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23
May 23

We play the song “Crazy Life” at the end of this post

I took this photo the other day, and I keep forgetting to publish it. That’s too bad, because it’s a great nod to the apparent lack of thoughtfulness of others. This is outside our building on campus, and these are handicapped parking spots, as you can see from the blue lines and the sign.

All of which makes this installment of Hoosier Hospitality amazing.

You can’t really move scooters unless you rent them, of course. The wheels are effectively seized to prevent free rides. So you have to muscle them around, which is what I had to do. But, on the off chance that anyone needed the space, at least someone was thinking about you.

I can say this about Hoosier Hospitality: it’s alliterative.

We haven’t run the tab feature in a few weeks, and my browser is groaning under the pressure. This is the place where I am memorializing pages that I might want to refer to again, but might not earn a bookmark.

The 25 best documentaries of all time, ranked:

The documentary genre is a more varied one than many people give it credit for. As a type of film, documentaries do usually aim to inform or educate about some kind of non-fiction story or topic, but that’s not their sole purpose. Some aim to evoke certain feelings or experiences more than anything else, others aim to present an argument or point of view in a persuasive manner, and others are mostly concerned with simply entertaining audiences the way a work of fiction might.

Furthermore, some documentaries aim to do a combination of the above, or maybe even none of the above, instead opting to do something else entirely. Exploring the world of documentary filmmaking can be a truly eye-opening thing to do, and reveal worlds or unique perspectives that aren’t as easy to explore through other genres.

James Brown’s historic concert, staged 24 hours after Martin Luther King’s assassination, is now restored and free to watch online. This show helped calm down Boston somewhat. It’s a legendary performance.

6 do’s and don’ts when buying used scuba gear:

Ok, so you’ve decided to buy your own scuba diving equipment. Whether you are newly certified or a seasoned diver, used scuba gear may seem like a great opportunity to save some money. Buying secondhand diving equipment can either be the greatest deal of your life or the biggest mistake, the difference is knowing what to look for.

We like to look out for you guys, so here are 6 tips to buy used scuba gear:

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’:

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

We return to 1998 in the Re-Listening project. For the blissfully uninitiated, I am going through all of my CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a stroll down a musical memory lane. It’s fun. And I’m writing and sharing some of it here. These are not reviews, because the web definitely doesn’t need another quarter-century-too-late alt band review. But they are a good excuse to post videos, pad out some content and have a little fun, which is kinda the point of most music.

This record is from 1997, but from what surrounds it in my old CD books I know I picked this up the next year. I imagine I got it from one of the two independent music stores that were in town at the time, but I don’t remember that part, here. This is one of the alt bands that personified the 1990s, and you can hear that immediately in the first track.

Toad the Wet Sprocket saw this record, their last for more than a dozen years, climb to number 16 on the Billboard 200, both on the strength of what had become a dedicated fan base, but also the single “Come Down,” which settled nicely in the top 40 in the U.S. and in the top 10 in Canada.

That song was so ubiquitous I was certain Toad was putting it on every record, and every musical coordinator had it in shows, movies, and commercials, but apparently not. I can only blame myself, and the A&R people at Columbia Records who had this on the air somewhere within ear shot every 17 minutes of my early 20s.

And here’s Glen Phillips doing “Throw It All Away” solo. I can never decide if this, or the full band, is the better version.

The answer, of course, is which ever you hear live.

The whole record is a fine continuation of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s work. The production is great, it’s hard to argue with the instrumentation. Glenn Phillips and Todd Nichols are in full throat. Everything works and there’s a little something for every mood. But I am always listening to Coil to get to track 11.

This is what I wrote when I finally, finally saw Toad the Wet Sprocket live last year.

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.

And I love Todd Nichols’ sound.

Toad have released two records in the years since, 2013’s “New Constellation,” which was a crowd-funded album, and the Starting Now (2021). Some of their other work, and re-work, will show up later in the Re-Listening project. And like Chris Spencer says at the end of that 1997 video, you can catch them on tour this year, too. We did, twice, last summer, and I’m a little bummed I won’t get to see them this time out. But you can!

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19
May 23

Oh, the laughs we had today

I’ve been working on cleaning up the ol’ email. I use my inboxes as To Do lists, so the email count there never gets too high. Right now there are 20 emails in my inbox and that, to me, is too high.

