Tag: reviews

Playlists

jono55

Back in 1987, I turned my ex-wife, and said: “You know, this October I am turning 58, and I haven’t had a mid-life crisis yet. Do you have any suggestions for me?” It turned to that she did, and it was a doozy. Before that very same birthday rolled around I was a single man.

As I have done since I was in my mid-teens, I turned to music when the clatter in my head grew too loud and a bit of respite was needed. I found that I could replace that mental static with a song. For the next couple of years, there was a short list of perhaps a dozen tunes that were in very frequent rotation. Looking back, I can’t see much of a pattern in them, and they would go in and out of the daily playlist depending on my sense of the world at that given moment. But they were always there, arrows in my quiver for use when life would place dragons on the stoop.

I’ll post a few of them here today.

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In 1956, driving home from work at the grocery store, I head a song on the radio that stuck in my head. You know how it is, you go through your day with noise of all sorts passing by you and your brain, luckily, ignores most of it. Then, for whatever reason, one of those sounds sticks, like a dart on a board. The tune was Frankie and Johnny, and the artist a man named Lonnie Donnegan. I bought the album and every song was a winner for me, even at that age. Playing that LP on the cheap equipment that I owned at the time I eventually wore it out, so I bought another copy. Later on that album was lost, and when digital music came ’round, it hadn’t made the cut. Still hasn’t. But I found later on that all of the tunes that had been on that original album were now available on other Donnegan collections. He and I have become great pals that never met.

Album title: An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs

You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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I ran across Richard Thompson in 1982, when I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights in Rolling Stone. Since then his music has been with me as a constant presence. Going through his catalog quite a while back I came across Beat the Retreat, which I absolutely loved. Such mournful guitar work … my, oh my. Later on in life when times were melancholy it was a song to turn to. Not for solace, perhaps, but to help put words to feelings that were as yet inchoate.*

*I’ve never used “inchoate” before. Nifty word.

Beat the Retreat, by Richard Thompson

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Phoenix is the sort of tune that might have been sung Karaoke-style way after midnight by a middle-aged man in his cups who was swimming in self-pity and loss.

If any of you know of such a Person of Pathos, recommend it to them. It contains something more than slender hope, it holds out the possibility of triumph.

Phoenix, by Dan Fogelberg

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Friends, Elon Musk and I (we are bffs) would like to recommend the messaging app Signal to you.

Signal is free to use and available on both Android and iOS operating systems. Alongside the extra security protocols, it includes all of the basic messaging tools you’re going to need, including read receipts, emoji support, group chats, and voice and video calls.

Company website

Not only is it better at keeping your secrets than its predecessors, there is always the chance that you will get to sit in on a national security session where they talk about war, bombs, and other cool stuff!

And it doesn’t cost you a cent. With emojis, yet.

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Warnings

jono55

A couple of weeks ago I introduced myself and you to a new artist, Stephen Wilson Jr.. Since that time, I have been listening to nothing but his music. His first and only album contain 34 songs, which is an unusual and formidable number, and has given me much material to listen to and to ponder.

What I have found is that he is a troubadour and whether he knows it or not, he is he is singing my younger Minnesota redneck life as well as his own. He sings it in the key of grunge and he sings it loud, with his own interesting guitar style.

You never heard of a Minnesota redneck? Check out the definition of the term right here.

  1. an uneducated white farm laborer, especially from the South.
  2. a bigot or reactionary, especially from the rural working class.

Dictionary.com

Nothing there about Southern exclusivity, is there? All you need to do is spend long hours in the field with the sun beating on the back of your neck and you qualify. It helps if you are dumb as a rock as well, but that’s not a requirement.

As for me personally, I have in turn been uneducated, white, bigoted, and still struggle with being reactionary at times. Also, the number of dumb things of which I have been guilty in my extended lifetime would make all but the most most adamantine rocks blush with shame.

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From The New Yorker

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On Stephen Wilson Jr’s album there are several songs that stand out for me.

