05
May 23
May 23
500 site words, 400 music words, and then the weekend
It occurs to me, and matters to no one else, that I need to spruce up some of the site’s images. Some of the headers and footers on the blog should be updated removed, and the images on the front need a big refresh. I think I might get into some or all of that next week. I have, of late, updated a few of the mini-banners you see breaking up sections of each post. Some of those have already been implemented. Others will make their debut later this summer.
You could say that the blog’s aesthetic itself is due a refresh — I’ve run this WordPress theme for seven years, it seems — but I don’t know of a better look for what I’m (barely) doing here. Those rotating headers and footers, a bit of PHP echo code, are the key. Go ahead, click refresh a few times. You’ll always have a different look. There are, as of this writing, 107 different headers and 107 footers that surround these brilliant words. But you’re right, 107 is too many. That should get pared back.
The problem, he sighed, is that I use a basic numerical system for the numbering, which makes the PHP randomizer work better. So if I decided to remove, say, the 36th header, 37 must become 36, 38 must become 37 and so on, all the way up to 107. Errr, 106. This isn’t hard, but it can be tedious and leads to errors, which leads to restoring backups, which always feels more perilous than it should, even though my host is incredible. And all of that comes after the editorial angst. Sure, that trip to Washington was terrific, but is that cloud shot important enough, really, to keep in play? And I have to ask myself that 214 times?
Take this one, for example.
That’s from my former job, it has no meaning to me, but it’s supremely ridiculous, and so it survived the last cleaning. What was the point here? That they’d mastered the art of putting eyelets in cardboard stock? Showing they had a second font? Did someone have it out for sans serif and inconsistent stroke? They could now do full color? Were people missing the older 1960s-ish sign an inch above it?
That one, I’m sure, I shot for the specific purpose of making as header art. But what of other photographs? Easy enough to edit, I only look at them and wonder about the decisions I made when I hurriedly cropped them to fit the template. If editing them is easy, taking them out of rotation is harder.
I’d rather edit something I’d written — kill my babies, as writers say — than take photos out of the mix.
Of course, I have an entire folder of retired banner images, why do you ask? Why do I have an entire folder of retired banner images? Because, well, you never know.
We could get into the philosophical here, too, reducing the volume increases the penetration, but I’ve already written 500 words about … well … nothing.
I have a reorganization idea though, maybe I’ll implement that this summer.
In today’s installment of the Re-Listening project, 1998/1999-me picked up my copy of “March,” the 1989 debut album of singer-songwriter Michael Penn. I love this record.
The song you might remember is “No Myth,” which went to 22 on the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart, number five on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, peaked at four on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and hit number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
There are a lot of musicians’ musicians on this record, and most of Prince’s backing band are listed in the credits, too. Kenny Aronoff, who played with John Mellencamp and John Fogerty, and graduated from right here at IU, plays some of the drums.
I’m not sure if it was this record, or his next one, where I thought it would be neat to sit down for a few days and try to write things with him. I don’t normally think that about musicians. I enjoy the work, I might see the shows if it works out, but I never think, “What would happen if I, a person who has never written a song in his life, sat down with this person and a few notepads?” Except, fpr some reason, when I listen to a Michael Penn record. No idea why. Could be the clever lyrics.
The other reason, I think, was that I didn’t have that much going on whenever that idea came to mind.
As debuts go, this record shows so much promise and potential. Penn wasn’t exactly a new to all of this. He was in Doll Congress, which earned a nice following in Los Angeles. Half of the songs on this record he wrote during his time in that alternative band, which might explain the incredible varied, and engaging things he’s doing throughout this record. This is the last track.
A few other Michael Penn CDs will appear in the Re-Listening project sooner or later. These days, he seems to be spending his time producing others, and composing and scoring for TV shows and movies. In October of 2020, with no other work on his plate, he released a non-soundtrack song for the first time in years. Presumably he’s back at it again these days.
