Funny, how quickly back-to-normal gets you back to normal. I’ve been a bachelor the last two weeks, but my lovely bride returned from a much-deserved family trip yesterday. We, of course, hopped back in the car and went over to Cincinnati for the rock ‘n’ roll show. We got back just around midnight last night. And this morning it was the alarm, a quick bike ride into work, and watching the work over at the half-gone Poplars Building.
I wonder if I can call it the Pop Building, then.
This evening it was leave promptly for a quick bie ride back to the house. We had to return a rental car and that place closes at 6 p.m. After that, dinner, catch up on the new Game of Thrones show, House of Exposition And Time Jumps and then get ready for bed.
Back-to-normal happens quick.
Yesterday in this space I shared some clips from the rock ‘n’ roll show. Toad the Wet Sprocket opened the show. Here’s photographic proof. They had an eight-song set.
I’ve been listening to them for almost 30 years, now, and I’ve seen them twice. Both this summer, 18 songs total. Worth the wait is a weird expression here — particularly since the first show was supposed to be in 2020, and the Monday show was a spontaneous add-on that was, itself, postponed from last month, and — why did I wait to see a band I enjoy? Surely, somewhere along the way, there were intersecting opportunities. Right? But who knows?
Toad opened the show, and the Gin Blossoms were the featured act. They did a six-song pure nostalgia set (down from the nine songs we saw from them in July). And that was fine. I’ve managed to see them a half dozen times, I think. Same jokes, same material. You’re there for the vibe, and to try to reclaim the unreclaimable feeling of a younger day. It’s illusive; it’s Sisyphean; it’s impossible and melancholy.
So, then, Gin Blossoms are perfect for that.
That’s a hasty, from-the-hip mix I made on my phone just now. I am surprised how well it works.
The rest of the week we’ll fill out this space with Barenaked Ladies. (Lots of clever lyrics for titles, too!)
adventures / IU / Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off on ‘To give a little something even though he gets behind’ 29 Aug 22
They are making progress. Progress is being made, of the destructive sort. Just across the way is the building where Elvis slept. And, before that, a bunch of college students, and then some guests to the city, and then people worked in there. Now the building, long in the tooth in it’s seventh decade, as being pulled apart. A green space will be where the Poplars Building is. This only means that no one has decided on a better use for it yet.
I wonder if the person who had the room-converted-to-an-office knew they had Elvis’ room. Seems like you’d spend a little time trying to figure that out, no?
Anyway, we’re several weeks into this now, and they were scraping away ferociously on the east end of things today. No ETA on when the job will be completed, or when the adjacent parking deck will reopen, but I shall try to keep you up-to-date on this, the least useful, interesting or successful feature on the site.
Let’s balance that out with the most successful feature on the site, the weekly check on the kitties. They’re doing just great. Having a ball. Despite my playing zone defense these last two weeks, don’t let them fool you. They will try. But I have documentary evidence. Here’s a blissed out Phoebe enjoying an evening cuddle.
And here, Phoebe is surveying her queendom in a most grand style.
Poseidon, meanwhile, is playing the role of the jester of the royal territory. He often does.
And, last night, he got in a bit of reading with me. It was, again, a nice cuddle. Don’t let him tell tall tales. He will tell tale tells, fib, fabricate, dissemble and lie.
We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show tonight, making for a long but fine day. Earlier this summer we finally saw a 2020 concert in Indianapolis. It was postponed, twice, because of Covid, but when we finally got to see the show, it was great. Concert tickets purchased in 2019 age well, turns out. That adventure was a wonderful little return to normal — whatever that is these days.
The same bands were going to be playing Cincinnati last month, and The Yankee found a good deal on resell tickets and made a good impulse buy. But someone in the tour got Covid, so they had to postpone that show. We found out at the parking both of the concert. It’s a quick two hour drive, and the weather was nice that evening, so we walked around a bit of Cincinnati and made silly videos that never got used anywhere, I’m sure, and had some acceptable-north-of-the-Ohio-River pork barbecue.
Tonight was the rescheduled show. Or, to be more precise, tonight was the re-re-re-rescheduled show. The original was in 2020, and then they tried to run it in 2021. And then again, and now, finally … oh, and a thunderstorm was moving through lower Ohio.
But the lightning stayed away, and the 90s and turn-of-the-century pop music blared forth. Another great show, even if we knew the setlist.
As an added bonus, I can spread out music on the site for the next three days. So here’s Toad the Wet Sprocket, playing all the alt radio mainstays of the 1990s.
I don’t know if Crazy Life was my first protest song or the first for my slice of my generation, but I’m pretty sure it was the first one I really noticed. The first one I read about. And I read a lot about Peltier. I’ve never really settled on how I felt about it, not really, but this is Wounded Knee.