Father’s Son describes the complexities in his relationship with his father over time. Complexities which many of us have dealt with in our roles as sons, fathers, even (as I am learning) grandfathers.

The Year to Be Young – 1994 : my own such year was 1956, but the rest of the lyrics could have come from my diary, if I had kept one.

Calico Creek: the words that caught my attention talked about a deep creek that was dangerous in the spring, but by late Summer …

Where the rope swings are rotten
Had our toes touching bottom
It’ll be dry by July, but if you walk down the sides
You can find some Rapalas

That last line … we kids from low-income families knew well to walk along the newly exposed banks looking for Rapalas and other fishing lures caught on snags and rocks during times of higher water.

Enough! You get the idea. To find so many songs that revealed those common experiences … for me this guy’s music falls under the category of a big fat blessing.

Father’s Son
Year To Be Young 1994
Calico Creek

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From The New Yorker

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PSA

This next piece is in the nature of a Public Service Announcement. Robin and I have discovered a substance of such addictive power that we aren’t even sure that we should put this information out there, on the outside chance that lives could be ruined.

A few weeks back we discovered a new recipe and decided to try it out. It sounded simple, promising, and could easily be manufactured at home using ingredients typically found around any kitchen.

The recipe was for a version of a rice pudding. A homely dessert if there ever was one, and ordinarily considered safe to eat. But our first batch was so tasty that within an hour we looked at one another across a table, spoons in hand, and realized we had eaten the entire bowlful. Little grains of rice were scattered on our shirt fronts, our eyes were glazed and out of focus, our pupils dilated.

To be sure that what had happened was not a fluke, we made another batch a week later, and this week yet one more. Each time with the same result. During the last episode Robin had to duct-tape me to a dining room chair and throw out most of the concoction. Flocks of birds descended upon it which then were unable to fly away without wobbling.

Here is the recipe. I publish so that you can avoid accidentally putting it together. It is the dessert equivalent of crack, and I can say with certainty that once you start on on it you will be unable to stop until you are rendered immobile and possibly nonverbal for hours.

Sharp objects and heavy machinery should not be available to those who ignore these warnings and commit to cooking up something they are not prepared to deal with. Like meth and rice pudding.

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Memento Mori

Roberta Flack, a great lady of American song, passed on this week. She had many, many hits, including one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard, entitled First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. It was featured on the album First Take, released in 1969.

Even if that had been the only tune she’d ever recorded, it would have been enough for me to remember her name.

First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

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Riding Off From It

jono55

DISCLAIMER

I don’t do jokes on this blog, mainly because I can’t tell jokes very well and often leave my listener scratching their head and wondering just what it was that was supposed to be funny. But for some reason, the story of the Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major that I first heard sixty years ago is an exception to those woeful facts. For one thing, I remember the whole joke (amazing). For another, when I tell it in conversation I can bring to bear what I believe to be an absolutely irresistibly humorous Scottish accent. ( I summon my inner Billy Connolly). All of this is to preface an off-color joke which might offend tender sensibilities, and for that I apologize in advance.

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A Scottish Regimental Sergeant Major in full dress marches into a drugstore and asks for the pharmacist. The Sergeant opens his waist pouch and pulls out a neatly folded cotton bandanna, opening it to reveal a smaller silk square which he unfolds to reveal a severely battered condom.

“How much for repair?” the Sergeant Major asks the pharmacist.

“Six pence,” he replies.

“How much for a new one?”

“Ten pence.”

The Sergeant Major folds the condom into the silk square and the cotton bandana, places it in back in his kit bag and marches down the aisle and out the door.

Next day the Sergeant Major walks back into the drugstore and asks for the same pharmacist. He pulls out the folded cotton 
bandanna, then opens the smaller silk square which once again reveals the ill-used bit of latex. He then declares:

“The regiment votes for repair.”

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Having mentioned Billy Connolly, I feel obliged to share one of my favorite bits of his, taken from a concert in New York.

