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14
Sep 22

A musical catchup

I am woefully overdue on an update to the Re-Listening Project. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car, repeating a project I did a few years ago. I didn’t write about it then, but using it as a bit of content now. And you’re along for the ride. What you’ll read today aren’t reviews, but maybe a few highlights or memories.

And the Re-Listening Project is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as so much of music should be.

If you watched any MTV in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, you saw Seven Mary Three. That is, most assuredly, how I discovered the guys from Florida. Their label debut, “American Standard” was rapidly surging toward platinum status and Jason Ross was screaming in everyone’s ear. And if that strikes a familiar cord, then you remember “Cumbersome” and “Waters Edge” and some of those last dying blooms of Gen X angst. (Or were these the first roars from the millenials? Hard to know.)

Anyway, this was the place where grunge and the pure rock of that era intersected. It was right-place, right-talent, right-A&R-staff, right time. And we’re going to hear more from 7M3 in due time. So as not to overburden you, dear friend, here are just three songs. All of these diverge from the over-the-top intensity of their singles, but also hinted at where they were going.

They evolved in interesting ways, releasing seven studio albums and one live record. I have at least four of them.

The math doesn’t make a lot of sense in this song. So I’ve decided it is hyperbole, which lets me just get back to enjoying the song. Which is good, because it’s a great little rock tune.

I’m pretty sure I bought this CD because of my roommate. He loved this song. I can still see us riding around in his pickup pumping this through the old worn speakers in the dashboard.

I don’t know if it is a false memory, but I can just seem him banging out the drums on his steering wheel, with that big perfect smile on his face. He was a good guy, and I always think about him a lot when I hear this record.

And to really shake things up, the next disc in my first CD book was “A Kind of Magic.” This was Queen’s 12th studio record, a quasi-soundtrack to the first Highlander movie. If you think there are a lot of things going on in that sentence, you are correct. Any number of them might be quirky on their own, but in this combination, they make for something totally weird.

It was an immediate and huge hit in the UK. Stayed on the charts there for more than a year, spawned four hit singles. This record peaked at 46 in the United States, but was a top 10 in Argentinia, Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany. And, yes, we’re going with quasi-soundtrack. No official soundtrack was produced for Highlander. Six out of nine songs on the album appeared in the film, although all of them in different forms.

If you remember that movie, though, (and how could you not!?!?!?) this song also became the love theme.

That was a hit single, and one of the better ones. This was not released as a single, but is integral to the movie. And also, shows off Queen’s serious musicianship, punctuated by weird movie interjections.

I am pretty sure I picked up this CD at one of the radio stations I worked at. And I’m pretty sure two songs are the reasons why. “Princes of the Universe” became the movie theme and later, a modified version was the theme of the TV spinoff. Also, Brian May is really bending some strings here.

And while this was a quasi-soundtrack for Highlander, I learned about this song from the Iron Eagle movie, which was released the year before. And, somehow, it got tacked on to both movies. This is an open-road, windows down song, and it still evokes that feeling all these many (many) years later.

It has big allusions to Martin Luther King, Jr., and I did not know until just now that it was a Roger Taylor song.

{{{Fried chicken!}}}

(That part always ruined it for me, though.)

And so we move from the UK to Arizona, for another band I discovered because of moderate rotation on MTV.

People that didn’t take the time to get into The Refreshments probably thought this was a novelty act, or a splash in the pan. But let me tell you, Roger Clyne has chops. And some soul. The Refreshments put out one more record together, got disgusted with the big labels, split up and did some other things. Clyne and P.H. Naffah have another Arizona-based band these days, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, and they have 13 albums out and a huge party-band following. But, for now, a little bit more about “Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy.”

I must have picked this up late in the spring of 1996. I stayed at college. Everyone I knew at the time went off to work or home or wherever they went. But to my freshman way of thinking, if you’re paying rent, you may as well be there. If you’re there you may as well be taking classes. So I took classes. (Made the dean’s list that summer.)

And I listened to this record A LOT.

I don’t know what made the narrative structure work so well on me, but it surely did. Straightforward themes, you could see yourself in some of these dusty roles. And you can belt out the choruses with abandon if no one is around all summer.

What’s great about this record, to me, is that I feel exactly the same today about each of these songs as I did 26 years ago. They all still sit just as they should in my ears.

Maybe it was because I really took the time with this record in one hot, slow summer, and they were writing about the hot, slow world in Arizona and Mexico and added just enough wanderlust.

Also, there’s weird doses of humor mixed in everywhere. And if I had to describe the first half of college in one phrase, I could do far worse than saying “It was weird doses of humor.”

