It has been cold and damp all day. Mid-fifties and wet socks are no way to live, but that’s how we’ll approach the last week of April. The rest of the weekend’s forecast doesn’t look much better. At least next week the sun returns which, hey, April.
It might have hit 55 degrees this morning, in the pre-dawn hours. So, this year, my seven-year-long hypothesis, the Little-500-marks-the-beginning-of-spring hypothesis, has not held.
The long-range forecast suggests we’ll maybe hit 70 degrees … sometime before the first week of May is over. Maybe.
This is our chance to catch up with the Re-Listening project. Catch up, that is, until the next CD is over. Which means we might be behind again by Tuesday. Such is the pace of things, when you’re listening to old CDs in the car. I’m not sure how I run through whole albums so quickly, I will probably run out of music before I figure that out, but 40-or-so minutes goes fast, considering the small amount of road I cover.
Anyway. We’re cruising down memory lane. It is the summer of 1998, the summer of Natalie Merchant. “Ophelia” was her second studio album, her only one to crack the top 10 on the Billboard 200, where it settled in at number eight. It went platinum in the U.S., largely on the strength of “Kind & Generous” which broke into the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay Chart.
That’s the one you remember. The first track, the title track, is a total mood setter.
For some reason it is easy to remember the talent that Natalie Merchant put into all of her work. She left the regular artist route to do other things, but this record is full of examples of a quality of work that her fans appreciate.
And, in the interests of time, I’m skipping over the great wah wah guitars of “Frozen Charlotte” and the piano ballads like “My Skin.” Mostly just to get to the last song, a cover of “When They Ring Those Golden Bells.” It’s a popular and important gospel and bluegrass song from 1887, written by a French immigrant, a man who fought in the Civil War, the American-Mexican War and, for something even more intense, was a clown and a circus leader.
Dolly Parton has covered it. Jerry Lee Lewis has covered it. But this duet between Natalie Merchant and Karen Peris is something to behold.
Like so many things that take place when you’re the age I was when this CD came out, I didn’t have the ability or insight or patience to fully appreciate this album. But what I missed out for in 1998 I enjoy more today. Ophelia is always a fine listen.
Back then, though, I wanted something more like what came out that fall, when Pearl Jam released “Live on Two Legs.” It’s a series of live recordings from their summer tour. It debuted at number 15, and went platinum. It’s a quality of recordings far superior to most any bootleg you might capture. But the band was a bit more restrained by this point — Eddie Vedder was 34, after all, and the rest of the band was right there, too. One review called it a “thank you” to fans. To me, today, it feels more like a valentine to Pearl Jam’s part of grunge. But in 1998, no one thought in that way just yet.
There’s more to the timing in retrospect. This was three years after the band revolted, almost alone, against the Ticketmaster monopoly. That stand effectively clipped their wings in the United States from 1995 to 1998. It’s also two years before the tragedy at the Roskilde Festival. Less important than all of that, the musical landscape changed underfoot.
It is technically proficient for the genre, and a good ride for fans. And, clearly, they don’t want this embedded.
If you play that on YouTube, though, you can hear the full album. It’s worth hearing, even if you’re familiar with the catalog, though there’s not a lot new there. The last time I saw them was a few months after Roskilde. Grown men were crying; it was a bit much. It was in that period of the official bootlegs, and I have a copy of that 2000 show somewhere in this collection.
Pearl Jam, as a band, are still on tour. They have a mini schedule for late this summer. Eddie Vedder is doing a few solo shows, too.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shiver some more.
I visited Chick-fil-A drive-through for lunch yesterday. The local Chick-fil-A now has multiple touch points along the drive-through path. It eats up half of their small parking lot, but they are incentivizing drive-through customers if you’re using their app. We use the app for our regular Saturday lunch run.
It’s hopping at noon on Saturdays, of course, so you roll down the window and talk to three people along the way. First there’s the person getting the order. Then there’s the first merge point, three lanes to two, and the a second person who is controlling the order of traffic. Someone else confirms the order, usually after the second merge point which pulls the two lanes into one line, just before you reach the window. Three or four crew members in that little space, and then two people outside of the window that actually hand you your food. On Saturdays, we briefly interact with four people to get our sandwiches; who knows how many people are in the back doing the actual food work.
