Primitive

Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 – Primitive

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.

1999

Prince – 1999

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.)

Editions of You

Roxy Music – Editions of You

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!

Elephant Stone

The Stone Roses – Elephant Stone

Did you see the Coachella line up?! Whoa. I really hope they stream it again this year because I’m quite sure I can’t afford that. I’ve always been a little afraid of giant festival shows anyway. Too many people in various states of consciousness, port-a-potties, uncertain food, and then the bands you really want to see aren’t going to have the time to play as long a set as you would get if they were on their own. But I have to admit, that’s quite an impressive list of bands.

The Stone Roses. If someone invents a time machine, they’re one of the bands I’m going to go back and see, circa 1989/90.

All the Dark Horses

Trashcan Sinatras – All the Dark Horses

Frank Reader on a bicycle? Well, stop right there! The man has a voice that just melts me. Then there’s that incredibly adorable Scottish accent. Riding a bicycle no less. Sigh.

I was thinking about a different song of theirs, January’s Little Joke, which I often do as the new year gets underway, but I got sucked into that YouTube vortex and stumbled across this one instead. In these cold, dark winter months, I’ll take a sunny reminder like this any day of the week. 

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

Cars

Gary Numan – Cars

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.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)