Anyway, The Refreshments were great. Another one of those bands I never had the chance to see live, but one day The Peacemakers will be nearby, and I’ll be there. It will be a glass-raising party.

I had one more musical addition. Some label sent me a maxi single of a band they were pushing. It was a hit in southern California, I guess. But they never caught on elsewhere. And the tracks just weren’t good. I made the mistake of googling the band. They managed to put out two records. And at least one of the former members is still in music. His website told me he composes stuff for games and a few movies and slot machines these days. He looked happy. He referred to his band in a nice way. Took the wind out of my sails about being critical of his old work. (I mean, how would I feel? And you certainly could.) So we’ll end the musical exploration here for now.

I’m about to wrap up Cahill’s book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. I will, that is, if I stop nodding off. (This is a function of going to bed too late, not being interested in what I’m reading. I need to start turning pages earlier in the evening once again, especially for good stuff. And this is a nice book. We’re getting close to it, and while these last sections have defied excerpting, this part is telling. After the fall of Rome, when surviving was the most important thing a person could do in Europe, not “reading” or “writing.”

I suppose the most impressive thing we’ve learned here is how quickly that could happen, over the span of time. Just a few generations of collapsing societies and economies and oncoming hordes and it was almost all gone. Makes you wonder a bit about what it will be the next time.

And, even worse, I must now start to wonder, even as I finish this book, what I’ll read next. (So many good options. Only so many I can read all at once.)

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25
Aug 22

I didn’t know Derdriu and Noisiu either

I sat on the porch for too long this evening, enjoying the stillness of the air. That pushed the rest of the day a little further into the night. Get cleaned up, play with the cats, have a bite to eat, and so on until, finally, it was late and dark by the time I got around to watering the flowers.

I did that in the darkness, because we don’t have lights right over the flowers. Easy enough, though, especially in the dark. Give the spigot a half crank, make sure the sprayer is on mist and then move back and forth a lot. The sound lets you know if you’re on target. I was thinking about different types of leaves and the sound the water makes on them. I was thinking of how this wouldn’t happen to me:

Watering plants, with a gardening hose, being a terribly suspicious activity and all that.

Watering his neighbor’s plants.

The charges against the pastor were rightfully dropped. Seems fairly perverse that they were filed to begin with.

Let’s check in on the Poplars Building, the one too wild to tame, too tough to implode, too slow to be scrapped to death. The cleanup continues on the ground. No tearing down of what’s left of the building today. (Maybe they found the room Elvis stayed in?) Elvis stayed there.

And people know that. It is a remarkable thing for here. It is remarked upon. That’s something to hang your hat on, one supposes. Of course, there’s also a statue honoring the future birth of a fictional war criminal. (The war criminal joke is one of the best in Star Trek. It’s a reliable chuckle. That we have people who put a bust up for a character that’ll be born in 2336? That’s hysterical. There are layers to this, the tongue-in-cheek joke, the get-a-life joke and, finally, this-is-a-remarkable-thing?)

I read this in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization this evening. It’s one part of a poem in the “Táin Bó Cúailnge,” an epic of Irish mythology. Noisiu was killed by a jealous king, and is lamented by Derdriu. “Though for you the times are sweet with pipers and with trumpeters …”

The whole of it is merely excerpted here by Cahill, and I’ve done it an even greater injustice, but if you pull it out and let it stand on it’s own, it’s just as heartrending as the rest of the lament.

A bit later, he gets to Patricius, the fifth-century missionary and bishop in Ireland, the “Apostle of Ireland,” St. Patrick. The first two paragraphs here, they are drive-by sociology, dangerous and liberating, and good enough for a book that I’ll read.

Fragments of a great papyrus.

The next time I need to name something portentous, that’s on the shortlist.

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24
Aug 22

Same same

This was Wednesday, which felt like Thursday, because I thought Tuesday was Wednesday. When I finally came to grips with that and adjusted for chagrin, it made the entire day feel like … Tuesday. Which, just great.

But at least Thursday, tomorrow, will seem a surprise. Even if today, and yesterday, just seemed a repeat. A repeat of every other repeated day that repeats itself. I had one meeting that was more deja vu than meeting, another that was much the same. The same things were resolved as the time(s) before.

I’m even watching the same shows. It’s a weird loop out of time, a long running loop with no end possible. And it’s only a Wednesday. Of August.

There’s one brief moment where my bike points west in the morning, and the sun has cleared the trees and there’s nothing in the road and the pavement is clean and I can take a shadow selfie.

In the evening as I ride back to the house I see different shadows. I’ve been meaning to take a different sort of picture here for some time now, but this one seemed to work in a different kind of way. I like the lines. They, too, repeat.