The point of having all of those people isn’t to speed up the process, but to control the flow. Your wait isn’t at the window, but in the line, with the slow illusion of progress via motion. The other virtue of the setup is that they can put people outside, or pull them in, based on customer rush.
Take yesterday, which is the point of mentioning this anyway. The early lunch crowd on a Wednesday isn’t particularly busy, so I only talked with two people between entering the parking lot, and making the window.
At the window, a guy was leaning out, waiting for me. Big smile on his face. Gregarious, ready to have a chat. (It stands out here.) My food wasn’t ready he said, so he leaned into the little easy chitchat. He loved this, and he leaned in by leaning out of the window. He asked me how my day was and complimented my pocket square.
He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Instead of having to ask me two or four easy throwaway questions, I started asking questions of him. You could tell this doesn’t happen to him a lot in that job. We talked about the weather and naps and his other job. He works for DoorDash, and I wanted to know if he got to meet a lot of people that way. I asked him if they took care of him there, and how far he drove. And then my food was ready, in my car and I was on my way.
I’d like to think that he somehow took the exchange forward, and was even more enthusiastic with the next several guests.
I once again find myself behind in the Re-Listening project. Somehow a few days go by, and a few more CDs get played and now you have to power through whatever I write about it all here. The point of the exercise being to listen to all of my old CDs, in the order that I acquired them. The secondary point being to write about them here. They aren’t reviews, or the dreaded re-reviews, just an excuse to go down memory lane, and to post a few videos for you.
Which brings us to the only reason most people bought this particular album in the mid 90s.
New Zealand’s OMC released this, their only record, in 1996. I got it as a freebie in 1998. It made it to number 40 on the Billboard 200. On the strength of this song, and three other singles you probably don’t recall, it was certified gold.
How do things catch on half a world away, I wonder. It’d be easier today, sure, but getting airplay from around the globe … it had to be MTV. Whatever it was, the critics liked it.
There is a certain infectiousness to the songs. This was the second single.
This is the third single, and the track that sticks with me whenever I listen to this CD, which is admittedly rare. This is also the first track you hear if you play the whole album and, I like to think, this is why critics struggled to label the record. In 1996, this was a unique collection of sounds.
I bet you never thought of New Zealand hip hop, Urban Pasifika is is called, as influencing the global sound — and that’s OK, I hadn’t put that together before now, either — but here we are, hearing the strains of OMC in other people’s work, and OMC itself enjoying a resurgence on TikTok of all places.
OMC only produced the one record, mostly because of record label disputes. Pauly Fuemana was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder and died in 2010, just 40 years old.
Which brings us to New American Shame. This was released in March of 1999. Didn’t like it then, and I never, ever listened to it. I am so unfamiliar with it that when the first song began in my CD player — it’s always a question of what comes next in the Re-Listening project — I wasn’t sure what AC/DC ripoff I had picked up somewhere. Kiss without the appeal. Buckcherry without the adhesive backing removed. (There’s nothing to stick to here, is what I’m saying.) It’s a power slop dirty rock ‘n’ roll sound that doesn’t appeal to me, with rote mixing and mastering on the production side. This is the first track, which was remixed when the band signed a major label deal, and released as a single. It hit 35 on the Mainstream Rock Chart and, unless this was your genre, I’d be surprised if you’ve ever heard it.
The rest of the record sounds a lot like that. It has its place, I guess. It’s all the sort of thing you’d heard from the annoying pontoon boat just upstream that ruins your day.
I don’t want to play any more of it here, for fear of that very thing.
We’re counting down, because it seems a fun thing to do this week really, and I noticed an unusual thing today.
Everything went green. Bright, wavy green in a big, big way all of a sudden. This is a blurry view of the trees from my campus office. Blurry because, I don’t know why, but I like it.
And this is the same tree, just a few moments later, in focus, and from beneath it’s now bountiful limbs.
But that’s different. This is the same tree, roughly from the same angle as the blurry one, though the linear distance is different.
