Bicycle

Memory Tapes – Bicycle

I had a very bicycle-themed Christmas this year, which is a little strange since none of the people who gave me these bicycle items know that this fall I tried to resurrect my old red bike and get back into riding shape. It’s a pretty easy bet that I would like any bicycle related thing though, so I was happy and appreciative.

I got little metal bicycle earrings, a set of four small juice glasses with different bikes on them, a book, and a 500-piece puzzle with pictures of a dozen or so bicycles. It sort of feels like a sign. I guess I might just have to try a spin class.

I think I would really like spinning IF I could bring my own music and not have someone shout at me when I should pedal faster, or whatever it is they do that makes this a group activity. There’s that too. I would prefer to be by myself. Just me, the open road, the tunes in my ears. When I lived in DC, I often rode my bike to work. We had this intern from Germany at our office who was about my age and he’d bought a bike too. People thought we would make a cute couple, and we were good friends, but as he once said to someone who suggested it, “we can barely cycle together.”

I have never liked exercising but bike riding was never about the physical fitness aspect, it was always a much more elusive feeling that I’m not sure I can explain. It’s sort of being at one with the bike. You and this two-wheeled metal frame, rocketing through the landscape, it’s damn near close to flying. You have those slow sloggy moments too when you notice the little details of your surroundings while trying not to look too pathetic as a runner passes you on the uphill. That has only happened to me once but I remember it vividly and I’m pretty sure I could call upon that memory in a darkened spin room when I need a little motivation.

A good playlist is always essential. In college I made a tape synced for my bike route so I had just the right sort of beat and inspiration on different spots along the way. I have recreated it as best I could for my iPod, and it’s not bad, but it was made for that specific 17-mile stretch and it doesn’t work as well on my current streets. This song might be a good biking song. It has a certain lost-in-the-moment feeling to it. The fact that it echoes New Order at the 3:38 mark is ok, I love New Order. I can almost see the green leaves whizzing by now. I just have to wait a good five months for that to be a reality. If I hit the gym this winter, maybe I’ll actually be able to pull it off.

Northeast Winter

Mazarin – Northeast Winter

It took me 2 1/2 hours to drive home yesterday on snow covered roads. I wish I could say I won’t let winter bother me but I do hate it so.

So why do I live in the northeast? I like it during spring, summer, and fall. I like that the cities are close together (good for touring). I like the history, all the old buildings, the landscape. I just hate the cold, dark, icy parts. I hate the barren tree branches, the grayness of everything. The squeaky sound of snow underfoot.

Christmas

The Buzz of Delight – Christmas

It was maybe three or four years ago that I heard this song while I was out doing some Christmas shopping. I was amazed. Sound Castles by The Buzz of Delight has got to be one of the more obscure records I own. Sure, Matthew Sweet went on to greater solo fame in the 1990s but I never met anyone who knew about this EP. Plus, I was in Macy’s, or someplace totally mainstream like that, not anywhere that was handpicking the music being piped in.

It was only in trying to find an mp3 of it later on that I discovered it had been on a new wave Christmas compilation in the mid-90s and that Matthew Sweet had released an album of his early recordings in 2002 that included the Buzz of Delight tracks. Maybe it isn’t as obscure as I always thought but hearing it, or any tracks from that album, always takes me right back to my college dorm room.

The Main Event

#WhereILivedWednesday: 440 9th St.

This post is part of #WhereILivedWednesday, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants, and as such is a slight departure from my usual video first format. The song is below and you’d better press play, it’s so worth it.

In the summer of 1979, my parents sent my older sister and me to stay with my Aunt Linda for a few weeks. They had arranged for us to go to a day camp at a private girls’ school in her town, where I could do gymnastics and my sister, tennis, in addition to your usual camp activities like batik, pottery, swimming, and the like. I wasn’t quite 12 years old yet so I didn’t realize that they were actually trying to get us out of the way while their marriage was falling apart.

We loved Aunt Linda. She was my father’s only sibling and we didn’t see her that often since she lived three hours upstate from our house. My dad was pretty stressed out and yelled a lot but my aunt Linda never yelled, she mostly laughed. She was so much fun and staying with her was going to rule. We had our own room in the old tower part of the house that even had its own sink.

Of course, all the bedrooms had their own sink since it was a convent. I don’t know about you but every convent I’ve been in has sinks in the bedrooms, and as I had another aunt who used to be a nun, plus my Aunt Linda, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in convents. The convent was an old house on a dead-end one-way street (I swear I’m not making that up) that had had renovations (for all the sinks!) and additions built onto it over the years. We had to go up these almost circular stairs, past a larger than life-sized Infant Jesus of Prague statue to get to our room but it was cool because it was kind of our own little hangout.

