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‘Step high and light’

Just when you thought the sinusitis was done with you, the head thickens once again. Otherwise? Feel great! Except for right around the middle of the head. It’s just a head pressure thing, a let me go and move on abut my day thing, an enough already thing. It’ll be fine soon.

So, it’s back to the OTC pills.

I treated myself to a nice long swim today. The water was warm, 92 degrees the thermometer said, and it is true what swimmers say, you swim faster in colder water.

That’s why I went slow, you see. Has nothing to do with taking forever to get my arms warmed up. Nothing to do with poor form. Nothing to do the continued head cold recovery. It was all about the warm water.

But I did have a nice 3,000 yards of it.

It gave me a lot of time to think of something legendary swim coach David Marsh told me. He has won 12 national team championships and 89 individual NCAA champions, and he’s coached 49 Olympians, so you come around to thinking he knows a thing or two about what happens in a pool.

On a show I hosted, he told me, “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

I didn’t swim a lot then, but I thought I understood his point. But now, swimming lots of laps of my own, I appreciate the point a bit more.

See? I’m slow in the pool.

I’m never shaving anything off my time.

But I bet if Marsh stopped by, he could give me two pointers that would improve everything.

Too bad he’s busy just now, Olympic year and all.

We return to the Re-Listening project. I’ve been playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order of their acquisition. The real point is to just enjoy the music, but I’ve doubled my value by using it as a way to pad out the site with a few memories and some good music. These aren’t reviews, far from it; there are enough of those, and then some, out there. Besides, we’re going back to 2005, or 2006, to discuss a 2000 record.

I picked up “Smile” without knowing anything about it, because I’d been fully bitten by The Jayhawks bug. It was their sixth studio album, and it was a move in a somewhat new direction for the band from Minnesota. The alt-country, jangle-pop sound gave way to a more straightforward pop, sonically.

“Smile” reached number 129 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart, which no one knew existed.

If you picked up this album, the first sounds you heard were also the title track.

It isn’t entirely devoid of the jangle-pop sound we all loved so much. But you can chart the progression all throughout the record.

But you couldn’t overlook the new direction. Probably it didn’t sit well with the purists, but Gary Olson was gone (for the first time) and this was their second album without him. It was like they were looking for something. And it took a little getting used to.

They were clearly exploring new distortion pedals. If you sit with it, though, the lyrics are still strong in spirit. Most importantly, the harmonies were still shimmering.

This was always a car CD for me. A lot of back-and-forth to work, 20 or 25 minutes at a time, for quite a while. I was probably late a lot. Hurried parking lots and the like. I remember I bombarded The Yankee with it, because we were carpooling at the time, but she preferred other Jayhawks records, I think. I also think it’s hard to go wrong. What you get, across their catalog, is material for a lot of different moods.

The Jayhawks are going back on the road next month. And, in October, they’ll be playing a show about two-and-a-half hours from us. This was the first band my lovely bride and I saw together. They were about that same distance away that night. And the next day we decided we, in our late 20s, were too old for driving that far and back in one night for a show, with work the day after. (We were both working morning drive at the time and being in the newsroom at 6 a.m. the next day was not easy or pleasant.)

But this show is on a Saturday. Something to think about.

And with that we are, for the time being, caught up in the Re-Listening project. But there are still about 150 CDs to hear again, and share with you.

Come back tomorrow, we’ll talk about a neat little light.

books / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Jul 24

Mid-century sod

It is so hot, it must be July. Later this week, I’m shopping for ice vests. Summer just feels different, the older I get, and it is, of course, getting hotter, too. Maybe I should invest in ice vests.

We sat in the water to read. Shade, body-temperature water and good books. There was little relief in the activity. But it was a lovely activity.

I finished reading a biography on Gino Bartoli, Road to Valor. It’s one of about 250 books you can get on Ginettacio, any number of which are quality reads. It’s one of the handful that focuses a bit more on the Gino the Pious aspect of the man. Champion cyclist, hero of Italy, Resistenza italiana, who had his best years on the bike taken away by the war, a man who nevertheless used his bike to save an uncounted number of people’s lives during that time.