So that’s three photos of the same tree. Forgive me. It’s all so bright and new still, here in the third week of April, and it will take a few more days for the foliage to feel familiar. It’s like the shock of the seasons. There is that indistinct time where you stand at the door and mentally prepare yourself for one condition outside — hot, mild or cold — but then get something different. It is, in fact, the shock of the season.
Three days until the local, officially recognized beginning of spring. Since 2017 it has always arrived the weekend of the Little 500, the two big bike races.
Ha! I just looked at the weather. Friday, the day of the women’s race, the forecast calls for rain, with a high of 58 and a low of 44. The men’s race on Saturday will be under partly cloudy skies. The high is projected at 54, with a low of 34 degrees. Tomorrow, which has no bearing on this whole spring-arrives-with-the-bike-race phenomenon, the high is 82. Weird year.
Anyway, here’s another photo. A different tree. It just looked cool.
Cool, I say.
I was in the studio this evening with the news team, the penultimate news show of the year. It’s a wonderful feeling when a semester winds down, more so when it’s the end of an academic year, but bittersweetly so. For the news crew in particular, we’ll see a few key people graduate, but there’s a whole platoon of freshmen who have this year gained incredible experience for next year. The news side, I am happy to see, will continue to make good strides, having built a nice pipeline, evenly balanced between older and younger students. Now, they’re always growing and growing, helping each other grow, and I pitch in on the little things.
Tomorrow will be another night in the studio, with the sports gang, and that may be their last taping of the year. Bittersweetly so.
It seems we’re always playing catchup on the Re-Listening project, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing that with Alanis Morissette’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.” The album was released in November of 1998, but I picked it up in early 1999. It was another freebie, and, through the Re-Listening project I have discerned a pattern. I didn’t always fall in love with the freebies I picked up way back when.
From this remove, my time with Alanis Morissette feels like a stream of consciousness ple goes like this: Jagged Little Pill has been everywhere for two years, no need to buy that. Also my roommate has a copy, so … Dave Coulier!? The next one, I’ll get the next one. Oh, there it is on the giveaway table (probably) so put that in the pile.
The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 and set a record for the highest first-week sales by a female artist, a record she held for two years. It stayed on the Billboard 200 for a solid six months, and has moved millions of units … but, because it is the music industry, being triple platinum after “Jagged Little Pill” was 16-times platinum in the US, this was underwhelming. (The music industry is weird.) And I’m going to gloss over all of it.
I’ve listened to it. I tried to dive into it. I paid attention to every track this time through. There are 17 tracks here, the runtime is almost 72 minutes. It’s a long record, one which has never resonated with me. I find that odd, since we all watched her grow up. Grew up at the same time, whatever. The woman has lived her entire life in front of the public eye, all of the stages and phases a person goes through, we’ve seen them. For 1998, this was fine, but watching an artist’s march through life leaves a different sort of longitudinal vulnerability. Some of this feels dated now, though, that I finally figured out what always troubled me here. It’s the background tracks. There’s just too much nasally, head voice harmony on here.
Anyway, the stream of consciousness takes us far beyond this 1998 record, end with the best song, the best performance, I’ve ever heard Morissette do. This was July of 2020, just the right mood during that first Covid summer. Sadly, NBC has taken the original video down. Here’s a taste of it.
It was a perfect performance: a poignant song, a new record, eight years since the last and a full family in her orbit. This is the Alanis Morissette my stream of consciousness is most interested in now, not the 24-year-old from “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” but the confident, multitasking woman at a new kind of peak of her powers. That’s the one worth re-listening to.
The cats demanded to be at the top of the post. The cats know, I’m sure, that they’re the most popular thing going on here. And so Phoebe was happy to pose with a little playful sass.
(And if you think that’s cute, just wait until you see her next photo here. I took it tonight. It’s the most adorable thing in kitty world.)
Poseidon, meantime, is practicing his impersonation of a statue … while we bounce his bouncy ball all around the house.
I’m about half convinced he only plays to make us play, so he can stare at us. Anyway, the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and they’re happy with the extra sun and warmer temperatures they’re experiencing lately.