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One of my daughters once said that in our family when something bad happened you were given 5 minutes to grieve, and then you had to make a joke about it.

It’s true that there have been times that my discomforts whenever I have come face to face with the appalling in life made me into a stuffer, someone who puts his feelings away until there is a more convenient time to deal with them. Being a time which may or may not ever come along. I do that less now at this season of my life, but a lifetime of such putting-things-off is not an easy habit to break off completely.

This clip from Lonesome Dove illustrates pretty well what I’ve been talking about. A boy dies of snakebite while on a cattle drive, and his compañeros are burying him. As Woodrow F. Call says, the best thing to do with death is to “ride off from it.”

And there are times when “riding off from it” is necessary. In another time and place when I found myself (believe it or not) in charge of running codes on children who had arrested, my mind all on its own would click into a cool and quiet groove where the alarmed and frantic behaviors of those around me were only static, and what I needed to do was laser-clear to me. There was a need to bring order to this clamor and I took that as my role. The other personnel in the room needed to be rapidly given assignments without raising their panic level, and I found that I could do that.

Finding that I had this facility came to be a useful thing in my emergency room work. Looking back, though, I can see where a problem gradually developed in that I began to apply it to everyday life, in relationships and situations where it wasn’t appropriate or constructive.

Because sometimes the best thing is not to “ride off from it,” but to sit down and weep. Not in some vague tomorrow but right then, on that very chair in front of you. With friends, if you are fortunate.

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Took a longish drive on Monday to Basalt CO, to the Steadman Orthopedic Clinic, for consultation on a bunion. You know, one of those foot things where for no good reason your big toe decides to go off and do its own thing.

.It’s one more case of life’s attempts at humor which falls flat. Life isn’t very good at humor, actually, being much more adept in the role of sorrow-bringer or day-screwer-upper. We met a very pleasant surgeon who was not completely full of himself, which I have found to be quite an unusual thing. He was an excellent communicator as well, and what he communicated was that if possible he would like to avoid surgery altogether, but if it became necessary how that would be accomplished. We left the clinic with a plan and we’ll see how things go from here.

En route we saw three small herds of antelope pronghorns, each group containing about twenty individuals. It’s been several years since we’ve seen even one, so it was a banner day in that department. Some light snow had been predicted, which did not materialize.

We stopped in Grand Junction on the way home to do some shoe shopping that the surgeon had suggested, and visited the Mesa Mall to do just that. It was like stepping back into 1980, because here was a vibrant mall with a great many stores (and nearly completely absent those ghostly empty stores), a bustling food court, and gaggles of teenaged girls wandering about in what seemed aimlessness, but was probably not. There were teenaged boys as well, and one sturdy group of four walked by us as we consumed some fast-food Chinese cuisine, all four young men being tall and strong and wearing identical haircuts.

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Each year at this time I try to find a particular table grace of Garrison Keillor’s and I fail to do so. What I do succeed at finding each year is yet another prayer that cuts through the gourmandic fog of the day. Here is this year’s.

O, heavenly Father, we thank thee for food and remember the hungry. We thank thee for health and remember the sick. We thank thee for friends and remember the friendless. We thank thee for freedom and remember the enslaved.

There are so many people on this planet that it is quite likely that somewhere in the world there is a man who was born on the same exact day that I was and at exactly the same hour and minute. He may be living halfway across the globe and have had the hardest of lives, such trials that if I knew them they would make my own problems seem positively trivial. In this season of Thanksgiving I think of him and my wish is that in the years to come the blessings would be distributed more evenly between he and I.

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Thank You For A Life, by Kris Kristofferson

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Byte Me, Universe

jono55

Before Apple’s Macintosh came out, I had no interest in puttering around with personal computers at all. They seemed perfect nerd fodder, with their dark screens and blinking green cursors. Who cared?

Then one day in 1984 I wandered into Team Electronics in Yankton SD and there was a new Macintosh sitting on a table with a sign that said “Try Me.” So I did. All I had to do was find out that there was such a thing as cut and paste to make me realize that for anyone who needed to write this was a magical tool.