The Sisters also ran a day camp for younger kids, right there on the grounds of the convent. When we got home from our day camp, we were allowed to hang out with the campers who hadn’t been picked up yet, swim in the pool, play ball or jump rope on the black top. The other nuns were just as good at arts and crafts as my Aunt Linda so we got to make whatever things they had done that day, or learn fun camp songs (they weren’t even religious!). There was also another building with a teen rec room that had a juke box and a foosball table and even a soda machine! This was living!

The secret to all of the fun wasn’t just the amenities, however. These women were a riot. If no one had told you that they were all nuns, you would never have guessed it. Well, except for Sister Josephine who was kind of old and crotchety and still wore a habit (the only one who did), even indoors when she would shush us all because she couldn’t hear the Merv Griffin show despite the tv volume being turned all the way up. My sister and I didn’t have to go into their prayer session in the evening after dinner, we were free to hit the rec room or watch something besides Merv on tv. It was a pretty sweet set up.

They had a PA system at the camp so they could announce when it was time for the groups to switch to a new activity or come into the main camp building for lunch. One time at the end of the day, when we were already back from our camp, my Aunt Linda was getting ready to make an announcement only she didn’t realize the PA was already on. It must have been a long day and they were a little punchy. The big movie that had just been released that summer was The Main Event, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and the theme song was getting a lot of airplay on the radio. My Aunt Linda grabbed the mike and did her best Barbra Streisand imitation of that song, getting all the way through the slow-burn intro before someone had managed to clue her in that she was belting out a mildly racy disco hit to the whole camp.
Press play, you won’t regret it.

That was one of the last times we stayed up at the camp/convent with my Aunt Linda. My dad moved out at the end of the summer and Aunt Linda and some of the other nuns moved to the midwest about a year later. But my sister and I have our memories of that great summer of ’79 at 440 9th St.

Nothing Natural

Lush – Nothing Natural

Back in the early 1990s I was living in Washington, DC, working at a museum, spending all my money on NME and Melody Maker and tickets for shows at the 9:30 Club.

I was kind of in a weird place, musically. I still loved all the music I had been listening to in college but I felt like I was becoming a little self-destructive and that I needed to branch out and find things that didn’t crush me. I loved that – the ability the music had to absolutely level me – but it wasn’t really helping me get on with life. Hence my weekly trips to the bookstores in Dupont Circle and Georgetown for the NME and Melody Maker.

Grunge was big at the time, and I liked most of those bands too, but there was something about the shoegazers that really appealed to me. This was lose yourself in the sea of people all moving in unison in the dark (still smoky) club, kind of music. Lush, Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, I saw them all at the 9:30 Club. I don’t know if most of the people there were blissed out on some drug or other but I was immersed in the music blistering in my ears.

It was a short-lived moment. I left DC in 1994 and a lot of those bands broke up not long after that so listening to this music is always a real time warp for me. It’s so completely those years of being done with college, out on your own, supporting yourself, figuring out what you’ll do next.

No Clocks

Pylon – No Clocks

Here we are, back to Eastern Standard Time. Boo. Hiss. Bah humbug.

I hate this day. So many people just adore the day we set the clocks back because they think they gain an hour of sleep. Unless you are a childless person who has to set the alarm and be at work somewhere early Sunday morning then no, you do not get an extra hour of sleep. You wake up at whatever time you would wake up and, if you’ve set your clock back before you go to bed, it is whatever time it says it is.

What you lost, however, is an hour of daylight at the end of the day. I guess if you live significantly farther south or at the western edge of your time zone, this isn’t such a big deal. Here in New England we are at the eastern edge of the time zone and from now until after the winter solstice, it’s all down hill. Let’s weigh it up. One hour of sleep, if you actually woke up, looked at the clock and said, “Oh good, I can sleep for another hour!” and then successfully fell back asleep on this one Sunday, or plunging darkness at the end of the work day for the next two to three months. Hmmm.

Overly dramatic, maybe. I think I have undiagnosed (because I’ve never done anything other than bitch about the darkness) Seasonal Affective Disorder and my office is a windowless interior space so to leave at the end of the day and have it already be dark, just depresses the life out of me.

I went to the grocery store late this afternoon and the clouds that had covered the sky for much of the day were breaking apart with the last rays of the sun lighting them up with amazing colors. I stopped to take a picture. It was 4:44 p.m.

sunset

The sky at 4:44 p.m. on November 3, 2013

Pretty. But I would find it much prettier if it had been more like 7 p.m. If only we could spring forward in March and then never fall back.

What’s Good?

