Videos

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/)

Cellphone’s Dead

Beck – Cellphone’s Dead

My phone isn’t actually dead, yet, but it’s not long for this world. It’s amazing how accustomed I have become to having the internet in my pocket and how I am no longer put off by the size of a smartphone. I actually want a bigger one. Let me clarify, thinner, but with a bigger screen. I’m having a really hard time deciding though and the more I look at online reviews, the less certain I am. 

I still have a landline in the house. A real, mounted to the wall, no caller-id, has a curly cord, phone. I almost never use it but let me just say, the last two hurricanes that hit did a number on the power lines, damaged the cell towers, but that landline was still working both times. In advance of hurricane Sandy, I fruitlessly searched the area for a replacement battery for my cell phone but it seemed like everyone else, who had been without power for a week after Irene, had had the same idea.

For a long time I didn’t have a cell phone. I didn’t need one and I didn’t really want one. Even after my first child was born, it wasn’t until one day when my husband and I were both going to be out of our offices that it even occurred to me that we would be unreachable if daycare needed us in the case of an emergency. Now I hardly go anywhere without it.

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

Dancing Barefoot

Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot

I think I knew who Patti Smith was before going to college but only in the most cursory way, probably based on recognizing album covers and knowing maybe two songs. In short order though, I learned what a big influence she had been on so many bands I loved and even if I still didn’t know much of her music or much about her, I figured they knew what they were talking about.

I became addicted to this song* during college. Addicted, or some might say obsessed, pretty accurately describes a good 3/4 of my college years. Everything about this song just nails that mix of excitement, anger, longing, mystery, all the emotions the 20-year-old me would keep bottled up until I was alone in my dorm room or out on my bike. Then I’d blast the tunes and “spin so ceaselessly ‘til I lose my sense of gravity…”

About a year ago I went to an exhibit of Patti Smith’s photography. I’d read her book, Just Kids, and loved it and couldn’t wait to see her work for myself. The museum had an evening event where they had a dj playing music, food, drinks, and anyone wearing a concert t-shirt got in for free. I hauled my old shirts out of storage and proudly picked one to wear.  The shirt says EVERYTHING on the front and IS COOL on the back. I stood there looking at Patti Smith’s photograph of Keats’ grave, wearing my Pylon t-shirt, while the dj played Bigmouth Strikes Again and Radio Free Europe. Everything is cool.

* Actually, the one on constant repeat was The Feelies cover of this song – I think it was a flexi-disc that came with The Bob or something, I didn’t have the Patti Smith album yet – with a slightly faster tempo. A slower, totally haunting version by the Swedish sisters who are First Aid Kit, sung last year when Patti Smith won the Polar Music Prize, just proves how universal and timeless this song is.

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