The other side of the coin is that there are folders aplenty. And sometimes those need to be cleaned out, too. Anyway, today I was able to wipe out the last of the old communiques from a no-longer important folder. This was the graphic Google rewarded me with.

I’ve deleted the label name to protect the innocent, but seeing that … that was a good feeling.

And it was worth a giggle. But not the biggest giggle of the day. But you’d need several anecdotes worth of backstory and 71 words to be able to properly appreciate that one.

After all of that email fun, and other paperwork fun, I got out for a nice little bike ride this evening. It was an easy hour, just 17 miles and change before the dark clouds threatened.

More urgent was the absence of any legs. This, I told myself, was just one more ride to try to feel better in the hardest gears. It was the regular roads, but the third ride in the last six days, after a week or so being off the bike. Just — huff– getting — wheeze — my legs back.

It was an almost perfect ride, though. There are presently four criteria in this category of bike rides. First, it has to either feel super easy or incredibly hard. Second, no matter which of the first, I have to be able to exit the bike at the end with grace and ease. Third, my shoes stay in the clips for the entire ride, meaning I never have to put my foot on the ground. And, fourth, no close passes.

The first did not happen, because the sensations were mediocre throughout. I almost got the second one — but since the first criteria wasn’t satisfied, it doesn’t count, not really. The third one did happen. My feet stayed in the pedals the entire ride. And the fourth criteria was almost met, but for a truck just near the end of the route. Thanks, black pickup truck.

So, really, about one-and-a-half of the criteria were met.

We were trying to recruit, via text message, a colleague and friend to a particular cause this evening. It’s a poli sci, comm theory guy, but he might be professionally miscast. He’s an outdoors man, a keen student of nature. And now he is very much interested in, among other ecological things, the health of the insect world.

Like most serendipitously random conversations that can tolerate puns, I drove the initial joke of insect biodiversity in the media straight into the ground.

My lovely bride? She knows who she married.

We’re still trying to make up ground on the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in order, of course. That’s not the part where I’m behind. I’m behind in needlessly writing about it here for content filler — and embedded videos. So let’s get to it.

We’re in early 1999, contextually, listening to Duncan Sheik’s second record, the 1998 release, “Humming.” He’d gotten accidentally famous on his debut record, which “Barely Breathing” helped drive to gold record status, earned a Grammy nomination and stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a year. I vaguely recall an interview once where he talked about playing small clubs this week, and then giant theaters the next. I’ve always thought, on the basis of nothing more than that interview, I’ve always thought that this release was a deliberate choice to go the other way. Less obvious pop, more introspective art.

That’s the first track. The album title, I’m pretty sure comes out of these lyrics after the bridge. You’re also listening to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which makes several appearances throughout the record.

Atlantic Records released this one as a single.

Didn’t really register on the charts, but it got him a guest slot on Beverly Hills, 90210.

This was the second single, and part of why I think choices were made on this record. Also, why couldn’t they get John Cusack in for this video?

Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but two lifetimes ago when I was a reporter and on the air everyday, I decided to replace vocal exercises with a few musicians. Duncan Sheik was one of those. And, for a time, this record was one of those things I played in my car a lot at 3:30 a.m. on my way to work.

I just rubbed my face, hard, at that memory. Evening typing “3:30 a.m.” made me tired. The point, though, memories of being ultra-sleep deprived aside, the vocal work Duncan Sheik does always impresses me. The man’s still got it, too. I ran across this cover a year or two ago.

These days, he’s not working as a touring musician, but he’s produced a lot of others’ work. There’s a lot of theater credits under his name — he won a Tony in 2007 — and you can find his music is all over movies and TV, as well. He won a Grammy the very next year.

He’ll appear in the Re-Listening project once or twice more, too. And he’s got about five more albums I don’t own, besides. And so I’ll add those to the list, too.

Up next on the list, musically speaking, another staple of the 1990s alt rock scene. But, first, the weekend!

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18
May 23

Another part of the neighborhood menagerie

We sat on the deck for a time into the early evening. The weather was fine, the birds were in full throat, the reading needed to be read. There was a baby bunny on the deck with us. See the chair leg? That’s my chair.