Among his highlights, Bartali won the Giro d’Italia in 1936 and 1937 and the Tour de France in 1938. Then the war, and when it was time to race again, he was already viewed, in his early 30s, as an old man. And so the anziano won the Giro again in 1946, and the Tour in 1948. It was, and remains, the longest between Tour wins and the second longest such streak in the Giro, which brings us to his rival, the great Fausto Coppi.

Coppi was the vanguard of the next generation of great Italian bike racers, another top talent, and he didn’t want to sit in line behind the old man, hence the rivalry. The book oversells it a little. There are stories, not included here, of how the two got along and worked together, even at the peak of their rivalry. But that duality doesn’t lend itself to drama, one supposes.

(Coppi would later set the mark for the longest interval between wins in the Giro.)

Everything about Bartali’s life — short of his riding a bike at the absolute peak of his powers — strikes you as a hard life. But it isn’t a hard read. The authors, Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon, took great pains with their source material and interviewed many people who knew Bartali. He was the subject of some of the myth-making, lyrical style of mid-century Italian journalism, but none of that was used here. Instead, this easy breezy read comes off a tiny bit elementary. It’s a backhanded compliment: I enjoyed the story they were telling. I wanted more of it.

There are other stories about his time during the war that deserve more attention. He put some of his Jewish friends in an apartment he owned, hid people in his cellar. The biography discusses his ferrying messages and forged documents through the Italian underground, hiding them in the frame of his bike and risk his life, trading on his celebrity, to move this information from one place to another. There are varying accounts of how this played out with the fascists and the Nazis, but that gets glossed over somewhat. There was no mention of his leading refugees toward the Swiss Alps in 1943. Some of the gloss is understandable. It wasn’t something he talked about, and a lot of it are now vague and, contemporaneously dangerous diary entries others kept, or decades old recollections. Bartali himself told his son, “One does these things and then that’s that.”

It was an act of his faith, and then, like many people, he simply tried to return to his life, tried to build a new and better one. And chapters and chapters could have been written about that, for most of us are fortunate enough to not know the experience. Just after the war, for example, when Italians started racing bikes again, they did not race for money. No one had any. They raced for chickens. Or for supplies. Or, in one instance, there was a race for pipes, that the winner gave his community so they could continue rebuilding their infrastructure.

There are always a lot more to these stories, is all.

I had a 2,500 yard swim today. The water was about 92 degrees. It felt a bit warm for a swim.

Swimmers say they swim faster in colder water. I swim slow enough, under any conditions, for this to be a negligible, to say nothing of perceiving it. But I did notice how warm the water is. Can a pool feel sticky?

Just as I finished my laps, I saw a plane turning north overhead. I waited until this moment to take a picture, because I thought I might need to make up a navel-gazing essay about two planes occupying the same plane and what it means for time and conspiracy theories and the efficacy of windshield wipers at speed.

But then I rememebered, it is Tuesday, and I’m not pressed for content.

Still, airlines aside, do you think a pilot ever gets up in the air and aims for a contrail? Just to break it up?

And while you think about that, please enjoy one of our stands of brown-eyed susan flowers (Rudbeckia triloba).

If anyone needs some for an art project, a bouquet or flower pressing, let me know. We have plenty.

And, finally, we return once more to the Re-Listening project. Longtime readers now this is an intermittent feature. In my car, I am playing all of my CDs, in the order of their acquisition. Here, I am writing about some of what I hear. It is one part reminiscence, one part excuse to put some good music in this space and entirely an excuse to pad the site.

I’ve been behind on the Re-Listening project for … I dunno … roughly a year. (See? Very intermittent.) It looks, though, as I’ll be caught up next week. That’s a weird feeling. But I digress.

So we’ll return to 2005, when I was listening to the 2004 Harry Connick Jr. release, “Only You.” it was his 21st studio album. It earned a Grammy nomination debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and hit the top 10 in the UK and Australia. All of the tracks are Baby Boomer standards. I think I picked this up used.

I played this whenever The Yankee was around so I would appear cultured.

My favorite songs were full of understated little moments. The Temptations and Stevie Wonder and a big handful of other recording artists made it famous, but Connick had to do it too. He puts some nice coloratura to it. And that little vocal nod at 1:24 somehow makes the whole song.

I was, and remain, a fan of this one.

