminded me how much I value looking forward, and moving ahead.

What he said.

I must note that today is the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the first disastrous attempt for civil rights activists to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma. I was outraged, not only by the actions of the police, but by the fact that they dare do that ON MY 12TH BIRTHDAY. Talk about narcissism.

Here’s an article about a Japanese American activist heading back to Selma to commemorate the march.

On a cheerier note, this is the 10th wedding anniversary of Rebecca Jade, the eldest niece, to Rico Curtis.

The #1 song on Wednesday, March 7th, 1900 was Ma Tiger Lily by Arthur Collins

The #1 song on Thursday, March 7th, 1901 was Stars and Stripes Forever by Sousa’s Band

The #1 song on Friday, March 7th, 1902 was Tell Me Pretty Maiden by Byron G Harlan, Joe Belmont and the Florodora Girls

The #1 song on Saturday, March 7th, 1903 was In the Good Old Summer Time by Haydn Quartet

The #1 song on Monday, March 7th, 1904 was Bedelia by Haydn Quartet

The #1 song on Tuesday, March 7th, 1905 was Give My Regards to Broadway by Billy Murray

U2, Bob Crewe, Fab Four, plus more

Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs.

If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I can have some strong opinions. But with the U2/Apple thing, I feel ambivalent. On one level, I’m oddly entertained by people freaking out over Apple’s forced iTunes download of U2’s new album, and wonder if it’s just a first world problem. I particularly loved how it ruined someone’s “carefully curated collection.” I’m impressed how well the secret was kept, with the release date of the next U2 album still unclear to the media as of last month.

Then there’s the Why U2? contingent epitomized by this quote: “It’s true that Apple’s wine-drinking, plane-flying user base probably overlaps with U2’s cool-dad core audience more than most bands.” Ah, U2’s not cool enough; here’s the album should have given away instead, and maybe they’re right. Fortunately, I’ve read plenty of suggestions about how to delete it.

The result of this apparent misstep is that the album, Songs of Innocence, is crap. 24 hours after release, it was deemed the worst U2 album ever, as though one could decide something like that so quickly. I still haven’t hear the thing, so I have no opinion.

The bulk of the criticism, though, has to do with lack of choice in the matter, that was fascistically foisted upon millions of users. Maybe that’s true, I dunno. Read the Rolling Stone article about the event.
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Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs. There are nice pieces by Rolling Stone and Dustbury.
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Without much effort, I keep finding Beatles-related stuff, some e-mailed to me, for some obscure reason.
*1964 – the menace of Beatlism
*their 1st US TV Appearance?
*Someone Uploaded the Entire ‘Beatles’ Cartoon Series to YouTube – it’s not “long-forgotten” by me
*Kids React to the Beatles.
*Apple scruff Lizzie Bravo: the girl who sang with the Beatles
*It Don’t Come Easy by George Harrison
*Paul McCartney ‘Early Days’ behind-the-scenes blues jamming.
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Jay Z Steps Up To The Plate To Argue That Tiny Music Samples Are Unprotected By Copyright As TechDirt said, Good for him.
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Early Simpsons: a hymn by I. Ron Butterfly.
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Arthur points to the drinking song that we sing when we present the US national anthem. No, it isn’t that easy to sing either. I’ve been REALLY liberal when people do the Star-Spangled Banner (Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Jose Feliciano are all fine with me, but Rosanne was not). I hear it as a swing version myself.

Oh, here’s version (of SSB, not the drinking song) by niece #1, Rebecca Jade, if I’m doing that FB embed thing correctly:

Post by Rico Curtis.

The 9/11 Memorial

The waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night

After 9/11/2001, I had only been in Manhattan once that wasn’t in passing (train station to Charlotte, e.g.) and that was seeing a musical in 2003. I had never been particularly close geographically to Ground Zero, despite living less than 160 miles away.

When Rebecca (niece #1), her husband Rico, and a couple of their friends came out from California to NYC around Thanksgiving 2013, one of them items on the Californians’ agenda was to see the 9/11 memorial.

The museum exterior was at the site, but not yet open. There was no charge to get to the plaza at the time, but one had to order tickets ahead of time. We were booked for 4:30 p.m., the last grouping, and we had to pick up tickets beforehand.

At least at that point, the key to the enterprise was patience, for we spent over a half-hour waiting in line on an unseasonably cold November afternoon-to-evening. Then we had to go through screening, not unlike what happens when one goes to the airport.

I will say that the waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night; wish I could find the pictures I took.

At the end, you end up, as all good museums do, in the gift shop. There was a constant barrage of videos about what happened “that day” and in the weeks thereafter. It was a bit numbing, actually, but not especially moving, oddly.

Only one of these pieces got me emotionally involved, and it was a cartoon – this cartoon from StoryCorps – that actually made me cry.

Now that the 9/11 Tribute Center is complete, I can’t imagine wanting to go back and relive the experience. The State Museum in Albany has some artifacts that I’ve seen, fairly often, and that’s enough for me, for now.