In between, at the office, the view of the destruction of the Poplars Building shows two good days of scraping. Not sure where the now familiar big orange has been moved to. Maybe there was a more pressing job, or they just moved it out of sight.

But there are some smaller, and no less impressive, heavy machinery tools out there rearranging the debris. I’m hoping they get to that elevator shaft or service core, or whatever it is, soon. In my imagination it’ll crumble like potato chips, or take an intricate and futuristic solution. These are the only possibilities I can picture. It’s empty and air, or a re-discovery of something impossibly strong from the mid-20th century table of elements. The rest is more of the same.

Back to Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. In the third section he’s finally got to Ireland. And after a very light summary of ancient Celtic texts (which read as hilarious, in parts) Cahill quotes Lord Kenneth Clark’s documentary, Civilisation.

So that’s a 1996 pop history book quoting a 1969 BBC2 series. Still resonates. Maybe they were onto something. Or, perhaps, we haven’t found a better understanding. How could we? We’re in the same paradigm.

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22
Aug 22

First day of classes

My legs were tired on Saturday, so I took a bike ride on Saturday. They felt better on Sunday, so I let my legs rest. Today my legs feel only medium, who can figure any of this out? It’s a two-stairs-at-a-time day. Anyway, here’s a little bit of that Saturday ride. I like this portion of the route, because it is easy, and there are trees.

This morning I rode to campus and achieved a goal I’ve had for the last week or so. I wanted to make the trip without having to clip out of the pedals. There are a few tricky intersections to get through, and I benefited this morning from a school bus stopping behind me, and holding up traffic through the first one, a round-about. The second is a busy little intersection for a bicycle, and I timed it right, with a lull in the traffic. Later, I had a red light and a four-lane road to cross. Rather than try to track stand for the whole cycle (which I can’t do for that long) or I wheeled into an empty parking lot and did three donuts at the cell phone store until the light turned green. After that it was easy, a few hills, a left turn, a stop sign, and then … where did all of these people come from?

Oh yeah, classes. Today’s the first day of classes.

This did not sneak up on me. I am sure it snuck on some.

Oh, look, the itchy and scratchy crew are back for more work on the Poplars Building. They’re making good progress, too. You write one thing about them on Friday, and they’re pulling down more mid-20th century … whatever style of building that is all day Monday.

That 1960s dust and debris is probably what the big curtain is for, though today I’ve come to think that the crew is shielding the Poplars Garage from having to see what’s happening to the Poplars Building.

The parking deck will stay. It is currently closed, but — and here I will once again try flexing the power of this blog — we need it to re-open sooner than later.

Hear that, everybody?

It is time once again for the biggest hit of the site, the weekly visit with the kitties. They’re doing great. They just want all the pets. At least they take turns demanding attention, I’m not sure how they schedule that, but it is fairly considerate of them, alternating their neediness.

Phoebe will not share her toys.

Poseidon, meanwhile wants to come outside. Or wants me to come inside. Probably the former, but he’ll begrudgingly accept the latter.

It’s a funny thing, watching that loudmouth meow without being able to hear him because of the glass between. He will be heard, but I will not hear him.

I read Cartman Gareth’s We Rode All Day this weekend. It was a quick read, two short sittings got the job done. It’s about the 1919 Tour de France, the first Tour after the Great War. I don’t know anything of substance about the racing of the era, and then along came this most unconventional book.

It’s told in the first person. Gareth is writing for the voices of four racers and two organizers.

It isn’t my style of book, generally, but I found it growing on me because he kept it moving. Mostly, I want to learn more about those old races — this one was the second longest Tour ever, if I’m not mistaken. It was a different type of racing than the modern version, and in this book Gareth twice makes a point of saying the 1919 race was also altogether different than the rougher in the 19-oughts. An Englishmen writing, in English, for French cyclists using modern English colloquialisms. This must drive the French and Francophiles crazy.

It is interesting, and maybe worth reading, but I’m not sure if it was entirely satisfying.

Last night I started Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. After Rome fell came the Middle Ages. And in this pop history book we’re going to study some of the crossover between those times. Should be fun because, as Cahill points out, historians are experts in a period, but not in the transitions.

The idea is that some people on an island off Ireland saved literacy, the church, western culture and so on. Monks with silly haircuts living in stone huts, not too long after they’d figured out the written word themselves, really. It’s a part of the Irish mythos, but not talked about in the wider world, so here’s Cahill.

To understand what happened in the fifth century, and why Rome fell, he asks why the Romans didn’t notice the problems. What were they doing? To answer that series of questions, Cahill goes back a further century, introducing us to the poet and teacher Decimius Magnus Ausonious for reasons that aren’t yet clear to me. He says his verse is no more fresh than the modern day sympathy card. I’m not sure why it is important to pick apart a man that’s been dead for 16 centuries, but he’s having fun doing it.