And since we’re listening to standards, the next CD up in the Re-Listening project is a Frank Sinatra greatest hits, another 2005 library find. I prefer Deano, but this is pretty good. “Nice ‘n’ Easy” spent nine weeks atop the Billboard chart in 1960, and was nominated for the Grammy in the Album of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance and Best Arrangement categories. It went gold. Old blue eyes could do no wrong, right? He was doing some things right here, to be sure.

It’s one of those records that is useful to have, but I never really played all of that much.

This is Sinatra’s take of a Hoagy Carmichael-Ned Washington classic. It’s beautiful.

There are 16 tracks, almost all of them are performed as ballads. The notable exception is the first song, the title track.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote this one for an operetta that was never realized. Ginger Rogers and Fred Aistaire brought it to life, Billie Holiday immortalized it. And then came Sinatra. There’s a story out there about how he had to really understand a song, really feel a song, to be able to sing it, and this song is on a slow enough roll that you can think about that for a bit, and then, sure enough, you hear it.

Most of the tracks here will be at least passingly familiar to casual listeners, but you have to have an affinity for 1947 music to know this song. Those times when I play this CD I marvel at how I’ve never heard this before. In 1947 Art Lund, Dick Haymes, Sinatra, Dennis Day, The Pied Pipers and Frankie Laine all had a hit with it. (Lund’s version topped the charts. Sinatra’s peaked at number six.) The Four Freshmen, Andy Williams and Dean Martin all made renditions later as well. But the first time I heard it, it sounded like this.

Those crying violins put you in that cafe, but the voice really puts you in the seat at the table.

And that’ll do it, for now. The next time we return to the Re-Listening project we’ll try some 2000 Americana pop from Minneapolis. And then I’ll be caught up. Unless I get behind again by then.

adventures / cycling / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
2
Jul 24

What a big screen we have

Really, the only problem is that I’m tired. I’ve had a mild cause of symptoms of most everything that you’ll find listed with sinusitis. Oddly, each comes and goes. What troubled me last night was fine this morning. And something else comes along to be the day’s first mild ache or pain — always underlined with a cough, which is, usually, italicized by the gentlest sniffle I’ve ever encountered.

Always, when my sinus decide to bother me it’s days of not being able to breathe. This time, thankfully, that’s not been an issue, which is odd. And oddly welcome.

The biggest thing is just the fatigue. Nothing like a bit of seasonal doldrums in the middle of the summer.

The weather is nice. Nice and warm.

Meaning it was a good evening to try our new setup. Projector, screen, sports.

Just in time for the Tour, the Olympics and maybe some late night old movies, too.

Set up was easy. We’ll improve our storing technique in time.

Speaking of bike riding, here’s my little chart of miles through the first half of the year. Really flattened out the last two weeks, huh?

In the next few days I’ll have a lot of riding to do to make up for it, whatever that means.

Here’s a quick clip from our dive in Cozumel a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got five more clips to put here after this ray, which you can see up close. The trick is to be behind the group you’re diving with, watching which way the critter is going and take a good angle to arrive at the same place.

In our next video we’ll see a flounder! It’ll be great!

It is time to return to 2005 and the Re-Listening project. You’ll recall that I’ve been listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. You get to read all about it, because I’m padding the site with some music and, usually, stir up a memory or two. Though there are no strong memories attached to these records, which were library pickups for me.

The first one was the BoDeans debut “Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams,” which T-Bone Burnett produced. It was simple and big, the start of something big for the roots rockers from Wisconsin. Most of us learned about them from the later “Closer to Free” or “Good Things,” but this is where it started. And if you put this on, in 1986, it would have been a stylistic revelation.

The third track has always been one of my favorites. The interplay between Kurt Neumann and Sam Llanas works so well. And it’d do so for a long time, until suddenly it didn’t.

One more quick one.

OK, one more and, remember, this is 1986.

And the good news is, there’s a sweaty bottle out there with your name on it. The BoDeans are touring the U.S. right now.

The next addition was also a library grab — probably I got it on the same day. It was Sister Hazel’s fifth album, “Lift,” from 2004. Consistent sound from the band, though I think I’d generally had my fill by then. I found a few tracks on here I liked, but mostly I was pleased it was a library find.