So I bought one. And I installed it on a table on the lower level of our home where I could explore its possibilities without being in the way of normal household activity. I wrote letters, wrote poetry, fiddled with MacPaint to create primitive graphics … a kid in the proverbial candy store was I.

One evening, after I had been working on a talk I was going to give at a staff meeting, I was looking over the several pages I’d created for typos, when my son came down the stairs and flicked a light switch. At that moment I discovered two things. One, that the outlet my Macintosh was plugged into was controlled by that switch, and two, that when the Mac went dark all that precious writing went away. Forever. I had not yet learned to save as I wrote because I didn’t know you needed to. Who could imagine a machine that would take your hard work and allow it to vanish?

For a few frantic minutes I couldn’t believe that my stuff was gone. I read through the computer’s manual several times looking for some loophole, some place within its CPU where that speech still existed, and all I had to do was figure it out. At long last I gave up and gave in. Rather than go look for a shotgun to deal with the problem directly, I resolved to save and save and save my work from then on. Whenever I purchased new software I looked to see if auto-save was a feature or not. If it was, the sale was made.

There were other smaller and less dramatic losses to come before I truly learned my lesson, but that first one was the mind-bender, my “I can’t believe it” moment. Even today when I think back on that moment, I can see where my sense of how the universe should be ordered was disturbed. And in my perfect universe several hours of one’s work did not disappear at the flick of a switch.

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Loser, by Beck

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I used to have a friend who was paranoid-ish. He didn’t own a credit card of any kind, being suspicious that there were people out there who would steal his money. He owned a computer but used it basically as a large calculator/paperweight, since it was never connected to the internet. He worried that someone might get inside his head and he had no intention of letting that happen.

And that was in a much more innocent time, 40 years ago. He and I have lost touch, and I can’t help but wonder what he thinks today of social networking, online banking, and sexting. Must be hard for him to sleep at night, worrying about someone breaking into his home and surreptitiously connecting him to an ISP without his knowledge or permission. It would be a new sort of cyber-crime, in that they don’t take anything the night they enter your home, but over the years to come you are electronically whittled down to poverty and insignificance.

Because once you turn that sucker on and hit that first clickbait screen telling you to come see the 100 most vicious dog breeds owned by 100 of the worst actors of all time, you have a 50/50 chance of disappearing forever into bogus-land.

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I have what might charitably be called irregular sleep habits. Robin and I retire early, as befits persons of our seasoning, but I am usually up again before midnight. Then there will be a variable period of hours where I completely waste my time using the internet as my tool of choice, next it’s back to sleep once again, then awakening before 0400, when I finally decide I’ve had enough of this circus and just get up.

This morning during the internet phase I got it into my head that I wanted to listen to the song Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead. And I wanted to listen to the very best version of the song. So I posed that question to the cloud, and while there was not unanimity, the version played at a concert at the Swing Auditorium on February 26, 1977 kept coming up.

This morning during the internet phase I got it into my head that I wanted to listen to the song Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead. And I wanted to listen to the very best version of the song. So I posed that question to the Cloud, and while there was not unanimity, the version played at a concert at the Swing Auditorium on February 26, 1977 kept coming up.

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On Amazon the triple CD of the concert containing the “album only” cut was priced at $135.00, which was not a budget item that I had submitted for approval, so I searched further and found the song once again at the Internet Archive, where it could not be downloaded legally. And yet here it is now for your listening pleasure. Don’t judge me.

Terrapin Station, by the Grateful Dead

After I was done messing around with all of the above electronic stuff, I got up to stretch my legs and found that a beautiful light snow had fallen. Only a fraction of an inch, but enough to make the world pure white. Trackless.

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BTW. The world of the Grateful Dead is not one to enter without a guide. They have released more than 200 albums, mostly live concert recordings, and there is quite a bit of variability in sound quality and occasionally the enthusiasm of the musicians. Fortunately the Deadheads have not all died off as yet, and they are out there vigorously commenting on each band on each album.