I had a nice 30-mile ride this weekend. It was hard, in that it didn’t feel easy. But it was the sort of hard that made the overall time a bit faster. The sort that made the legs hurt, that made me a little bit delirious, apparently. This was the best picture.
The Yankee said I must be riding well, because I dropped her twice, and she said she was riding hard. Then again, she caught me, twice, while I fought through the teensiest headwind. So she is riding well, which spells trouble for me in keeping up with her the rest of the year.
Anyway, that was a part of the weekend’s exercise, and not at all the part that makes for sore muscles today. Something in that area between the bicep and the forearm — what’s that called, the elbow? — is protesting mightily today. I am in that phase of a new ache and/or pain where I am still learning the motions that hurt, so if you see me moving slowly to starboard, that’s why.
One of the trees outside the building has reached full bloom, the full I’ll-miss-this-when-they’re-gone stage. The blooms are funny things. You can spend all winter looking at sticks pointing this way and that, waiting. One day you see those little bulbs, those hopeful signals of the future. And then you see the blooms — or the buds if you’re really slow and careful — a few at first, and then the entire symphony.
Just in time for you get used to the inevitability, the persistence of those beautiful colors, it all turns green. Then there’s that day or two required to get used to seeing all of that bright, bright green again.
It’d be nice to have trees that bloomed at different times, is all. And if I had a field carefully arranged with all of them on display in a way that always shows color. I wonder what that would look like. I imagine a gentle incline and spiraling trees, and mounds and mounds of upkeep. That’d really aggravate the arm.
Meanwhile, back over in the Re-Listening project, where I’m enjoying all of my old CDs in the order of acquisition, we are now in January (or February) of 1999. I remember being excited about this, I remember looking forward to playing this for friends, and having some of these songs appear on the radio. It was my second live double-album, which just wasn’t something that came out a lot by then.
It was Dave Matthews fourth album, but this wasn’t the Dave Matthews Band, it was Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, in the first of their third album, and before Reynolds formally joined DMB. (Everybody caught up in all of that?)
Anyway, Live at Luther College at number two debuted on the Billboard Hot 200 in February, Silkk the Shocker kept it out of the top spot, with Brittney Spears climbing fast. Despite all of that, it stayed on the chart for 51 weeks.
This was recorded in 1996, so by the time fans had this disc in their hands in 1999 six or seven of the new songs were comfortable, familiar, hits. But there was still some new stuff to explore.
I liked this one right away, it’s a jam band experiment of acoustic guitar jazz masquerading as a pop tune deep cut.
And the other song that blew our minds, the one I played for everyone, was this one.
That’s what a virtuoso sounds like. I don’t know anything about anything about playing a guitar, but I put this on a lot, and for a long time, wondering what it must have looked like. Clearly, there’s a loop machine in there, but there’s still a lot of mastery to observe.
Fortunately, decades later, Tim Reynolds is still playing with the form, and people started recording it on their phones.
I saw Dave Matthews Band later that summer, the last time I caught them live — just before all of the tickets got outrageous. They have 5 North American dates coming up this summer, and I’m sure they’ll be great shows full of the truly devoted. Reynolds will be at those shows according to his website. Matthews and Reynolds, meanwhile, released two more live double discs, in 2007 and 2010. I had no idea about that until just now, but there should be one or two more DMB CDs coming up in the Re-Listening project. But we have to get through a few more fillers this week.
I’m hungry. Quite hungry, really. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I am due a don’t-eat-much phase, but it seems I’m going the other way. This is a deep, can’t-ignore-it hunger. Lunch didn’t touch it. All the snacks stored away in my office? Not a dent. It is a considered-second-lunch-at-4 p.m. hunger. (Pizza sounded sooooo good.) I dared not to stand too close to anyone wearing a microphone in the studio this evening, lest my tummy start chiming in. After dinner, still hungry. I didn’t even have a big workout today. Makes me wonder how I’ll feel after a bike ride tomorrow morning.
I met a guy from Hearst Television today. The broadcasting giant sent two recruiters to campus to meet students. They did one-on-ones with interested students, I told him I could tell him to hire some of the young men and women he met, right away. They also did an under-attended info session, too.
