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75 miles later

Happy Monday from the cats. Phoebe is enjoying the sun. We’ve had our share of clear skies the last few days and they’re both taking full advantage. A sun-warmed furry cat sits in her own realm of indulgence.

Poseidon also wishes you a Happy Monday. And he would like you to know that, for all of the times I tell him I outwit him because I am bigger and smarter, he is now taller than me. Way, way taller than me.

He’ll rub it in for days.

So the cats are doing great, thanks.

We went out for a bike ride this weekend. Twice, actually. Two of my three weekend rides, were outside.

These were rides two and three outdoors this year. Still low enough to count, and a late start owing to a combination of weather, my schedule(s) and my lovely bride working her way back into riding outside. These were her second and third rides on the road since her horrific crash last September.

So rare and novel, it still feels like going outside is getting away with something.

I remember, just after her surgery at the end of September, after a week of zero sleep for either of us, the surgeon came out to tell me she did well. He taught me a new word and said they’d send for me when I could go back to sit with her. While I waited, I called my mother-in-law, giving the good news, trying to reassure, being chipper. I called my mom, too. Both of them, being thoughtful moms, asked me how I was doing. I told her mom I was great: all systems go, taking care of your daughter, looking forward to seeing you soon. To my mother, I heard myself, a bit more candidly, say that, after a week of worry and sympathetic grimacing and no sleep and a fair amount of stress that “I could really use a bike ride.” Seemed selfish then, and in retrospect. My mom took the ‘You have to take care of yourself too,’ approach, which was welcome.

That was on September 29th of last year. I spent the next two weeks and change hovering over the convalescing patient. Three-and-a-half weeks after her crash I got on my bike again — riding part of the same route she’d been on — which wasn’t spooky at all. Between the rest of October and November, recovery, catching up on stuff and so on, I got in four more road rides before the weather turned. (I looked that up on the app and I am surprised the count was that high.)

Last month, on a picturesque weekend day, she wanted to ride outside. We pedaled around the neighborhood for a few minutes, going slowly, averaging just 10 miles per hour. A tentative toe in tepid water.

Saturday, after months of rehab — her ribs and shoulder blade are much better and her collarbone is finally starting to heal six months later — she decided to try riding on asphalt again. I can speak to this firsthand. As much as the physical, it’s a mental progression from riding on a trainer to dealing with wind and noise and cars and bumps. It takes a while to feel like yourself, and some more time after that to approach comfortable. She’s right on schedule, which is to say her schedule.

So Saturday, after I’d already spun out 33 miles on the trainer, we went out for a rambling 17-mile ride around the neighborhood. This is odd, because she always knows where she’s riding, but it was great, because there’s something magically freeing about riding aimlessly. No timers, no zones, no watts, just a bike ride.

Then, yesterday, another beautiful afternoon, we rode the winery route, doing four circuits of the 6.6 mile lap. It’s a quiet set of roads, loosely rectangular, with the interstate running alongside. It’s a good place to stretch out your legs. I asked her, after the first lap, how she was doing. She knew I was asking how it felt and how comfortable she was. She said she was doing OK. There weren’t a lot of cars around to bother us, just as we’d hoped, so she could concentrate on all of the rest of it. So she was concentrating on how her legs were feeling. She was frustrated, feeling sluggish, despite riding on her trainer all winter.

Reaching for an explanation, I said “You rode yesterday. And you know it’s always a little different, going from the trainer to the road. Plus this wind is everywhere.”

There’s a windmill at the top end of that route, and I watched it go around and around each time we went by. We were in a cross-head-cross-wind all the way around.

Then, for a few moments on the second lap, she found her legs. Her form straightened out, her legs took on the familiar form, the one that tells me I have to chase. And so I did, setting a two-lap PR for my efforts.

And now my legs are a bit tired.

I am now three CDs behind on the Re-Listening project. We’ve just worked our way through a stretch of really good jazz, and this next little bit is a comparative step down. An embarrassing step down, perhaps. Let’s just grin and get it over with it.

These guys got discovered in Australia at 15. Their five studio albums have moved more than 10 million units over the years. Their second record got a lot of play on MTV and alt radio, and Neon Ballroom is their third release, at the ripe old age of … 19. It topped the chart in Australia, where it went platinum three times. It also went to number one on the UK rock and metal chart. It climbed all the way to the 50th slot on the Billboard Hot 200 here, and is certified gold. It is one of those efforts that defines a little slice of 1999.

