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21
Jun 25

The mountain massif, Pilatus

We got in one of these things today. Gondolas are amazing. But let me back up.

We took a train, and then had a short walk. And then there was the meeting with a tour guide, Rolf. A curly coiffed man of chiseled stature that should have landed him on stage. Perhaps it did! But now he is here, leading this most isolated life. Meeting people for a few minutes, giving them a sticker, telling them which bus to get on, doing 11 minutes of patter on the bus, which includes several reminders to not leave things on the bus, because we aren’t returning, and then dealing with the lady who left a diaper bag on the bus. And then he directs us to those red gondolas. And then to another, larger cableway lift. At the top of the tour, he says, in his pleasant, practiced, kindly authoritative way, “We will be meeting here at 3:30 to depart at 3:45. If you have any questions I will be in the cafeteria for about half an hour.”

You wonder what he’s eating there. He brought a sack lunch. What’s he reading? Or does he just stare out the window, dreaming of after shave smells gone by?

That’s what he looks like. He looks like a man who enjoyed splashing on that smell every day. His skin looks like it looked forward to it. There’s just no other way to say it. He would have been the 45-year-old who would have been unironically cast in the part of a 30-year-old in a 1974 movie. A bit too handsome and mature for the part. And a Hai Karate aficionado. Old Spice for the really big days.

Anyway, a few of the views going up to the top of Pilatus.

The four of us walked around up there. My bride and I went on two of the outdoor walks. Her parents appreciated the views from indoors. It’s full of rich views. As rich as the lines now gaining way onto Rolf’s face, rugged and firm as the mountains themselves. Have a look.

Pilatus’ highest peak is a modest 6,983 feet, but everything up there offers commanding views of Lucerne, below.

The descent from Pilatus involves the Pilatus Railway, named the world’s steepest cogwheel railway. We did it in 2022 and, honestly, it was better. The cogwheel had older cars, which made the gradient — at one point, 48 percent! — feel much more adventurous.
The cars were steam until the 1930s. What we rode a few years ago was from the 1970s. They were hyping the new cars on our first trip here, and something has been lost with the upgrades. It’s just another closed-air thing you can do. Then it felt — there’s not a word here, thinner, smaller, less substantial, shabbier, none of these work — like the ride itself and the machine you were on, were full of character. Now the steepness is the only character, and even that visceral feeling is mitigated by modern glass.

At the end of the cogwheel ride the lady caught up to her diaper bag. Rolf was the hero he’d always been meant to be. So was Eddie, the plucky young bus driver with the hip hair who should probably be on a beach and not a bus. We never saw him again. With Rolf, though, and that diaper bag, we all crossed the street from the cogwheel station at the base of the mountain and walked over to a boat. Here, we enjoyed a nice, quiet boat ride that completes what they call “The Golden Round Trip.” It’s a nice boat ride. The views are scenic.

But it does feel a bit tacked on to the rest of the experience.

I spent much of the time trying to stay out of the sun, and enjoying the breeze.

We had dinner at a lakeside cafe. I had some German-inspired currywurst. Quite tasty.

And then we caught the train back to our hotel. Whereby I marveled, as I do, at the everyday beauty of this place.

What must it be like to wake up each morning and see a waterfall out your back windows? Or be surrounded by these lake and mountain views each time you come home?

The human mind has a weird capacity for adaptation, but how long would it take to get used to something like this? “Ho hum. Again. Yes, yes. It’s hilly and mountainous and rugged. But I’d enjoy a change of pace. I could sure use some flat.”

I wonder if that every enters into the minds of the locals. It will surely come to my mind tomorrow. We’re riding bikes!

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12
Jun 25

No particular key

Last meeting of the school year today. An informal thing. A small celebration. A planning session. An AI conversation. A gabfest. It was an afternoon of chatting and fun, not work. But it’s the last thing on the calendar for a bit.

So we celebrate. Inspired by the collective encore of Sunday night’s show, I give you, the summer of singing in no particular key.

Now, let us summer!

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11
Jun 25

If you’re hung up on wind chimes, Smiley Smile

It was coincidental timing that we saw Barenaked Ladies on Sunday. They were the headliner of the concert I’ve been touching on this week. And they, of course, did their modern version of Brian Wilson. Today, of course, came the news that the legendary musician Brian Wilson had died. It was not BNL’s best sound of the night, frankly. Then again, it’s not Ed Robertson’s song. (Every time I see them I think, Maybe this will be the night Steven Page strolls out from stage left … )

BNL is still a fine band, and they put on a nice show, that one is just off a bit. The live shows were always better with Page, but you understand why they parted ways in 2009. Anyway, here’s Page fronting Brian Wilson for BNL.