It’s like a small, smoky venue of nuevo Florida Keys, as heard in Gainseville, for the rest of us. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, if it is for you.

But for their terrific earlier success, they could be the best cover band in America.

And Sister Hazel is on tour right now, as well. And the next time I make you sit through my old music, we’ll be playing a few standards and classics.

adventures / memories / SCUBA / video — Comments Off
26
Jun 24

Ocean videos

This time last week we were in Mexico. It rained and stormed a lot, so we didn’t get to do all of the diving we’d planned. This time last year we were in the process of moving. It was hot and dry and smoky and stressful. This week we’re dealing with tree damage at home from Sunday’s storms.

I’ll let you decide which is better, but it certainly wasn’t this time last year.

So let’s talk about last week, instead.

One afternoon we just played in the waves. The water was almost rough, but we had a nice time getting beat up. There’s nothing to this video, but a little girl’s smile in an adult’s happiness.

I recorded quite a few of those. Most aren’t very well composed — waves — but, looking at them now, they were consistent. Every time the wave slipped away from her, she stood up and immediately turned for the next one. She’s not even aware of it. It’s an ingrained move, one stemming from years playing in the waves. That’s what I love.

She’s always looking ahead.

These were the best clips from our two-tanks of diving in Cozumel. As you can see, the visibility was pretty low, but we did see a few nice things.

I’ll cut these into individual pieces for anyone who plays favorites. Some people just like to watch the sea anemone wave endlessly. Also, if you didn’t watch it all the way through — shame on you — there’s a giant turtle at the end.

cycling / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
11
Jun 24

A mechanic, two hours of exercise, and music that still holds up

Took my lovely bride’s car to the shop yesterday and got it back the same afternoon. Regular maintenance sort of stuff. But things are better, she said.

The guy has a shop in the middle of a neighborhood. It’s a two-bay shop, with a slab that’s not big enough for the cars he has on the property. His office is all the way in the back, it’s a … careworn sort of place. That isn’t ordinarily the right word for this sort of thing, but it fits. No one is especially happy when they have to see their mechanic. You take a little angst and stress and — depending on your pocketbook or what’s going on — maybe a little anxiety to your mechanic. People bring in the things that make something careworn.

The couple of times we’ve been there, I’ve seen a few fishing poles in the front room. They’re just sitting there, on a pile of stuff that looks like it hasn’t been moved in a long time. Two rooms back, there’s the guy. A bit on the tall side, thick all the way around. Always wears a bandana. He strikes you as a time-is-money guy. He’s economical with his words, because if he’s talking with you he isn’t making money elsewhere.

I’m not even sure what the guy did to her car given the small amount of money he charged. I asked him to look into something about my car, too. And maybe he will. If he does, maybe he’ll charge me a low, low price, too.

It’ll cost more.

Monday was a beautiful, mild, sunny day. Today was perpetually overcast, but Monday was just lovely. The sort of day where you could unassumingly spend too much time indoors. The sort of day where you wouldn’t even notice it. I spent too much of it inside.

I did go for a little 30-mile bike ride, my first in eight days. I felt like I needed a few days after my last one, and then other things come along and fill your days and before you know it, you wonder if you’ll remember how to balance the thing. It’s embarrassing.

They closed a road while I wasn’t riding. The first sign I saw said the bridge was out. It’s an overpass over the freeway, and I figured it couldn’t be really out, because that would have inconvenienced the motorists below and surely I would have learned about this. So I ignored the signs and the barrels, rode right around them and up to the bridge. And only when I was on the thing did I worry, but the bridge is an engineering marvel and, halfway over, I rationalized that if it could hold itself up then whatever was going on wouldn’t be challenged too much by one guy and a bike.

Only nothing was going on with the bridge. The issue was a little further down the road. This was the issue.

Once I got around that I had, of course, another little stretch of road that was closed from the other direction for the same reason. Almost a mile guaranteed with no traffic. It was lovely! I should just go back and ride that over and over and over again, for as long as it lasts.

Meanwhile, last night was the night the local volunteer fire department … practices driving their trucks around? They actually closed down one road, and a volunteer who takes his traffic directing duties very seriously waved me onto this road.