Turns out the guy was from Savannah. I told him my wife and I got engaged there, and that we got married there. He knows the place. Everyone there knows the place. He lives just up the road, he said. He told me about the owner of the place where we got married. I told him we were just there in December, did the bridge run. Told him we go every year, that we don’t even do the tourist stuff anymore, but just walk around and enjoy the pace of things. I asked him if he had a job for me there. He asked me if I wanted to be a news director. The guy that was the news director in their Savannah shop just moved. I say, who doesn’t want to be a news director?
I wonder how many people he meets every year. How relentlessly positive he is, because he was profoundly optimistic, and energetic. Good traits, I’m sure, for this type of recruiting.
He left with my card. But, most importantly, he left having met a lot of talented students. A few of them might wind up within their company. They’ve got almost three dozen stations to fill, after all.
Let’s dive into the Tuesday feature, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. I have so many open tabs this has become a regular thing. I’m not sure if we’re calling it that, or if we should. But it’s my site, so I can decide I guess … Anyway, here we are, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. Yeah, we’re not going to call it that. Anyway, I have a lot of open tabs, and not everything should be closed, lost and forgotten forever. Better to memorialize a few of those pages here.
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Same website, same general concept for me: of someone is writing about them, lichens and moss deserve at least a skim.Lichens and the meaning of life:
Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).
Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:
The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.
Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.”
Now that we’ve thunk deep thoughts, let us enjoy the idea of a delicious pie.No-bake Lemon Icebox Pie:
My Southern sweet tooth can never resist an icebox pie — a class of pie that earns its namesake from simply chilling the pie layers, so there’s no baking involved. They’re wildly simple to assemble, and lightly sweet with a crisp graham cracker crust and the most stately pile of whipped cream on top. With fillings, the flavors are endless, from strawberry to coconut to chocolate. Lemon ranks at the very top for me — fresh lemon zest and juice in this pie contribute to its natural lemony flavor, with no artificial colors or extracts required.
And now I’m hungry again. I’ve been hungry all day.
The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”
Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.
So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.
I wonder if this is happening, in actuality, in other places and we just don’t know it yet.
Something we do know: how many tabs, 28, I still have open on my phone’s browser. That’s pretty decent progress. Still hungry, though.
With a quick dash of a video or two here, we’ll be caught up on the Re-Listening project. For just a moment. That’s the way it works. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I got them, in the car and writing something about them here. I live just 4.5 miles from work, but it is a 20-some-minute commute, somehow. These CDs, then, come and go pretty quickly.
We’re in late 1998 here, with a by-design one-hit wonder. New Radicals released this one record, fronted by the high-toned Gregg Alexander, but Alexander and his writing partner, Danielle Brisebois, ended the project before the second single was released. The album ” Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” was topical, critical, and pulled from all sorts of influences to make a modern pop record. The record made it to 41 in the US, and landed in the top 20 on charts in Austria, Canada, and the UK. You might remember the top 40 hit single.
In the liner notes to her 2004 compilation Artist’s Choice, the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell praised “You Get What You Give” for “rising from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope”. In 2006, Ice-T was asked on Late Night with Conan O’Brien about what he has heard, besides rap music, in the last few years that really grabbed him and his only reply was “You Get What You Give”. In a Time interview, U2 lead guitarist the Edge is quoted saying “You Get What You Give” is the song he is “most jealous of. I really would love to have written that.”
I always liked the album, but it’s starting to show it’s age.
The first track has, has always had, a terrific energy. And when it came on — even though I am playing all of these discs in order I’m not always sure which one is going to appear next — I was quite excited for the rest.
A bit later, this one isn’t bad. The bit about obscure bands is hale, hilarious, hipster:
The rest … today it just feels like it’s trying to find it’s voice, while trying to be a meta-album, while trying to channel Prince and, among others, Hall & Oates. The 1970s came back in 1997, basically.
New Radicals signed in 1997 and called it in the spring of 1999. Alexander went back to producing. Seems the touring was part of the problem. They went platinum along the way, though.
