If you were looking for me today, and couldn’t find me, that’s because you didn’t look here.
There are pretty good odds that I’ll be there tomorrow, too.
05
Sep 22
Sep 22
Happy Labor Day
We had a short bike ride on Saturday morning, dodging raindrops until I couldn’t. I wanted to get in a quick 20 miles to reach the next round number for the year. (All of the records are falling this year!) And in the early going we went by this familiar corn field, which almost made it to Labor Day before turning.
And then, up the street and up a few hills, The Yankee was creating some big distance. See the little red dot on the side? I had to cover all of this ground to get her wheel again.
Eventually I did, and then we rode together for a while. She turned for the house and I added on a few more miles to get to that goal, and then found myself in the rain. It was foreshadowing.
We got in the car, pointed south and drove through every storm cloud that a third of this great nation can provide. My car hasn’t been this clean, nor my shoulders this tense in the car, in some time. This is just the beginning.
You know how, sometimes, you people stop under an overpass? When my wipers were going full blast and I was slowing down to about 35 on the freeway to let them keep up, it seemed like a good idea.
I always liked overpasses in the rain. That constant rattle on the roof interrupted, however briefly, by a bit of human engineering. It can be a sudden and stunning change, and then just as quickly, the rain returns, because the overpasses are only a few lanes wide. Sometimes you want more overpasses, I guess, if only to park under them.
We did not wait out the weather, but pushed on carefully through. And one of our rewards was this site.
You can almost see it there, but in the heartbeat before I took this photo, and those trees in the foreground crept in the way, you could actually see the place where the rainbow was hitting the ground. It wasn’t off in the distance, or beyond a hill. It was right there. I did not see the pots of gold, however. It is a busy interstate, maybe someone beat me to it.
We made it to my mom’s for a nice little vacation. We had dinner there Saturday night, and a quiet Sunday. Today my grandfather and a great-aunt and great-uncle came over for dinner. This was the first time I’ve seen my aunt and uncle since before the pandemic began. They were, and are, a hoot.
I could tell you stories, but it is a light week here, and you’d need to know them and hear them, anyway. But I will jot this down, just so I can remember it. Someone was telling a bit of a family story and my great-uncle didn’t hear who was the subject of the story. He said, “Who?” He heard the name. There’s a half beat where the name sinks in and you can see the gears readjusting to the new information. And then the man, who is in his 80s, giggled. It was him and them and perfect.
02
Sep 22
Sep 22
‘Oh, snap! Guess what I saw?’
Welcome to September. Like you, I have no idea how this happened, or how it occurred so quickly.
Today I taught someone a foundational trick of a technology that’s now more than 30 years old. Happy to do it. It makes me rework the analogies I use. If you, for example, haven’t figured out how to do a basic thing that’s existed during the entirety of your professional career, I need to find a frame reference you might understand.
So remember when Chevy Chase …
Otherwise, this whole thing is hopeless.
An equally impressive highlight of my day was going up one floor to get a remote control, and then taking that remote and its DVD player to someone else a few floors away.
Just kidding. The real highlight of the day, maybe the week, was lunch. I walked down to Chipotle and ordered some takeout. This was the second lunch I’ve purchased during the work week since February or March of 2020. I figured a day or two of something other than a peanut butter sandwich will make the return to peanut butter and bread seem all the more exotic again.
If you are what you eat, I am destined to become a big smear of peanuts.
In other work miscellany, the next time I will show you progress on the removal of the nearby Poplars Building I expect will look a lot different than this. This has been the story since Monday.
They’ve been working on the rubble, and some of the lower part of the building obscured from our vantage point. But I bet they won’t be doing anything tomorrow. It’s a three-day weekend, of course, meaning everyone is making it a four-day weekend.
Let’s jump back in time to Monday night, when we caught the Barenaked Ladies show in Cincinnati. On Monday, in this space, I shared a bit of the opening act from Toad the Wet Sprocket. If you were here on Tuesday you saw a brief bit of the brief feature performance from the Gin Blossoms. Yesterday there was a bit of classic BNL. And here’s a bit more from the 2018 inductees of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
This is “Man Made Lake,” from last year’s Detour De Force. The drummer, Tyler Stewart, says:
it is an allusion for drowning in man’s creations, as opposed to losing yourself in nature, which is often very therapeutic.
I think that it’s a very raw vocal, very personal and up-close. It’s the first song that we recorded for the album, and I think it really set the tone for those acoustic sessions, and obviously, it’s a standout on the record.
And that’s all well and good, but there’s just something about that simple bass drum that haunts the whole song. It’s a curious, and telling, heartbeat, if you will.
Detour De Force, their 13th studio album, was produced just before the pandemic began, and later that same summer, is the album this tour was meant to support. So just imagine, right about here, three or four paragraphs of navel gazing about how the pandemic impacted the arts.
This is from the song “Looking Up,” off 2017’s Fake Nudes. It’s a live show song, I think, a bridge between one mood and another in a concert. And this is the only interesting part in a song of saccharine pablum.
The big finish is a cover medley. There’s some instrumentation changes, some Led Zeppelin, Devo, a web meme and a nod to the late, great Biz Markie. And we always celebrate Biz Markie.
Tomorrow, the encore!
31
Aug 22
Aug 22
Pedaled downtown it was great, 8:30 on a Wednesday night
I am running out of ways to vamp for this demolition project. No big updates on the Poplars Building today. It is amusing, a few people on social media have marked the occasion — one gentleman flew his drone over it — but no one is lamenting the building. One of the best, and kindest mentions, is from what’s left of the local paper, which called it “a city landmark with countless, shifting identities.”
Now they’re just shifting rubble.
The saddest part of all of this, truly, is what’s happening to the local paper, which has never been in that building, but it is similarly being pulled apart.
Anyway.
Tonight, @IUSTV begins their 20-year anniversary with the 2022-2023 debut of @IUSTVsports. pic.twitter.com/cLZ30QaPvb
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) August 31, 2022
The late nights begin again for me. It was a 6 p.m. production, which wrapped at 8 p.m. today. One production and two shows down, 41 shoots and 72 shows to go.
I’m exhausted already.
But I did get a nice evening view of the sun streaming into the building at one point.
We wrapped everything up and I rode my bike back to the house in the last bit of the daylight. There was less traffic, meaning I got to go faster, and I did the whole trip — including three stop signs, six red-light intersections, a roundabout and a left turn — without putting a foot on the ground.
I’ve done that three times now, so I need a new goal. Please submit your ideas.
Time for a few more songs from the Monday night rock ‘n’ roll show. The headliner was Barenaked Ladies, and because they were the main attraction I’m stretching this content a few more days.
This song, Enid, is 30 years old. And the band genuinely looks like they still enjoy this one. Huge hit in Canada.
It was their second single, and off their debut album. Their first single was a cover of a Bruce Cockburn classic. That same year, and also from their debut album, they released Brian Wilson. Here’s the beginning and end of that Monday night performance, because I enjoy the search for a coherent mesh point.
Brian Wilson covered that song, by the way. How cool is that?
More music, and perhaps some other interesting stuff tomorrow.