I’ve never been on this road before! A new road! This particular area is laid out in a wide country grid, so I knew exactly where it would go. It was almost like being lost, but not nearly as fun. Being lost when your legs feel good is just about the most fun thing you can do on a bike. The other day The Yankee was telling me about a ride she had without me where she got turned around for a while and I said, “Really!?” a little excited, and a little jealous. So when I’m not haunting that closed road I need to find more new roads. (I have one in mind just now.)

I saw some beautiful cattle enjoying their evening graze.

Soon after, a fire truck passed me. And I met that rig two more times. I’m not at all certain what they were practicing. (And I know for certain it was VFD practice because they’d deployed signs in some of the areas that were impacted.) Maybe they have new drivers.

Early this afternoon I went for a swim. I put my camera on the bottom of the pool to document the experience.

The experience was laps. I swam, slowly, 1,250 yards. All part of the build up. The build up to swimming more, later. As usual, it took a while for my arms to feel like doing laps. The first 50 yards or so felt great. The next 600 and change felt sluggish. Somewhere between 700 and 735 yards, though, I felt like a champion swimmer. Long build ups, short peaks. Typical.

Actually it felt like a nice swim from about 700 yards through to the end, though I was ready to be done at the end.

Ever since I was a little boy, I said in my best Robert Redford voice, I’ve always gotten hungry around the water. Playing in it, splashing around in a lake, wading in a pool or swimming medium distances, they would all create the same deep hunger. It’s a familiar feeling that a lot of little boys and girls get. Only it never left me. I came to think of it as a physical and a mental need. I can just look at the water and get hungry, was a joke I told my friends. And so I had a second lunch today.

Which was great because, in the later afternoon, and into the early evening, I went out for a casual little 25-mile bike ride. I saw this tractor, which, if you look carefully, is dripping something on the road.

And I set three PRs this evening, all on (little) hills. I am not at all sure how that came to be, but I’ll take it.

Let us return, once more, to the Re-Listening project. As you may know, I’ve been listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing a bit about them here, just to pad the site, share some good music and maybe stir up a memory or two.

And today we reach back to 2005, to listen to a CD that was released in 1995, Son Volt’s debut, “Trace.” Uncle Tupelo’s Jay Farrar left the band and that lead to the creation of Son Volt and Wilco (Uncle Tupelo sans Farrar). Wilco’s debut was released first, by a few months, but Son Volt’s debut, in September of 1995, was a bigger hit. Either way, listeners one. (Both bands were, and are, terrific. Two alt-rock, alt-country bands are better than one.)

“Trace” was a reasonable commercial hit, peaking at number 166 on the Billboard 200 chart and soaring to number 7 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. Perhaps even more importantly, it was a critical success.

“Windfall” was the first single, and the first track. This was the first Son Volt sound most of us heard.

Something about Farrar’s voice that conveys a desperate, lonely, honky tonk feel that you didn’t get a lot of at that time. It was the nineties! And this, for me, was a library pickup to help fill an important gap in the collection.

Here’s the thing, though. These guys could absolutely rock.

The first time I saw them live was at Midtown Music Festival, in Atlanta, in 1998. It was a three-day, seven-stage show. There were more than 100 bands there, absurdly good acts, and you could see the whole weekend’s worth of music — if you were willing to sweat and stand for the whole thing — for just $30 bucks. Son Volt played early Friday. Just after that we saw the Indigo Girls and in between songs Amy Ray said they’d been over to see Son Volt, too. “God bless those guys,” she said.

I saw them once more, the next year. On Valentine’s Day, in fact. I took a girl to a first date to see them. I’d met her in a record store — and somehow it seemed that we knew each other, or the same people, or people thought we knew one another — and music was important to her. Soon after, we worked together. I got tickets to the show and she decided to call it a date, which was unexpected, at least by me. We had a nice time, and I am came to find out later that I passed many tests that night. We dated for four months after that.

She’s manages a big construction company and is married to a realtor. They live close to the beaches where she grew up, close to her family. It looks pretty perfect for her. I wonder what sort of music she’s listening to these days.

If Son Volt is somehow on the list, she’ll have to travel to see them this summer. They are playing a few festivals. Still rocking.