It moved from one side of my chair to the other, but he was otherwise quite still. Stayed by us, too, sitting patiently. I’d read a little and then glance down. Still there. Read a bit, look over for my buddy, still there. This went on for a half hour or so. Probably, it was wondering what we were about.

I half expected it to speak up in a Disney-type voice, wondering when I was going to make with the lettuce and carrots.

We return now to the Sisyphean task of catching up on the Re-Listening project. Overall, this is about listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I figured I’d write a bit about them, embed a video, share an impression or a memory, but never reviews because what the web needs right now is a decades late write up of a one-hit wonder. No, not that. It’s just for fun, and for whimsy which, as I like to say, is what most music should be about. But I’m also chronically behind in the write ups, it seems. So, chronologically, we’re going to briefly return to somewhere in 1998 or 1999. Or, if you prefer, last Saturday.

Often times I can remember which disc came next, but the real fun part is when I have no clue, which was where I found myself, while out running errands, last weekend. When you don’t know what’s next, the transition from one disc to the next might seem even longer. The CD changer makes the disc-changing racket and while the new one spins into action and the laser eye does laser eye things to make the 20th century music play, there’s a long beat of quiet and wonder. What will this be?

This one was pretty bad.

I’m not even sure why I own “How to Operate with a Blown Mind,” by Lo Fidelity Allstars, but I do. It had one single you might remember, and it sat on the US Billboard 200 in the 115th spot. It topped the Heatseekers Albums chart, but, most importantly, it taught me that electronic big beat was not then, and is not now, my genre.

Right now, I’m trying to find a track to embed here, but they just all annoy me. I’ll need to look at the liner notes to be sure, but I am hoping this was a radio station giveaway or something. I’d be disappointed with myself, these many years later, to realize I spent money on this record.

Which brings us to a somewhat better album, and March of 1999, and something that was definitely a station giveaway. (It has the little stamp on it that says so.)

Citizen King’s upper midwestern blend of hip-hop, soul, and punk, on their second album, “Mobile Estates” still holds up surprisingly well, even if some of it has the feeling of someone just learning Pro Tools. (Anyone learning a new production software platform knows what that is like.)

Here’s the big single, it reached the 25th spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.

One of the strengths of the record is how varied they got with the samples. And there’s enough chaotic, everyday noise to either make mastering easier, or infuriating.

There’s some silly low fidelity pretend funk throughout the thing, and all of it feels cheery enough. I have the impression, from this re-listen, that I just played this in the car a lot. It probably got attention from recency bias, until the next stretch of records came along to dominate my listening rotation. And so it was that when the penultimate song began I had almost no recollection of it. But it’s clever in its own Beckesque way.

Then they close the record with a series of totally anachronistic sounds.

This record featured the band’s biggest, broadest success. They split up in 2002. One of the guys bounced around in other musical projects in California, and has since moved to Berlin. Two are well regarded audio engineers and producers. One worked for a long time as a DJ, and even spun records at Lambeau Field before Packers games. He’s still making music these days, among other things.

But that’s enough of this, for us, for now. After this entry into the Re-Listening project, we are only … two CDs behind again.

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17
May 23

They can’t all be momentous

Have you ever had a day where nothing happens, and you still wonder where the day went? You might think that weird, I just think of it as Wednesday.

The building is all but empty. I don’t think I even said anything aloud to anyone today. And, yet, where did the day go? I did reply to an important email this morning, but that was trumped by my peanut butter sandwich, which might have been the highlight of the day.

There will be more to my Thursday, I am sure of it.

Can’t be much less, really.

The highlight of the day was the weather, which was just about perfect. Sunny and mild, it was 74 at the warmest point of the day, but was a warm mid-60s experience on my way out of the office. It was perfect for a bike ride.

The Yankee is fighting off a sinus infection, and so she contented herself sitting on the deck reading, while I set out to turn the pedals by myself. It was just me and my shadow.

The other day I rode down one of my favorite roads in the area. It’s an uppity country road, pretending to be an overly ambitious private drive. Except there are a lot of driveways on that road, but there’s a great downhill and one incredible stand of woods you ride through. I recorded the woodsy part, because everything was so green and perfect.