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Murmur

jono55

Okay, here’s a lesson, something to ponder. The lowly European Starling is not the most gorgeous bird, walks like it’s got a stone in its shoe, and has no song worth mentioning. A few of them were brought over in the nineteenth century and now their range is nearly all of North America. Hundreds of them can take over a tree in your front yard and literally rain feces on everything and everyone below. 

Why on earth does it exist at all, some might ask? What is the point of starlings?

Well, for one reason, they can do this. Something that might be thought unbelievable if it hadn’t been recorded as often as it has. A murmuration of starlings, they call it. Visual music.

Birds, by Neil Young

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From The New Yorker

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If I really want to upset all of my personal biological systems at once, all I have to do is check to see what the Republican-led states are doing these days.

Recently one of those benighted places decided not to prosecute a woman who had a miscarriage. Imagine that! How progressive of them.

There seems to be something about being a member of that political party that drives one to run around sniffing bedsheets and shining flashlights into cars just to see if anyone might be having the wrong kind of s-e-x in there.

The Party of Family Values is also trying to remove books from libraries that mention s-e-x as well, but have recently run into problems with dictionaries and encyclopedias which persist in reminding us all that s-e-x does exist. And not only does it exist, but it can be enjoyable, does not have to result in pregnancy, and is nobody’s business but the people involved.

There has been a persistent rumor that the GOP is planning to issue social security numbers to individual spermatozoons as part of their program of removing anything resembling science, common sense and reason from family planning and reproductive medicine. So far it is only the sheer numbers involved that have held them back.

The American Dream Is Killing Me, by Green Day

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From The New Yorker

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The Ballad of the Empty Creel

How many times does a man go down to the river, put on those awkward waders and adjust those suspenders, squeeze into hobnailed wading boots and rig up a fly rod, tread clumsily up that same perilous stream, suss out the perfect places for trout to hide, flick the fly to land perfectly into the one quiet patch of water in the middle of a tumult … and then return home without so much as a passing nibble?

How many times before despair sets in?

How many times before he questions his skill and sanity?

The answer, my friends, is as many times as it takes.

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An amazement. I have often bemoaned the sorry state of the cartoons in the present-day New Yorker magazine. They have been largely unfunny, self-indulgent, arch, and bleah. It is of some importance to me because I pilfer from them regularly and must therefore turn to the New Yorker archives for the totally excellent and imaginative cartoons from issues of years ago.

Even thieves have standards.

Imagine my surprise to find not one, but three in this week’s edition that I actually liked. Three. It gives one hope. One of the panels was particularly interesting to me. Fifty years ago I proposed (but did not follow through on) two innovations that I thought would be boons to parents. One was the Velcro wallpaper shown below. The other was shoes for hyperactive children that weighed five pounds each. In this way they could not only avoid being placed on drugs, but they would develop hip flexors like you wouldn’t believe.

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From The New Yorker

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For the first time since her knee surgery Robin and I went XC skiing on Friday afternoon. Snow conditions were excellent and the temperature hung right around 40 degrees. Where we skied was a place with groomed trails a few miles outside the hamlet of Ridgway called Top of the Pines. It is 175 acres up on a ridge with spectacular views of the San Juan Mountains. We had a great time, and there was a total of only 0.5 falls per person for the outing. 

Below are pix borrowed from Top of the Pines’ website because I did not have the foresight to bring my camera and take photographs of my own.(This follows a lifelong pattern of having excellent hindsight but a significant deficiency in its opposite.)

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Catapult, by R.E.M.

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This is for people to whom cats are interesting, even thought they may not live with one. The rest of you are done for the day.

There is a short story in this week’s New Yorker magazine entitled Chance the Cat that I found moving.

The author’s insights were especially intriguing, since they were all about the humans in the story, and whenever the story pointed at the smaller animal he could only describe what he saw. Because who knows a cat?

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