Also, and again, they were 19.

The very pointy tip of the millennial angst spear, we just didn’t think about them in marketing terms at the time.

I’m not sure I ever listened to this much, for whatever reason. A lot of it still feels new, even if it is a little dated two decades later.

Those guys went through some stuff, sadly unsurprising, perhaps, considering the attention they earned so young. They released two more records in the next seven years. After some on-again, off-again the guys split up for good in 2011.

And then there’s Sugar Ray, which was a station giveaway. I never listened to this thing. It was … not for me when I got it, and I was glad it was a freebie. That the three singles got nearly maximum plays across 1999 didn’t help.

Though this track did feature KRS-One.

And they covered a Steve Miller classic.

I’d entirely forgotten that track was on here until I played this disc the other day. As I said, I never listened to this.

Up next in the Re-Listening project, something I actually purchased, and enjoyed!

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6
Apr 23

Some days peak early

Eaaaarly this morning there was a car chase in Los Angeles, where it was still late in the evening. All of the local television stations put their helicopters in the air. The want was for a stolen car, suspect armed and dangerous. The driver stayed on the surface streets, stayed within an eight-block-or-so radius.

Car chases come with a set of truisms. The person involved isn’t making their best choices. And they are all amazing drivers, until they aren’t. Sometimes, these things are amazing advertisements for the durability of cars. And they can be oddly, voyeuristically entertaining, until they sometimes become terrifying. Which is why all of those media sorts were orbiting this guy.

The driver paused, and two people emerged. The passengers skittering away under the police chopper’s big light. They ran spike strips out in front of the car, those big metal set ups that are designed to be driven over, top puncture the tires of the stolen car, and then an officer yanks them away so that the tires of his colleagues’ cruisers are unscathed. To do this, you have to know where the driver is going, the road has to be open, and you’ve got to get there with the gear before the driver, and get him to actually drive over the giant metal spike strips. Sometimes the driver is wise to this, and swerves around them, but, also, see the first truism above.

This guy got spike strips at least three times, which meant he was utterly predictable, and that he couldn’t figure this out. See, again, the first truism.

The first two people who got out of the car, one of them was apprehended right away. The other a short time later, as the chase continued. After a time, the driver paused and another person exited the car. That person gave themselves up quickly as the driver sped on. More laps, more helicopters, more cruisers, more spike strips.

When the tires flatten, you can still drive. The car is noisy, and difficult to control. Now the driver is fishtailing. The driver can’t hold a straight line, because he’s lost three tires. And, eventually, the wasted rubber of the tires gives away, and the car, still going, but slower, has even less control, because the car is down to the rims.

And this guy was going Back to the Future.

Finally, he stopped. And, as is often the case, the stop seemed both delayed and abrupt. It was entirely unsurprising and, like so many of these things, anticlimactic.

The ones that have a climactic ending really, really make you question why you’re watching.

Why I watch is because of these poor news anchors and the interactions with the long-suffering helicopter reporters, how loose and rigid they are with their language and ideals, how there is seldom any followup, even if they’ve ginned up any given chase into something compelling, and how they prove, like me, to be poor play-by-play commentators.

Whoever was on the desk of the station I was watching tonight had a great way of rephrasing, without at all reframing, what had just been said by her colleagues not 45 seconds earlier. The whole thing is parody not beyond satire.

So there I was — watching this not good driver, make not-the-best choices, as the driver and a fifth person were taken into custody — wondering why I was watching this eaaaarly this morning while it was still late in the evening in Los Angeles.

I’ll watch the next one too.

Ron Burgundy knew what he was doing.

More music, because that’s the theme around here as we labor to catch up on the Re-Listening project. It’s every CD I own, in the order in which I picked them up. These aren’t reviews, anything but!

Imagine, in your early post-adolescence, discovering Keb’ Mo’. Invite some friends over, you put on “Just Like You”, his third album, for which he won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album — an honor he’s won twice more, and been nominated for seven times, total — and you are suddenly musically erudite. (From jazz to contemporary blues within one page of this book of CDs!)