Today, I rode down another of my favorite roads. It’s a dead-end street off one of our regular routes. I’ve ridden it twice, both times in the fall, and on some of the most spectacular autumn days. This 2019 shot, you may note, sometimes appears as a header on the blog.

I’ve made videos of the ride back out from the bottom of the road. This one was from last fall.

Same road, but from my first trip on it, in October of 2019 — and, yes, YouTube did a terrible job on the compression here. Trust me when I say the video looks much better in its raw form. So much so that I kept it on my phone. Give me a shout, I’ll show it to you sometime …

But, I thought, I should try this road in the springtime. Today was the day.

I overcooked it on the first curve today, so I had to abort the video. (Oh no! I’ll have to go back!) But here’s a photo from approximately the same view as the photo above.

It’s almost as pretty in green as it is in the yellows and reds and oranges of October.

We’re playing catch-up on the Re-Listening project, and today is all about the late 1990s blues. And for late 1990s mainstream blues, we’re talking about Johnny Lang. We’re going to address two albums at once, since they show up back-to-back in my CD books. I think I’m in a mini-stretch of CDs that were part of a bulk purchase. (Did I have to complete a Columbia House contract or something?)

Anyway, these are are out-of-order in my book. “Wander This World” is Lang’s third studio album. It came out in late 1998. He was an unbelievable 17 years old.

Is there a live acoustic version of the title track? There is a live acoustic version of the title track.

Really, if you think about it, Johnny Lang might be the key to the ultimate demise of AOL’s social cachet. What else could they do after that?

There’s a lot of great stuff on this 17-year-old’s record. (I drove listening to this and I still shake my head at that.) This might be one of my favorite tracks, and classic twelve-bar blues.

A blues musician named Luther Allison wrote that song. People called him the Jimi Hendrix of blues, and that’s as good a reason as you need to play the original.

Allison died a year earlier, in August of 1997. In January of that year Lang released “Lie to Me,” his second studio album. This thing hit shelves and, the next day, he turned 16. The title track is the first track.

There’s a fair amount of covers, blues standards I guess we should say by now, on this record. Here’s Lang’s live performance of an Albert Collins classic.

“Good Morning, School Girl” is definitely a standard. You can’t have blues as a genre without it. John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson first recorded it in 1937. Here’s another live performance from Lang.

I included the live performances because, under every video there’s a comment raving about his live shows. Never had the chance to see him live. And, sadly, he doesn’t tour any more. He put out five more albums after this pair, three of them going right to the top of one chart or another. He’s been dealing with some sort of vocal cord problem since the very beginning of 2020. Perhaps the last thing he was able to do is play in the house band for this concert.

It seems he’s gone silent online since then. (Maybe he’s got the whole thing figured out.) Hopefully he’s cashing steep royalty checks.

These are great records, for ears both fresh or experienced, and some of these tracks are probably going to take on some importance in a historical sense. I picked them up for atmosphere — some things just seem like the soundtrack for a party or some other event, but never figured out what that event might be. That has more to do with my imagination than the work, because these two discs are still powerfully strong.

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16
May 23

I criticized the font of the eye chart

I had a nice tomato basil soup for dinner this evening. It aged well.

Which is a thing I can say because the little date stamped on the bottom of the can was well behind me. This is from the Covid 2020 stash. Stuff I bought in February of that year. The Yankee was off to watch a marathon, had probably not even heard the word “Covid” yet, and I went to the store to stock up.

This was the first weekend of March of that year. I hit the grocery store, counted out enough things to get through two-plus easy weeks. Then I went to the hardware store next door and me and another guy there tried to figure out which of the few masks they had on hand were the right ones for the circumstance. I knew a tiny bit more than we did, we made our decisions and parted ways friendly, each with half of what they had — which wasn’t much. At the house I found a big plastic storage bin and stowed all of my new food supplies in it, in reverse order, so the most perishable things, the crackers I think it was, would be on top. I had notes, so that every so often, there would be an injection of those things nearing the end of their shelf life into the diet.

Fortunately we never had to rely on that bin, because grocery store workers were essential workers for a time, whether they were paid that way, or supported that way, or not. For a brief time, as I recall, we even ate better than normal. I remember being on a chat with friends and we were comparing dinner notes and someone shared their menu and I thought, “Who knew dystopia would include crab cakes?” But despite the occasional to regular shortages on shelves, we never had many problems. With the exception of peanut butter, and having to change bread brands for a while, we were exceedingly fortunate.