Though this song (and this video version) is from Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss album, I first heard it in Wim Wenders’ film Until the End of the World. I loved that movie. I was living in DC when it came out and between its initial release and the extended showings at a bunch of second run movie theaters in the city, I probably saw it about five times. It had such a great soundtrack too, which I snapped up as soon as I found it. The version on the soundtrack has an intro that’s missing here but I fired it up in the car this morning as I had a little Lou Reed tribute on my drive to work.

I only saw Lou Reed once, on tour for his New York album. The Feelies opened up the show at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. I remember when Lou and his band came out, he said they would be playing the whole album, in order, start to finish, so don’t bother yelling out any song titles. That was kind of unexpected for me but I figured, hey, it’s Lou Reed. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.

stub

My ticket stub

Scotty’s Lament

The Connells – Scotty’s Lament

Tonight I am taking my twelve-year-old daughter to her first concert (we have decided not to count the time we took her to see The Wiggles when she was almost three nor the time when she was six and staying with my sister who took her along to see Steel Pulse at an outdoor show, since she doesn’t remember either one). Another one of my sisters took her son to The Who for his first concert and friends have taken their kids with them to all manner of shows.

Before having kids, if I thought about it in the abstract, I imagined that I would influence my children’s tastes in music and they would be the coolest kids in school. For a while when they were very young, this was not far off the mark. I drove the car and controlled the stereo. I picked out the DVDs they watched and picked ones with soundtracks I liked (did you know there’s a surprising number of Ramones songs in Scooby-Doo movies?). But once they started taking the bus to school and hanging around with their peers, my music became something your parents listened to and not what they wanted to hear. I tried to bridge the gap for a while, making them CDs with songs I liked that got radio airplay, but currently there’s not a lot of crossover.

So tonight’s concert is my daughter’s favorite and I’m just accompanying her because she’s too young to go unsupervised. I am going to try hard not to embarrass her because I remember the one and only time I had a parent with me at a show.

I was in college in the Philadelphia suburbs and while I went to concerts in the city as often as I could, the last train left 30th St. Station right around midnight. If you missed it, you had to take an infrequent subway out through a rough neighborhood to the high speed line, which ran until 2am but only about once an hour. Most of the shows I went to were in theaters or sports stadiums because shows at clubs were always going to end after the last train. Every once in a while I could convince a friend with a car to come along but it was tough and the whole needing an ID or being 21 thing didn’t help.

This one time though, it just so happened that my dad was in Philadelphia for business and was staying at a hotel just two blocks from the Chestnut Cabaret. I had planned to meet up with a friend and her boyfriend to see The Connells there and now my dad was going to want to visit with me. I hemmed and hawed but finally decided to turn the situation to my advantage. His hotel room had two double beds so I figured we could hang out in the evening, have dinner, then I’d go to the show with my friends, stay overnight at the hotel with my dad, then we could do breakfast in the morning before his conference started. I didn’t expect him to say that he would want to come along. I tried to talk him out of it but it was just a club show, no seats, I don’t think I had bothered to get tickets in advance, so I couldn’t see how I could refuse to let him join us.

So dad and I went to see The Connells. He stayed at a table on the side with my friend’s boyfriend while the two of us hit the floor. He didn’t last all that long before the combination of age and business travel convinced him that he ought to head back to the hotel. I made my way to the hotel after the show and we spent the next morning hanging out before I headed back to campus.

What’s so embarrassing about that? It wasn’t at the show, it was the years afterward that I had to endure my dad bringing it up. The same exact sentences. “Remember that time we went to see, what was that band, oh yeah, The Con-nells (he always pronounced it as if it were two separate words)? And you two were down on the floor, I could only make out your heads bopping around from time to time so I left. Do you still go to see The Connells?” I am not kidding, for years, like ten, this same conversation took place every single time I spoke to him. Every.Time. If he was visiting and another person was around he would never miss the opportunity to regale them with the story about the time we went to a concert together. If I happened to tell him I was going to a concert he would immediately ask if I was going to see The Connells. (For the record, I saw them three times over the years, not the hundred and ten you would think if you listened to my dad.)

I spoke to my dad last weekend and mentioned that I was taking my daughter to a concert tonight. It’s been 25 years since that show so he doesn’t still remember the name of the band we saw but he started in, “Oh, I remember you used to go to concerts all the time.” I quickly changed the subject. Lesson learned. I will let my daughter be the one to remind me, if she wants to, about the time we went to a concert together.

Working in a Coal Mine

Devo – Working in a Coal Mine

I’ve been so busy at work lately that I was often doing work in the evenings or, as the lyrics say, “when my work day is over, I’m too tired for having fun” and that includes the old blog.

I’m also pretty behind in keeping up on all the things I usually follow. Lots of articles to read, art to see, and music to listen to.