He released this in the summer of 1994. I got my copy in … let’s say the end of 1998 or the very beginning of 1999. Someone gave this to me, or it was a work freebie, or something like that. I don’t have the liner notes, never did. But I have that drum and that harmonica, starting off a whole record. Musically erudite, I tell you.

Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, two people who shape all of modern blues-pop if you ask me, appear on the title track. You can’t do better than that for supporting vocals.

This record just cracked the U.S. Billboard 200 in 1997, staying on that chart for just one week.

Is there a Robert Johnson cover? There is a Robert Johnson cover.

How the man that influenced everything ever done in blues (and most of rock ‘n’ roll post-1961) did it.

Also in 1997, Keb’ Mo’ portrayed Robert Johnson in a documentary.

Never mind that Johnson died at 27 and Keb’ Mo’ was 45 or 46 at the time. Keb’ Mo’ has 19 records out there now, with all of those Grammy awards, and he’s still touring at 71. He has two shows next week in Australia, and then begins a 25-date U.S. tour later this month.

And we are now just two (much less musically erudite) CDs behind on the Re-Listening project.

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5
Apr 23

The changing weather and such

Today started last night, at 10:55, because I checked my email at 11:32 p.m. And then the day began anew just before 8 a.m. with what had to be the loudest clap of thunder not recorded directly below a lightning bolt. A bit later, I drove past a duplex that was fully ablaze. First, I saw a big plume of smoke, around a curve. When I drove by, a quarter-mile or so later, the police had just arrived. The roof of the building was already gone.

The local paper tells us that the residents were evacuated and no one was hurt. But it was a substantial fire, taking the BFD about three hours to put it out.

At work, work stuff, and the view was this:

A perfect day for more jazz!

At this prolific rate of the Re-Listening project, we are now only three CDs behind, and as I’m working my way through this in the order of acquisition, I know we are somewhere in 1998 right now. Acquisition is an important term here, because this is one of those that I impulsively picked up from a giveaway table. It is a sampler, and I can find no reference to this compilation on the web which is … weird.

So, look out the window, stare at the rain drops or the sunshine or the stuff in between, and press play. Or, if you don’t have exceptional peripheral vision, press play, and then stare out the window.

Tony Gil has one of those voices that makes you wonder why you haven’t heard of him. And after 10 minutes of searching, I wonder why I can’t find out much about him. I can tell you this song appears on the Felix Grant tribute record, which won The Washington Area Music Association’s album of the year. No small feat there, as it is an organization that represents the whole area.

Paula West has been singing for three-plus decades at this point, she’s still singing across the country and the record on which “Peel Me A Grape” appeared recently got a retrospective review from The New Yorker.

I’ve confessed to my inability to properly appreciate or express anything about jazz music. But when I think of what a jazz singer should sound like, I always hear Cleve Douglass in my head. If there was nothing else on this sampler, there would be that.

But there’s a lot more! There’s Mark Rosier. On the record that spawned this song, an independent release, he played all of the guitars, all of the piano, all of the keyboards and some of the percussion. Born in New York, he found himself in Texas by way of Florida, and then charmed the locals and the tourists with his music across the White Mountains in New Hampshire and in clubs in Maine. He died in 2020, after a long bout with cancer.

Everything on this CD is worth a listen, and I wish I could share the whole thing with you. But, instead, here’s the track listing. Pick out some of these things and dig for them.

Tony Gil – I’m Old Fashioned
Maua – Devil May Care
Pam Bricker – Long As You’re Lookin’ Good
Paula West – Peel Me A Grape
Cleve Douglass – Woman
Hinda Hoffman – I Just Found Out About Love
Donna Smith & The Vintage Jazz Quartet – Get it Straight
Valucha – Voce
Sally Richards – Old Devil Moon
Jass Street Station – El Ritmo de Amour
Fred Sokolow Jazz Quarter – Delilah
Karen Moore – What a Little Moonlight Can Do
Tony Gil – No Me Platiques Mas
Suzy Nelson – Am I Blue
Rose Russo – Uptown Baby
Mark Rosier – I’m Just a Memory
Steve Bulmer’s Kinetic Jazz Band – Just Friends

I was on that last track, from Steve Bulmer — who, today, teaches bass at UConn — and wondering if people have spent the time and effort to create some of universally accepted spectrum of jazz. You know, ranging from the deeply important things I’ve never heard of all the way across to the stuff you might hear at a grocery store, or on hold music. There have to be lists like this, and most of them not at all derivative. And where, I wondered, would I place some of these songs, because they are just different enough. The originals, the covers, the playful stuff, the smooth and easy and the best representations of the art form, all of it. Or most of it anyway. And where would I slot in this song or that song? Then I heard the jazz violin, and now I have a new rabbit hole to explore.