I was hoping I would discover he’s doing small venue gigs and that he was going to be in the neighborhood this fall, but alas.
Have a great weekend! I’m sure I’ll be here, muttering about banner images.
04
May 23
May 23
Dodging other people’s pictures
For about two weeks or so each year, leading up to the spring term graduation, the Sample Gates become a a photographic centerpiece of the campus. Already, it is a bustling place. This is one of those places where town meets campus, there’s a busy bus stop there, a Starbucks is just across the street, and so on. But now, there are crowds there for photographs.
The Sample Gates are a signature image on the IU campus. The gates appear old, and indeed they are to the modern student. It only took 80 years or so to get them built. Students had raised money for them at the turn of the 20th century, but the board had the same plans, so the student-raised money went to another project. After that, the university put the gates on hold. Different plans for the gates came and went over the next few generations. Then, in the 1960s, there was a new move to build those gates, but loud criticism stalled the project. People said it a wasteful expenditure when the money could go to scholarships and financial aid. (Can you imagine?) That brings us to the 1980s. The man who ran financial aid for the university donated money for the gates we see today and named them in honor of his parents, and so we have the Sample Gates — the place where IU folks see it as much as a welcome to the world as a welcome to the campus. That’s been the icon since 1987.
And now, at graduation, young men and women show up in coat and tie and nice dresses and caps and gowns and take their photographs. It ramps up and, by today, there are small crowds patiently waiting their turns, and graduates wasting cheap bottles of sparkling white wine for photographs.
Yesterday, someone had dragged out a professional photographer. They’d brought reflectors and the whole set up. Someone else, in the brightest part of the day, had dragged out a ring light for some reason. Someone else brought their full length mirror.
I have never understood why the university doesn’t close this to foot traffic for the week. Let the IU Student Foundation run things. A few bucks here for a few moments with a clean background. None of these other people in your shots. Or, for a few more bucks you get a few moments and a few professional shots with a photographer they provide. Sure, there are some instagram pros out there, but if you’ve ever asked someone to take a group photograph for you, you know that not everyone is a natural shutterbug. And the graduation pose is definitely one of those moments you don’t want to be cropped at the shins.
We return to the Re-Listening project, where we are listening to all of my old CDs, and in the order that I acquired them. I’m chronologically in late 1998 (or very early 1999) here, and we’re talking about Texas blues, and a 1995 posthumous greatest hits release from Stevie Ray Vaughan’s catalog.
I have the glimpse of a recollection of some news coverage after he and three others were killed, in 1990, in a helicopter crash. It was foggy and the helicopter was living a concert and crashed into a nearby ski hill. The news featured him, or him in Double Trouble, reducing small venue stages to ash, and then one of his contemporaries, I forget who, discussing how it seemed unfair that here you had one of the most talented guitarists in all of the world, he’d finally put his drug use behind him, only to die at the peak of his powers. He was 35.
He would have been 40 years old when people put this on for the first time.
Every song on here I know. I think almost every song on here I knew at the time, somehow, despite this not being my main genre, but sometimes the virtuoso goes mainstream. Indeed, SRV and Double Trouble dominated MTV in the early days. Also, every song on this record absolutely cooks. But you need to see him live. Thankfully, someone invented video and, later, YouTube, where you can see the man play his machine behind his back.
This song is also on the record, though this performance is from Austin City Limits, looking for all the world like the velvet bulldozer, Albert King.
For whatever reason, I don’t really associate a lot of memories with this CD — that’s one of the main points of the Re-Listening project — but the music is absolutely amazing, which is the other, more important, point.
Musically, SRV is critical to resetting the genre of pop and rock stations. He helped kill the synth-pop, and took some wind out of the hair metal scene. Most importantly, his cords held open the door for people like Robert Cray and Walter Trout, and maybe even the renaissance of John Lee Hooker a few years later.
In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll have a debut album, something I came to a decade too late. Also, it’ll be really, really good.
