Videos

I Samma Bil

Bo Kaspers Orkester – I Samma Bil

Today was the Eurovision Song Contest, held in my husband’s hometown, Malmö, Sweden. If you’re not from Europe or happened to spend a year abroad there during school or something, you probably have no idea that this extravaganza exists. It’s quite the big deal there though and they have regional competitions to pick the one song/performer that will represent the country. Back in 1974 ABBA won with Waterloo. Were it not for Eurovision, they might have remained world famous in Sweden, as we like to say.

I have a number of friends who live in Sweden, most of them Americans who have Swedish spouses like me, and they have embraced the over-the-top campy nature of the event. I’ll see their posts about the preliminary competitions, Melodifestivalen, and who they’re going to vote for, who had the worst song or outfits, but come the grand finale of Eurovision, my Twitter feed is non-stop snarky comments about the schmaltziest acts Europe can dish out.

To my knowledge, Bo Kaspers Orkester has never taken part in any of that, but I wanted to have a little taste of Sweden to represent them tonight since Denmark took home the big prize. I like a number of bands from Sweden but most of them sing in English and I thought it would be nice to have something maybe a bit more Swedish. This video comes from another Swedish singing festival, Allsång på Skansen, which is held every summer in Stockholm. The whole idea is that everyone is supposed to sing along, it’s mostly songs everyone knows, people bring the kids, it’s kind of an institution. I think what might be the best thing about it is that it’s so beautiful there. And look, it’s like 9pm and it’s still broad daylight.

The first time I went to Sweden with my then boyfriend, I lobbied hard to go up to Dalarna in central Sweden because I’d grown up loving all of Carl Larsson’s paintings and Astrid Lindgren’s stories and I wanted to see places that looked like those. We had a friend from graduate school (where we’d met) who lived near there so we stayed with him for a couple of days and saw the sights. The first night we sat up talking and the Swedes all kept glancing at their watches and finally had to tell me that it was 1am and we probably ought to go to bed. It looked like it was maybe 8:30 outside to me and I was so buzzed from all the extra sunlight. One of my American friends now lives way up in the north of Sweden where it never actually gets dark in the peak summer time. Of course the flip side is that they have very little daylight in the winter. Which is why I always try to have our visits as close to Midsommar as possible.

We Live As We Dream Alone

Gang of Four – We Live As We Dream Alone

I don’t know about you but it feels like the music press has spent the last two years reminding us of what albums are now 20 or 25 years old. Sometimes it seems impossible that so much time could have passed, other times it feels like, yeah, 20 years is probably about right. When I watch old clips on YouTube, it often looks like it was even longer ago (this one is *gulp* 30 years old). Poke around there for a while and if you’re looking for it, you’ll find some extraordinary things.

I bought myself a CD player as a college graduation present but I didn’t have any CDs yet so I also bought a receiver, turntable, and speakers. The CD player bit the dust a number of years ago but the turntable was just given a clean bill of health at a turntable clinic put on by my local record store. I sold off some of my records when I left college but I kept most of them and simply replicated my collection on CD as well. It’s funny because CDs were supposed to be indestructible but many of those now skip and one of them, the data just vanished from it completely. Luckily, I still have the records and they still play. Songs of the Free by Gang of Four is one of those treasured vinyl albums.

I remember reading that they were a big influence on bands I loved and they were in that movie, Urgh! A Music War which we got a copy of somehow. I loved digging around connecting the dots. In the pre-internet days, it took time and dedication and those were two things I had in abundance. The pay-off would probably seem small to most people—getting to see live footage of a band that had broken up—but to me it was like a secret code. Pay attention. It’s all there. Hey! Kids.

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth – Kool Thing

Kool Thing indeed. Really, can you out cool Kim Gordon? I don’t think so.

I missed that yesterday was Kim Gordon’s 60th birthday. I think it’s easy to forget how long she’s been out there paving the way for women in music because she’s still doing it. I have always loved that she was part of a band that was loud, experimental, noisy. There aren’t a lot of women in bands like that, and even fewer back in the early days. That she not only held her own but was often out front, like in this song, just made her that much more cool in my book. Like she didn’t take shit from anyone.

When she and Thurston Moore announced they were splitting up, I was more sad about the break up of Sonic Youth than of some super couple of alt rock. I didn’t know why and it didn’t really matter to me. Now that Kim has said why, I just think Thurston was a fool. Because Kim Gordon is the hottest fucking thing on the planet in my book. Happy birthday and rock on, Kim!

This is Not a Photograph

Mission of Burma – This is Not a Photograph

It seems only fitting to finish off this week with another Boston band, and an iconic one at that.

What an unbelievable week. There’s really nothing I can say that someone else hasn’t already said more eloquently. Let’s just hope the rest of the year doesn’t continue at that pace.

Book-ending the week on the positive side, I filed the taxes on Sunday (getting a small refund from both state and feds) and the state refund was deposited in my bank account today, just in time for Record Store Day. I walked down to my local record shop which is remarkably still there, and still a record store. Not records plus CDs, DVDs, posters, t-shirts, books, and all kinds of other stuff. It’s small and it’s for the vinyl lovers. Most of the newly issued records are usually too expensive for me so I tend to go digging in the bins for stuff I should have bought back in the day. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are still some real finds.