The rain moved out late in the afternoon and the clouds, which hung around for a few hours, thinned. Suddenly, the light went from diffuse to directly sunny, and then it was time to go into the studio. On the third of four late days this week, I left just in time to catch a bit of the sunset.

The timestamp on that photo is 8:25. Tomorrow, another late night in the studio, but I’ll be out of the office by 7:30. The long days of the coming season are always preceded by some long nights of the present.

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4
Apr 23

There’s a nice, easy recipe here — goes well with jazz

I attacked the morning with zeal. Zeal, I say. That was what the morning was attacked with, zeal. And urgency, and enthusiasm. The first alarm went off and I got up and put on the bike riding clothes and I went downstairs and rode on Zwift for 96 minutes, putting 36 more miles under my shoes.

One of the routes I did today included Neokyo All-Nighter, the fever dream of some poor game designer. What even is that thing floating in front of me?

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 95 routes down, 34 to go.

Later in the morning, I found myself reading copy aloud so a student could master the teleprompter. My voice was still thin in that way that’s difficult to control after a big workout. The was just coming from the back of my throat. There was no projection, no commanding news voice, no soothing tones, just a bleating, busted reed of a sound. Didn’t sound like me at all, especially to me. Even though I know it happens with a big workout, and in an hour or two I’ll sound more like myself, it’s always a tiny bit unnerving. What if it takes too long? What if this is the way I sound now?

But it was only a practice, for someone else. For some reason it got a polite bit of applause.

“Huzzah! He’s literate!”

That happened to me in a newsroom once, too. New job, second day there. The news director was the anchor, he pitched to me for my first story and I glanced over at him just in time to see a wide-eyed, stunned look on his face. “He can do that?”

And I thought, If you’re surprised, why did you hire me?

I googled this tonight, why my voice does that, not the former news director. (He’s in sales now.) It apparently has something to do with exertion and the way the muscles get used. But people seem to have different responses to this. Some people’s voices get deeper after a big workout, for example. This was a medium workout for me, though, and when I found that different people have different reactions, I knew it was time to close the tab.

Speaking of which …

While I closed that one to avoid diagnosing myself via Dr. Duck Duck Go, I am closing these tabs because … I don’t need this many open browsers in my life. The information could be useful, so I’m keeping the notes here for me, and sharing them with you, just in case.

I did an overdue phone upgrade late last year and, surely, there’s something useful to do with the old one. 10 ways to reuse your old iPhone in 2023:

Recently upgrade to a newer iPhone? We bet you have your old one stuffed in a drawer left to gather dust because you can’t figure out what to do with your old iPhone. But, lucky for you, we’ve got some fantastic ideas to reuse your old iPhone.

It is sitting on my desk, waiting.

I wanted a light and bright pasta one night the last time I had a bachelor weekend. I started pulling things out of the cabinet and then though, No, I’m hungry, not feeling experimental … and found this recipe, which was almost exactly what I was imagining. Light & easy garlic lemon pasta for two:

Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
enough cooked angel hair pasta for 2
salt & pepper, to taste

I ate that two nights in a row.

This came up right after the first balloon craze last month. When China shot down five U-2 spy planes at the height of the Cold War:

The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.

Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected — and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.

Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.

And, after closing these three, I am down to just 34 tabs on my phone.

I am still catching up on the Re-Listening project — playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car. These aren’t reviews, but mostly just an excuse to share good music and write about whatever comes to mind about it, the time, or whatnot. And right now we are somewhere in early 1998, I think, when I was adding a bit of jazz to the collection. Most assuredly I was trying to bring some class to my collection.

So today we’re listening to Charles Fambrough’s 1992 The Charmer. This is the second album from the late, great bassist and composer. This still plays as a great easy jazz listen.