As a gag, Brian Wilson covered BNL’s song about Brian Wilson.

Some years back, Wilson talked about a song, and a sound, to which he aspired:

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys estimates that he’s heard “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, more than 1,000 times. The very first listen, 50 years ago this month, still haunts him.

“I was driving and I had to pull over to the side of the road — it blew my mind,” Mr. Wilson said, repeating a story that has become something of a legend. “It was a shock.” Just 21 and already frustrated with his band’s basic surf music, he bought the single and set about deconstructing its arrangement and production.

“I started analyzing all the guitars, pianos, bass, drums and percussion,” he said by telephone. “Once I got all those learned, I knew how to produce records.”

Those records, many fans would contend, weren’t half bad, but if you ask Mr. Wilson, they still don’t stack up.

“I felt like I wanted to try to do something as good as that song and I never did,” he said. “I’ve stopped trying.” Mr. Wilson added: “It’s the greatest record ever produced. No one will ever top that one.”

You know it; it’s Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. It’s the Wrecking Crew, a wall of sound. It’s 18-year-old Veronica Bennett in those resonant Gold Star Studios.

My favorite will forever be.

Another bit of coincidental timing: as I write this, there’s an insurance commercial on using a brassy instrumental version of Good Vibrations as bed music. That song turns 60 next year.

Update: Some years back, BBC radio brought together a tremendous sequence of performances to celebrate another of Wilson’s brilliant pieces of art, and a classic song of our era.

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10
Jun 25

How do you hold an aerosol?

Sunday was the sixth time we’ve seen Guster in the last two years. (Proximity has its advantages.) Twice we saw their “We Also Have Eras” tour, which they now call a play. We saw them once in a standing venue. We caught a lunch set they put on for a local radio station. We also saw the second night of their weekend at the Kennedy Center.

I was trying to count how many times, overall, I’ve seen them now, and finally decided to just count the states. It’s at least five. To be fair, I guess, to me, that’s over almost 30 years now. (That is in no way fair to me. Or to them, really.)

Anyway, Ryan did a little crowd work, as has lately become the custom, and he came right by us.

Guster as the feature act, did a tight, nine song, 40 minute set. Which gets us to the headliner, which we’ll play tomorrow.

I had a pretty crisp bike ride this evening. And for 26.7 miles (or 42 kilometers, because it sounds more impressive to the American audience) I held my average speed throughout. That includes when I had to stop to take this photo.

That section of road has been closed for several months now. Ordinarily we turn left there anyway, but the closure has made the nearby stretch even nicer. But today I turned right, just to see what was going on with that bridge. And, yep, the road crews really don’t want you going through there right now.

This was about 20 miles in, and you can clearly see I was going fast by how blurry the asphalt appears.

And now, a reminder about how stop signs work.

There’s a four way stop near our house. I need to turn left to go home. An SUV approached from my right, and stopped, as it should. A car then approached from my left, and stopped, as it should. And then I completed my stop. And waited.

And waited some more.

Finally I shook my head, lowered my eyes and waved on the SUV coming from the right, a driver so flummoxed by car brain and the presence of a person on a two wheel self-propelled bicycle that they did not know what to do at the intersection.

So I ask you, who, really, is making roads dangerous?

This configuration of vehicles is sure to stymie anyone who has forgotten how stop signs work. This is how they work. The person that arrives, and completes their stop, first, is the first to go. In this case, I was last. Also in this case, people had no idea how to behave.

I went out this evening to put the cover on the grill and water a few plants. The air was still. The night was quiet. The moon shone brightly, peering at us through a thin skin of clouds, who’s main contribution to the atmosphere was, well, atmosphere. The clouds had a “We’re here!” vibe. And I wanted to take a photo. Only my phone was inside.

So I finished covering the grill, watered the four plants I set out to water, and then went inside to retrieve the image capturing device. It all took about as long as reading about it, I’m sure.

But when I came back outside, the clouds were gone.

Nobody needs spooky night sky stuff in June, I said to the moon. She had no reply, because she’s an orbiting satellite, and not a character than I can dialog with.

But if it were, the moon would probably say, “I can’t hold those in place, I’m a quarter of a million miles away from your clouds.”

Guess I’m doing it by myself.

How do you hold on to clouds?

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9
Jun 25

An entrance to eternal summer slacking

I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.

There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.

Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.

There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.

Anyway, the daylily is lovely.

We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.

This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.

I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.

He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.

When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.

We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.

I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.

Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.

These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.

And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.

On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …

I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.

Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.

And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.