Today I found Signals, Calls, and Marches by Mission of Burma. It was in such beautiful shape I was sure it must be a reissue but I took it out and it only had the 1981 copyright on it. When I bought it the owner said, “Wow, Mission of Burma, you’re a real deep catalog gal.” I came home and looked it up on eBay, there was a reissue on Matador Records back in 2008, but the one I just bought is an original 1981 Ace of Hearts pressing, it even still has the funky lyrics sheet on some kind of textured paper where the words to all the songs are written in alphabetical order. It’s so cool. $12.95 well spent in my book.

Between the Wars

Billy Bragg – Between the Wars

The first person I thought of when I heard Margaret Thatcher had died overnight was Billy Bragg. There’s a short interview with him from a few years ago on Democracy Now that sums it up pretty quickly if you aren’t familiar with his early days.

I grew up in a left-leaning family and I spent my teenage years assuming most people came from the same basic positions we did. What a shocker when I got to college and discovered the campus was teeming with young Reaganites. Clueless ruled the day. We’re talking about people who didn’t even know what apartheid was let alone why they should be demonstrating against it. If I’d landed on a more liberal campus, chances are I would have continued to take it for granted that most people felt like I did and not really become someone who paid an awful lot of attention. Instead, because the political climate on campus, in the country and over in the UK, was squarely at odds with my positions, I became much more engaged.

It surely helped that the music I listened to was firmly in the anti-Reagan, anti-Thatcher camp. I credit those musicians with furthering my education and waking me up to causes and injustices I hadn’t given much thought to before. I got the newspaper delivered daily and spent a fair amount of time in the library, not doing coursework but looking up the background on issues that cropped up in their songs.

I recognize that people not that much younger than me are likely to not really know anything about Margaret Thatcher. They would have been too young to understand it all first hand and not enough time would have passed for it to be taught in school. Even college kids today, are events that happened 25 years ago something they will study? I wonder when my kids are older, what will the history books say?

April Fool

Patti Smith – April Fool

This past week was pretty busy followed by a weekend full of activities. Now here it is April 1st. I am so ready for it to be April, for spring to finally get going full strength, but it’s been such a long winter that I almost feel unprepared. I need to schedule summer camp for the kids but I still don’t know what the last day of school will be because of all the missed days from hurricanes and blizzards. That kind of unprepared. I am always ready for winter to be over. Before it even starts.

I didn’t really care much one way or the other about spring until I learned what passes for spring in Maine. I’ll never forget our German teacher explaining to a classroom full of kids how, in Austria and Germany, it gradually gets warmer in March and little flowers start popping up and then more in April and everything gets green again. He was kind of a character, this old man from an Austrian skiing village, so I figured he was trying to be funny to get us to remember the words for the season. Then I looked around and saw a number of kids listening as if they hadn’t ever heard of spring before. That first winter in Maine was a pretty harsh one, not just by our weak and untested New York standards, and I remember it snowed into April that year.

My primary goal in applying to college was to get as far south as seemed reasonably possible. I applied to only two schools north of the Mason-Dixon line. I hadn’t given much thought to the type of schools (mostly the big state universities) or to my chances of getting in, I just didn’t want any more snow in April. In the end I wound up outside Philadelphia, which wasn’t south by any stretch, but the seasons did at least arrive when the calendar said they should and you could easily get by without real winter gear. Biking was possible pretty much year round.

But I really came to appreciate spring when I lived in Washington D.C. Unless you are an allergy sufferer, you should try to see DC in the spring. It really is beautiful. I was thrilled to discover daffodils in February, and once all those flowering trees get going, it’s a riot of color everywhere you look. The cherry blossoms really are lovely down around the Tidal Basin but there are lots of less crowded places I loved to walk around; Rock Creek Park, Dumbarton Oaks, the C&O Canal, and Mount Vernon over in VA.

I’ll always love summer the most but thanks to those years in DC, I’m a fool for April.

Talk About the Passion


R.E.M. – Talk About the Passion

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.}

Given to Fly

Pearl Jam – Given to Fly

I first saw this video a couple of years ago but came to think about it again recently when someone tweeted a link to an article about sign language interpreters at concerts. I also thought about it because I’ve noticed that I hear a low buzz in my ears when there isn’t any other noise around and I wonder if all those years of loud concert-going has finally caught up with me.

My grandfather was quite hard of hearing because he was a track coach and he was always firing a starter’s pistol just above his ear. Then my grandmother started to lose her hearing (she always said it was because she had to shout at him so he could hear her but I don’t think that’s quite how it works). She did not take it well and she groused and complained constantly about having to wear her hearing aids. Every time she did she would tell us, “don’t lose your hearing, it’s terrible” and I would always answer, “it’s too late, Grandma, I’ve been to too many loud rock concerts.”

When I graduated from college I didn’t have a job lined up or any ideas about what I might want to do with my life. I worked at a record store for a while and tried to figure out my next move. For a couple of months I got the idea in my head that I should become a geography teacher at a deaf school and tried to teach myself sign language. It didn’t take long for me to realize that was not going to pan out and fixed my sights instead on the much more employable field of film preservation. That turned out to be not nearly as far-fetched as at least my mother thought and I wound up working in D.C. in the photographic archive at one of the museums that’s a part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Washington, D.C. is home to Gallaudet University and at one point we had an intern from there working in our office. She taught us sign language for a couple of useful, everyday things, but the only two I can still remember are the signs for shower and coffee break.

I am such a believer in the powerful role music can play in people’s lives and I’m so glad to see articles and videos like this because I’ve always thought that not being able to hear the notes shouldn’t mean that people lose out on the whole experience. To me, listening to music is something that involves your whole body and I hope that no matter what happens to my hearing, I can still go to a show and be moved.