So it’s a personal anecdote as microcosm. They did because they could. Resources and needs and distractions and all of that. Cultivation of crops allows for a social evolution, rather than foraging and hunting for your every meal. Cultures can emerge and can flourish and, apparently, write bad poetry.

Ausonious winds up tutoring the heirs to power, and that increasing his status a bit, as well. In times past, being named to one of the two consulships positions was a huge and important honor. By his time, though, it was all coming undone. It was civics, not suddenness.

At least so far. I’ll learn more tonight. Cahill has made this great point about Rome’s notable historians — Augustine, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Gibbon specifically — tending to view things through the lens of their time. (All different, all correct insofar as they go, proving once again that there aren’t often simple answers to complex longitudinal questions.) With that in mind it should be no surprise that something written at the end of the 20th century would see the fall of Rome as taking place with not a little ennui.

Which is precisely when you need some Irish people to show up. And I’m sure they will arrive in this book this evening.

That’s … a lot of semesters on the wall. pic.twitter.com/tatjmd0HaC

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) August 22, 2022

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18
Aug 22

An early night, a long tomorrow

It is official. This building has sort of pox. They haven’t torn down any more of the Poplars Building within the last week. Though work is going on at the rubble level, today.

I’m sure there’s a reason. I’m sure it makes sense right away, but I can only see the cost of non-working heavy machinery. (Where they really make their money!) Perhaps next week they’ll be back at it. Maybe the big crane operator is on vacation this week. Whatever it is, this is slowing down the reopening of the parking deck, which is going to be a problem starting Monday.

And that eyesore will still be here on Monday, as well.

Elvis stayed there once, you know, in the dilapidated administration building’s first life as a hotel. He was booked for two nights. He skipped out on the joint.

Maybe the work crews have, too.

I am contemplating the undertaking of a new project at the house. Here is a hint.

If it all works out it should probably take about two hours. Which means it would take me two weeks, because these things never go to plan.

And just when you have built a rhythm, you make some foolish mistake that makes you second-guess everything. And there might not even be enough of this project to build a rhythm anyway. Many utterances will be uttered. Oaths may be taken. No new skills will be learned. Pride will not be established.

Splinters may be avoided.

That’s worth two weeks, if you ask me.

Watering the flowers. I did this just after dinner.

Dinner tonight was one of those nights where you push up the routine, because I was hungry, and then making a deal with yourself. “OK, 6:30, we heat up dinner.”

And then, “Hey, look, 6:27. Close enough. And then you’re going to eat and go to sleep.”

So I’m that old now.

Oh, look at how that salvia holds on to the water droplets! So long as you have the wonder of small things, how old you are, or how old you feel, might not matter all that much.

That’s what I say, out loud, to drown out the sound my knees can make.

I finished this book this evening. Lighter fare, but I read slowly, savoring words and sentence structures, especially of talented writers.

May Sarton wrote 50-something books, 34 of them were novels or nonfiction, 17 were poetry. This one, if you’ve been here the last few days, is about when she bought her home. Her parents had just died. She decided on a remote lifestyle so she could concentrate on her work, and she settled on a place in a small New Hampshire village. And over the course of the 188 pages of this book she looks back on her first eight years in the home, taming the property, meeting her neighbors, constructing her gardens. She goes on at some length about her gardens. The book is about the people, and the work, and from that she’s drawing the lessons and points she wants to make. She has an incredibly compact style, a great economy of words.

Here she’s talking about a winter of drought, when she was simultaneously being dismissed from a teaching job, and getting a book rejection from a publisher. Then, all on the same day, the artesian well diggers finally hit water, she got a letter with another job offer, and a letter getting that book accepted.

She celebrated by taking a nap.

That nap made a lot of sense today. It’ll take some time to figure out the part about making myths of our lives.

The book concludes a chapter or two later. She talks about the two days of the year that the whole community comes together. Once in March, and again in August. The first is for the big meeting to manage the village, the second is Old Home Day. It looks exactly as you’d imagine. People who have at any time been connected with the village come back. There’s a band, speeches, games. There’s a dance at the end of the evening.

Over the course of the book she has shared her friends, and now she’s showing them at play. And then, in the last two pages, after this admiration for her new neighbors, she shares an anecdote that sours the place. It’s two paragraphs. It seems obvious to anyone that’s ever been a visitor or a transplant to a place and, thus, the complaint is petty. Somehow, though, May Sarton manages to turn that into a part of her love letter. That’s a writer for you.