I read the article about King Krule in the most recent New Yorker and thought, huh, maybe I’d better give that another listen. I remember looking him up a couple weeks ago. I don’t know what song it might have been but it didn’t leave a lasting impression.
Now I am looking at this kid and thinking, whoa. First of all, he just turned 19. I am old enough to be his mother, and not just his unwed, teen-aged mother either. The article said he wrote this song when he was 13. Thirteen! My claim to fame at age 13? Winning the shop award in eighth grade. Sure, knowing how to swap out a faucet and install new light switches has come in handy over the years but kind of pales in comparison to this song.
There were quite a few more that I really liked, some under his former name Zoo Kid, like Out Getting Ribs. It’s a bit weird for me to have a musician be this young and be something I would like and my 12-year-old daughter would not like at all.
Today was the last day of school for my daughter. Pretty late this year because of all the days school was cancelled due to the blizzard and hurricane Sandy. It’s the power outages that do us in.
Summer is, hands down, my favorite season. The only thing I don’t like about it is the increase in the size and number of insects. Every other thing I adore. Hazy, hot, and humid? Love it. Thunderstorms? Sure! The smells, sounds, tastes, and sights of summer are what I live for all winter long.
Think about all the summer fruits and vegetables. There’s just no comparison. I like root vegetables probably more than the next person (as a vegetarian, they’re kind of staples for much of the year) but I’d trade them all for a ripe garden tomato. I’m not much of a gardener myself, I don’t have the time, space, or inclination really, but I usually manage to have a couple of large containers with tomato plants and I hit up the farmer’s markets pretty regularly. Farm fresh corn on the cob, does it get any better?
When I was a kid we used to go up to Maine from suburban New York City for the entire month of July. We went to a little beach town where there were only a handful of year-round residents but dozens of returning summer families. Some owned houses and stayed the whole summer, others, like us, came for two weeks or longer and stayed in the same rental houses year after year. We had electricity but no tv (or any kind of electronic distractions), just lots of other kids, books, games, cards, the beaches, rocky coastline, boats, swimming holes, blueberry patches: heaven. It was truly idyllic. My mother would let us roam free, more or less, and we ran all over the place in our bare feet. I know that all of my siblings feel the same way I do and wish we could give our kids the same lazy, free, unplugged and fueled by your imagination kind of summers we had there. I’m sure we complained about being bored now and then but our memories are overwhelmingly positive.
I’m taking some time off from work and going to try to recreate some of that summer magic for my kids on a greatly reduced scale. We only have a week and a half before the summer camps kick in and there’s not much chance I”ll get them to give up their DS and iPod, but if the weather cooperates we’ll hit the beach, look for seaglass, skip rocks, ride bikes, and bask in the warm summer sun right up until their bedtime.
It isn’t often that I’m tempted to think about the 1980s as a time of hope and promise. My high school and college years took place during the Reagan years and everything seemed bleak and hopeless. My first presidential election is a day I’d really rather forget but never will. It felt like the beginning of the end (and in some ways, it was).
The news of late has been pretty awful. We don’t have regular television service any more so I’m not even talking about the major network news outlets (most of which I’ve had trouble stomaching ever since Peter Jennings died). It just feels like everything that I read or that comes across my screens lately is more disgusting, baffling, frustrating, sickening, shocking—yet at the same time not shocking, that I start getting really depressed.
“Not everyone can carry the weight of the world.” Trust me, I know. And I know what you’re thinking. “For fuck’s sake! Combien de temps?! Hmm, Harry Reid?” All those empty prayers, empty mouths. This song may not have anything to do with the issues I’m incensed about today but it’s bigger than a single issue, or two or three. I want to talk about the passion. I want to talk about working toward something better. About finding some passion and doing something about it.
Today, one good thing came across the wires. For a few moments, I was reminded of a wonderful person who made a difference in so many lives. I’m talking about Mister Rogers. Today, March 20, would have been his 84th birthday. Mister Rogers not only lived his mission but he talked about it. And when you first hear his voice, especially in a serious setting like testifying before Congress, you almost chuckle to yourself thinking about how quaint and simple he sounds. But the more he talks, the more you watch everyone else get quiet. They sit, and they listen. They listen to him say things like, “I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.” In 1969! Talking to Congress about tackling mental health on children’s television! Or the way that he gently, and without pointing fingers, takes all of the television industry to task in his Hall of Fame induction speech (the whole thing is at the link above but if you just want to cut to the chase it’s here). Watch it. Really.
The article about Mister Rogers I linked to in the paragraph above is two pages long and has several videos, but they aren’t all that long and I promise you they are all worth taking the time to watch, and to read how and why he and his words are still relevant. In the final video included in the article, he says, “I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead…” Yes, it is tough, and we have a lot of hard work to do, and Mister Rogers isn’t here any longer to help us do it. He carried the weight of the world while we went busily about our days. We need to pick up where he left off. We have to.