I don’t have the education or jazz vocabulary to appreciate the composition — or the talented interplay between the musicians — as I should, but reading comments online I have come to understand it was apparently under-appreciated in it’s time.

To me, this is perfect for ambience — say you’re making a nice lemon pasta — or as something quiet in the office, or simple and unobstrusive for the car. Which sells Fambrough short. He appears as a contributor on 17 other records, plus releasing nine records of his own between 1991 and 2003. He died, at just 60, in 2011. One of his obituaries called this record the high point of the CTI label’s 1990s output. It also used two exclamation points and the word “splendiferously” in the same paragraph. This was, one presumes, written by someone with a much better sense of musical appreciation than I have.

And so, for your musical appreciation, here is the complete Charles Fambrough album, The Charmer.

I attacked the deal with zeal; I will end the evening with the jazz.

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3
Apr 23

New old books, new old music, and much more

Today was the first of four, no, perhaps, five late days in a row. It’ll be a long week. But it won’t feel like it, until it does, which will probably be … Wednesday.

I walked outside twice today. Once, in the middle of the day for a reason I’ve already forgotten. And then, in the evening at about 7:45. (As I said, long week.) This was the first day of the year I’ve been surprised by how warm it was when I took that step across the threshold. And then I wondered why I couldn’t conduct today’s meetings, and emails and all of the rest, outdoors, under a tree.

Tomorrow it will be a mind-boggling sunny and 82 degrees. Wednesday, rainy and 72. Then the 50s and 60s into next week.

Spring officially begins in 16 days.

Time to return to the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check with the kitties.

Phoebe has re-discovered the guest room, and a great place to hide from me before I head out in the morning.

What doesn’t make so much sense is how habitual she is. This is the time of morning when she should be sunning herself in a window — she will wait in our bedroom until we open the heavy curtains, because she knows where the sun is — but this room, the guest room, faces the west.

Poseidon was cold this weekend. And shy.

He also was able to wriggle his way into forcing me out of that chair, which was an impressive feat for a 10-pound cat.

I finished the Willie Morris memoir this weekend. He took a plane from New York back to Texas, to speak at his alma mater, and then drove over to his home in Mississippi. His little boy in tow, seeing the old places with his mother and grandmother, and then, the next morning, he caught a plane back to New York. An altogether unsatisfying ending, but that’s a memoir at 31, for you.

Still, some 36 pages before the end, this is the part that has stuck with me.

So I started, yesterday, a journal by the poet May Sarton. A local author I know quoted her last summer on the anniversary of her death. “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” I did a little research and bought four of her books, her journals, just on the basis of that quote. I’m now on the second of those four books, a year of dear diary of a woman trying to figure out life, herself, her poetry and her gardening. But around all of that she will make you sit up and re-read a passage now and again, like this one.

I figure I should read a month at a time, and in two weeks I’ll need another book.

Another book to go with Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which I also started this weekend. This is a 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner, and I am reading it on my Kindle, where I have a collection of dozens of books waiting for me.

I need to read more books, and so I will.

Believe it or not, we are still playing catch up on the Re-Listening project. I am playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car, and I am woefully behind in writing about them here. These aren’t reviews, just for fun and, sometimes, memories. And, at this point in 1997, we are entering a jazz phase.

And there’s some really good jazz in here. Up first, is a 1993 record from Jay Thomas, a multi-instrumentalist, with, now, 50 years of music on the books. Even back then, he’d been at it for a long time. You can hear him playing trumpet or flugelhorn or alto, tenor, or soprano, or flutes on more than 100 records. He’s fronted almost two dozen of his own. And you may not know his work, if you, like me, aren’t deep into jazz, but you’ve heard it. He shows up in commercials and movie scores quite a bit, too.

That’s the title track Blues for McVoughty. I wish I could say I had a good ear for jazz as a young guy, but I picked this up by chance off the giveaway table.

Somehow, sadly, most of this record hasn’t been uploaded to YouTube, but if you need an entry point to jazz, or easy atmosphere, or need to know what all the cool jazz aficionados were listening to in the 1990s, this is a fine place to start.

I am sure I picked this up to add something more sophisticated and mature to my collection. Can’t imagine why, though. And we’ll have two more jazz records back-to-back in our next installment(s) of the Re-Listening project.

For now, enjoy some of this nice weather, before it grows stormy again mid-week.