Over time that bin got out of sight, and then out of mind, but recently I dug it up. Now I’m going to work my way through what’s left inside of it.

Meaning lots of soups. But, around here, we say “Hooray soup!”

There’s a School of Optometry at IU. And you can do eye exams there. I’d never gone, but everyone you ask will rave about it. You’re seen by a student studying optometry, and they are supervised by a professor. The only knock is that if you make an appointment you should settle in, because it takes a while.

So I was ready. Appointment booked, calendar cleared. Showed up a few minutes early, even. And then a tall young man came out, called my name, took me upstairs, called me sir a lot and gave me the full two-hour workup. He’d been doing this clinical internship for about two months, he said, but he had the calm, patient and steady demeanor of someone who’d done this for a long, long time. He’s about halfway through the program, he said, and he plans to go home and practice in Winnipeg, where he studied biology in undergrad.

Also, I am a terrible patient. He got to the point of the exam where he had to drip drops in my eyes and my face is not interested in any of that. By the second time of dripping drops — this is a complete exam — my eyelids just refused to open. I had no control of them. The poor guy had to pry my left eye open, like it was a fight.

It’s a water on my face thing, an anything in my face thing, really. I step out of the shower and must immediately dry my face. In the pool, in the ocean, get that water away from my eyes. The dentist’s office? An exercise in zen patience that I can only just muster. Its those hands in my face.

Which brings up that little blue pen light test. It is attached to the exam station, the one where you put your chin in the little cup. The examiner sits on the other side, all the special lens stuff between you, and one of those devices is a long, slender piece of equipment, the blue light which comes right to your eyeball. Right up to it, he says, which was funny because my poor ol’ eyeballs were so recently traumatized by his foreign liquids.

It is some sort of hand cranked device, I think, and he moves it closer. I’m sure it is operating smoothly, but all of this is happening in the most compact focal plane possible, so it felt, to my traumatized eyes, like it was moving in fits and starts. The aversive part of my brain was not having that, either.

I am a terrible patient, but my intern was great. We had to wait for his supervisor to come in for the final sign off, so we talked about all sorts of optometry things. I learned a lot about things they can diagnose before your GP, which was rather fascinating.

And, I had photos taken of the layers of the back of my eyeballs. My guy said they’d had the machine for just a few weeks, and that IU was one of two American universities that had this on campus. My eyes were examined by cutting edge technology.

He also said “Perfect!” a lot in relation to my eyes. After a thorough exam — because my guy is learning — we can say my eyes are, in fact, pretty good. For my age.

No surprise here, but I am very much behind on the Re-Listening project. So let’s get into it so, over the next several days we can get through it. Before long we’ll finally make it into the 21st century. I think we’re in 1999. Remember, I’m playing all of these in the car in the order that I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, of course, but just an excuse to fill some content and play some music.

How far behind are we? We might catch up by the end of the week. At which point I’ll have probably worked through a couple more discs.

Anyway, it’s 1998 or 1999, though this CD is from 1994. It’s the band’s first studio album, though their second record was their major label debut. So after “Somewhere More Familiar,” I went back and found Sister Hazel’s eponymous record. (Universal re-released it because the entire music business is just a naked cash grab.) No singles, but it does have an early acoustic version of their breakthrough hit, “All for You.”

That track got a whole new recording for their next record, and that second version peaked at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Everything on this particular record feels a lot leaner, somewhere between a collection of demos and a polished high-end production. But sometimes that lets the instrumentation and the heart shine through a bit more.

Also, someone’s dog makes a wonderful guest starring role, which makes the bubba riff forgivable.

The real gem of the record, the one that you’ll want to skip other songs to get to, is the last track, a pretty great Sam Cooke cover.

I’m almost a Sam Cooke purist, but that cover does something right.

Anyway, this was a record for Sister Hazel fans, and, to me, generally a cheery background soundtrack. They’ll pop up once or twice more, later in the Re-Listening project. Or, if you don’t want to wait that long, go see them on tour. I caught them a few times back then, and the boys from Gainesville, Florida (they’ll mention that a lot) put on a good show. They have 28 dates scheduled across North America this summer.