Maybe it’s unfair to hold up Mister Rogers or bands like R.E.M. as examples of how we can take what we’re passionate about and try our best to spread the word and educate and inform people without getting mad or preachy. I guess I’m just hoping that we can remember those lessons and not get too discouraged. If there’s one thing I learned from the Reagan/Bush era it’s perseverance. It hurts and it’s demeaning to lose. But I, for one, need to look back at where I’ve been, what has been important to me, what helped me get through difficult times. This helps.
{If you’re wondering why I chose this early live video instead of the black and white one set to the studio track that would seem to fit perfectly, it’s because I couldn’t find a version of that without an ad and this time, I really felt like I didn’t want to subject people to a possible football ad.}
I just learned that today is Cindy Wilson’s birthday so in honor of that, some vintage B-52’s from 1978. I think seeing them like this, especially if you are not old enough to have known them in anything pre-Cosmic Thing, you get a different sense of the band.
They were always a campy band out for fun but I think the whole Love Shack era had a weird effect. I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it but it’s almost like the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at someone. In the early days, dancing around with your friends to the first (yellow) album or Wild Planet, especially as a newly minted junior high student, meant you were cool. I had the good fortune of having older siblings who brought home all kinds of music I might otherwise never have been exposed to at that age. By the time Cosmic Thing came out and large-scale fame had found them, it was no longer cool.
The other great thing about this video is that you now know how to do the Aqua-velva and the Escalator.
My brother’s best friend (he’s really like a second brother to us all) nicknamed us The Primitive Family sometime when they were still in high school. The title stuck and I’m sorry to say, I seem to be carrying on the family tradition.
We earned that distinction by having a number of household appliances that were in sad shape but money was tight, what with six kids to put through college, so we made do. This meant there was a pickle jar holding up one end of a shelf in the fridge. The tv needed time to warm up, five minutes or so, and the knob to change the channels had fallen off. For a while it remained on top of the tv and you would have to get up and put it on, then turn it to your channel and place it back on top of the tv. That last part only lasted until the cat managed to lose it and a pair of needle nosed pliers were left on top of the tv instead.
The record player also needed time to warm up before it reached the required speed. You could help it along by pushing the turntable around with your finger to get it going and then click the switch back and forth from 33 1/3 to 45. Once you had it going at something that looked like 45, you could chance turning it down 33 1/3. If you didn’t wait long enough, the weight of the arm and needle could drag it to a stop. We also became very adept at grabbing records off and dropping them down without letting the turntable stop.*
I’m sure there were other problems with the washer or dryer and let’s not even talk about cars. The car I’m currently driving used to belong to my sister so it’s no wonder that it shares this Primitive Family gene. The rear windshield wiper only works sometimes and only if you click it back and forth from on to spray and back several times. Occasionally I forget that I’ve left it in the on position, after giving up in frustration, only to have it suddenly start moving fifteen minutes later.
This morning I noticed a small hole in the floor in my daughter’s room. A knot in the floorboard had fallen through. I’m not surprised. The house is over 150 years old and the old floors have big gaps between each board, large enough to hold any number of Lego weapons. So I took a cork and shaved it down to fit and lopped off the top. Good as new. That’s actually the second time I’ve made some kind of home repair with a cork. A number of years ago in a terrible rainstorm I plugged up a hole in the basement that was pouring water like a faucet. I took an old baby bib that had a waterproof backing and wrapped it around a cork and jammed it in there. A couple of whacks with the rubber mallet and voila! It wasn’t an elegant solution but it did the trick.
* Not to worry, none of the records pictured up top were played on that old turntable.
I was stuck in traffic on my way to work the other morning. I turned on the radio to find out what was going on and, after learning I’d be there a while, started flipping through the stations. During the half hour I sat there I heard three Prince songs on three separate stations: When Doves Cry, Raspberry Beret, and Little Red Corvette.
Chances are if I’d been stuck there a little longer they would have played 1999. The album 1999 came out in 1982 (whoa, over thirty years ago!). At the time, the turn of the century seemed so far away and I couldn’t begin to imagine where I would be or what I’d be doing by New Year’s Eve 1999.
By 1999, I was living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan at a giant publishing company. You would think New York would be the ultimate place to be for New Year’s Eve, that one especially. However, I had my then fiance and his mother staying with me for the holidays. My future mother-in-law was 75 and didn’t speak English and taking the two of them into Manhattan where millions of people would be jammed in the streets, seemed like the worst idea possible.
My best friend was living outside of Philadelphia then and they were going to be away for a few days so she offered me their house. New Year’s Eve in Philadelphia instead sounded much more manageable and the chance to see the famous Mummer’s Parade on New Year’s Day was a big plus. Not many people would leave New York City for one of its biggest nights but that’s just what we did.