The Eighth Circuit thought a jury would have acquitted him had information improperly withheld from the defense been available, yet the court denied a new trial. And if you really dive into the story it’s easy to question how the system was used. But I don’t know, not really. None less than Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama have campaigned for him, though, and that means something.
The point is, this song made me look it up, and think, and ask questions of things in general and specifically. And I probably shouldn’t like a pop song this much, but anything that scrapes your brain for a quarter of a century is worth noting.
They did a Best Of album in 2011 — and it’ll come up much later in our regular music feature — in part to regain control of their masters. They reworked a few small things in some of their songs, including the ending of this one. This is still good, but I much prefer the original.
Toad opened the show, playing a short set, but most of their hits. In fact they removed two songs from the previous show in Indy, for whatever reason.
It must be weird to be a still-working band, on what is the growing and, hopefully, lucrative nostalgia tour circuit, knowing you can only get in so many of your songs. Of their eight songs tonight, seven singles, six of which charted, were released to great success in the early or mid-90s. The newest song they played was a ditty from 2013. I’d guess most of the audience wasn’t familiar with it. They released a new album last year, all new material, but not the first selection made the set list.
If you can play a half dozen top 10s decades hence, and people still pay to see you do it, you play the hits.
Speaking of which, more of that tomorrow in this same space.
My afternoon meetings were canceled. It was a slow-moving Friday, then. And that’s just fine! I disposed of some balloons that had lost their helium. (Helium atoms are small enough to leak through the balloon and escape. Now you’ve learned something today.)
Someone buys balloons for a few of the opening week festivities and, is it just me or do they deflate faster these days? Anyway, the balloons get moved around from space to space for this reception and that welcome and so on, until they’re just rolling around on the floor. Someone has to deal with them, and I went to graduate school, so it may as well be me.
I use scissors to put a small slit in the base of each balloon so the air can escape and to avoid a lot of popping sounds. No need to cause a panic, I’m already causing a mess. Those ribbons go everywhere when you’re cutting them free of the weighted base, in this case another balloon filled with sand.
But that was only the fourth or fifth most exciting thing that happened today. There was also watching the work at the nearby Poplars Building. The cleanup continues, today starring a few excavators moving rubble from here to there. You can just see them in between the trees.
Perhaps next week they’ll get back to scraping down the building. The point of this exercise is to see the progress of the destructive process, after all.
Then again, there’s rain in the forecast for the first part of the week.
I rode my bike to work, as I have been doing these last several weeks. But that’s taken the place of normal bike rides, for the most part. And also I’m carrying my bag, and riding through the city and it’s just not the same. So I decided to ride this evening. But, I figured, instead of starting at the house I could use campus as my jumping off point, and ride to the other side of town, which is rare.
So here’s my shadow selfie tapping out the miles on one of the only flat roads around for miles.
I’d laid out this route on a map and then mostly followed it from memory. It was a lumpy route.
Also on that flat section, I found a nice optical illusion. This road parallels the interstate, and there’s little more than a jersey barrier with glare shields separating the two roads. At about 25 miles per hour the shadows started going the wrong direction.
About 20 miles in, and starting the evening turn back to campus I ran across this sign. Normally, taking pictures of signs is a waste of time, and they’re never a good photograph, but knowing I had a few climbs ahead of me, it gave me a little chuckle.
It isn’t a barn by bike, but a bin by bike fits the bill. I’m assuming this corn will be going in there before long. (I set out on this long ride with no fuel and only one water bottle and, yes, at one point some of those cornfields seemed like a good idea. (That would have been a bad idea.))
There is a fire station out on this route that has a water fountain in the parking lot. They’ve even labeled it “water for bikers.” Pretty thoughtful of them. And I took advantage of that handy resource coming and going. There’s a big hill by that station, and since I went by it twice that means I went down the hill and up the hill. I don’t know if I’ve ever been down it before, but I did so with some hesitancy because who knows how it will go. It fit with the theme of most of the ride and I seemed a bit cautious and unsure of everything. When I came back that way I was just four seconds off my fastest ever ascent of that hill. Fast for me, then, slow by every other possible metric.
In between the hills, though, you do get some flat stuff. This is in some little valley that would probably be otherwise unremarkable, but for the angle of the sun as I was passing through.
I got back to town, and to campus, after a two-hour ride. Then I had to put my backpack back on my shoulders, now heavier than normal.
It was after 7 p.m. by then, of course, and the flow of traffic was all different, so the most amusing thing happened. I did the whole commute — across campus, through two neighborhoods and a huge commercial district, and then back into my neighborhood without having to take my foot out of the pedals. That was a goal I devised and said out loud just two weeks ago. Speak it into existence, as they say. That really works!
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.
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.