It also turned out to be Ed Rendell’s last night in office as the mayor of Philadelphia and they had a number of events all around the city creating a kind of roving party. As one event was ending and the crowd was making its way out of Rittenhouse Sq., someone bumped into my mother-in-law and said, “Oh, excuse me!” It was none other than the mayor himself. After that we made perhaps one more stop on the party tour but it was cold and we didn’t want to get stuck in traffic so we made our way back to my friend’s house before midnight and watched the fireworks on tv. Pretty low key. Let’s just say we didn’t bother knocking on Prince’s door.
(Sorry about the ad, the original video was removed from YouTube. I’ll keep looking for a better solution.)
I love this video. What a piece of gold. Bryan Ferry doing his one-armed piano playing/dancing. Brian Eno in his feathered finery, for that alone this is well worth watching. I can’t remember which of my siblings was the first to bring home Roxy Music, it just seemed to always be there. I don’t think I knew they looked like that though.
In case you missed it, this blog began on tumblr, where I’m still posting, but a number of my friends feel out of place there so I decided to have a WordPress edition too. If you are on tumblr, I also reblog stuff I find interesting there but I don’t carry it over here as the formatting gets screwy. Thanks for reading, watching, and listening in either case!
We were going out for a department holiday lunch today and a co-worker popped into my office to see who could drive. I said I could but my car is loud and uncomfortable and you’d feel like you were sitting in your mom’s station wagon. He said, “have I told you about my mom’s station wagon?” which launched us into a discussion about family road trips. I said we’d had some pretty legendary road trips when I was a kid. He countered that there was no way mine could rival his family’s car trips. He’s one of five kids and I’m one of six so we’re pretty well-matched.
I am so sure that in a face off of family car trips, I would win. We always only had one car and six kids in the pre-minivan days. You do the math. Squish that many people in a car together for seven or eight hours at a stretch in sweltering summer heat with cars in varying states of disrepair and you have a recipe for some eventful and memorable road stories.
This Gary Numan song always reminds me of one summer when my brother, two of my sisters and I went out to California to visit my dad for two weeks. My parents were recently divorced and he had moved out to Los Angeles for his job. My oldest sisters were already in college and had summer jobs so just the four of us flew out. My dad couldn’t be off the whole time we were there so he had planned this great camping trip for the week that he could take off. He had rented two tents and planned a route that took us up the coast to San Francisco, then inland to Yosemite and back down to LA.
What he’d forgotten to do was reserve any spots at any of the campgrounds he had mapped out along the way. Without fail, we’d pull in to the campground in the late afternoon or early evening and there wouldn’t be any available plots so we’d have to stay at a motel. We did take one of the tents out at one beach so we could change into and out of our bathing suits. It was embarrassing enough to be setting up the tent on the beach but when my younger sister went in to change, she dumped all the sand from her sneaker inside the tent. My dad refused to fold the tent up with the sand in it and made us carry it, fully popped up, back to the parking lot. We protested about it but he said that we would never see any of these people again in our lives and to just get over it. Sure enough, whatever restaurant we went to for dinner that night (because we wound up at a motel again), someone pointed at us and said to their friends, “look, it’s the people with the tent from the beach!”
The soundtrack for this west coast adventure was three tapes that my brother had brought along. No one had a Walkman yet so there didn’t seem much call to have a shoebox full of tapes with you at all times. One tape was the Ramones, one David Bowie, and one must have been a mix that had this song on it. I don’t remember all the other songs but when I hear this song, I see the four of us carrying the tent on the beach. I see the one night we did camp, in Yosemite, in a clearing not a campsite (missed the open spots again!), because my dad was fed up with having paid for camping gear we were never using. I see the 22 mosquito bites I got on my forehead alone during the ten minutes we sat around the campfire eating our dinner. I see the four of us banging our heads in unison to the Ramones while stuck in LA traffic – and in doing so, paying our father back the embarrassment he inflicted upon us with the tent incident.
There are a few more paragraphs I could write just about that trip, and that’s not even one of the bad ones. It was just long and boring with some amusing (now) stories to liven it up here and there. Hell, that trip didn’t even involve any car trouble, pets, or Shriners! Yup, I’ve got this family car trip smack down covered.
I’m reading Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever and although I’m not old enough to have been aware of the music scene during those five years (I was 6-11 years old and we lived just outside New York City not in it), much of the book is familiar.
Thanks to my older brother exposing us to bands like the Ramones, the Velvet Underground (and solo Lou Reed), the New York Dolls, and my own memories of hazy, dirty, hot summers, and a city with huge crime and drug problems, I don’t have a hard time picturing the events he chronicles.
Noisy Cats 