All month long, a group of dedicated followers of fashion have been listening to one Kinks album a day (in chronological order). Two of my favorite blogs, Pleasant Valley Sunday and The Song in My Head Today have been doing daily posts on all those Kinks albums. Compare and contrast (or at least go there and scroll back).
And red-hot atomic thanks to Never Get out of the Boat! for alerting me to a blindingly brilliant project: Brooklyn-based musicians Roger and Dave have decided to arrange, perform (on ukulele), record, and post cover versions of all 185 songs written and released by the Beatles (with 185 guest artists). They've been posting one of these a week since January and will keep posting one per week until they're done. And they also have been posting essays about the songs, musicians, etc.
In most cases, these are covers with full instrumentation (and often feature arrangements that depart quite a ways from the originals). Peruse the whole shebang here. I'd recommend checking out "I am the Walrus" (song 038) "Because" (song 017), and "Come Together" (song 007) then work your way up to "Revolution #9" (song 034).
A brief pause to appreciate the modern miracle of anti-lock brakes.
I was in Alaska for most of the past week.
When I got there, it was chilly, but they were still waiting for the first snow.
When I left, there was 3-6 inches of snow on the ground.
I drove nearly 600 miles in that week, often through near-blizzard conditions (and sometimes in virtual white-outs). I was driving a small Toyota Yaris (which looks a lot like a mouse and handles like one in the snow), so I slowed down when the road conditions were bad. Sometimes I slowed way down.
One night, I was going about 40 on a highway with a speed limit of 65 (through I stretch I'd cruised down days before when the road was clear) and two four-wheel drive trucks winged by me going around 75. Twenty miles later, I saw one of the trucks in a gully by the side of the road with four police cars and a tow truck trying to get him back on the road. I puttered by in the Mouse, going up to 50 when the road was clear and back down to about 40 on the bad stretches.
And I remembered being a passenger in a car decades ago. Going into the mountains, skiing. Driving down a highway slick with snow and ice at about 60. And the car hit something and went into a skid. Suddenly, we'd spun 90 degrees around and were facing the guardrail, but still moving down the road. And then the brakes and steering kicked in and we spun 180 degrees around until we faced the opposite guard rail (again still moving down the road at a high rate of speed). Time just slowed down and the car almost righted itself. Then almost stopped itself. Then slid into a soft wall of snow on the side of the road.
A small change in pressure or steering and the car would have gone into the guardrail and been wrecked. Or another car might have crashed into us. And forget about the car for a minute. This was before air bags, so we easily could have been injured or killed.
I thought about that driving slowly through near-blizzard conditions in Alaska. I probably could have pushed my speed up by another 5-10mph. And the car had anti-lock brakes and airbags, so I probably would have been safe even if it crashed. But I slowed down. And didn't care if it took an extra 10 or 20 minutes to get where I was going.
And the highways were better than the streets in town, which sometimes weren't plowed and often would melt from sunlight and traffic, then freeze again overnight. A couple of times, I had to press hard on the brake and feel the anti-lock mechanism clamping down, shifting between the four wheels hundreds of time per second to bring the Mouse to a safe stop.
I returned the car at night in a light snowfall as the temperatures slid down to around 20 degrees. About a quarter-mile from the airport is a stop light. As I approached, there were two cars waiting in front of me. I hit the brake and the Mouse started to slide forward. The anti-lock braking system kicked in, but the car was still sliding. It was clear that I didn't have enough room to stop and would likely slide into the car in front of me.
Time slowed again. And while the Mouse was trying to stop itself, I noticed there were two lanes in my direction on that road. In my lane, steady traffic had warn down the snow (which had probably just refrozen) to the pavement. The other lane had three inches of snow on the road, but no vehicles. So while the brakes were making that ABS crunching sound, I steered into the other lane, into the deep snow, and easily pulled to a stop at the light. Five minutes later, the car was back in the warm embrace of Avis, unharmed and undamaged. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
When I got home, I told this story to a friend of mine, who listened intently, paused, then said "are you still talking about cars?"
There were a lot of reasons to love the song "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield.
He was cute. He was a soap opera star. The album it came from (Working Class Dog) featured a photo of a dog in a shirt and tie with a photo of Rick Springfield in the breast pocket. It's pretty damn catchy.
But for me and all my friends, there was one overwhelming factor that made us love this song: the line "I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot." (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
And then there's They Might Be Giants, a band made for late-night college-hallway arguments about the meanings of their songs. But in the internet era those arguments would have to include the question does this version of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" make more or less sense than the original?
When I was growing up, it seemed impossible to imagine that the Berlin Wall would ever come down.
But 20 years ago, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, communism was going through an upheaval. A gradual inching towards freedom occurred. And travel restrictions were eased.
In part, this was because a flow of refugees from the East was forcing their way into the West.
In East Germany, millions of people (nearly 10% of the population) took to the streets -- marching for freedom.
The East German government, with the blessings of the Soviets, announced new rules that would let East Germans travel to the West.
In Berlin, tens of thousands gathered at the Berlin Wall, laughing, singing, and drinking. Then they climbed the wall. East German authorities announced that the border would be opened in the morning, but the crowds kept coming. And eventually the border was opened, without fanfare, in the middle of the night.
Later, sensing the situation was getting out of hand, East German leader Egon Krenz ordered the border guards to reseal the border by any means necessary, including deadly force.
The East German soldiers, looking out at the crowd of revelers from the East and West, made some efforts to establish order, but chose not to use any force. Over the next few days, bulldozers broke apart sections of the Wall, creating four new border crossings. Less than a year later, East and West Germany were officially reunited and only a small section of the Wall remained upright.
John Dear, writing in The Plough challenges us to imagine ways to make the world better (read his article here.)
25 (or even 21) years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed impossible -- or at best something that might happen in some far-away future when we were all dead. That was very clear. Until it happened. And suddenly everything seemed possible.
I can't think of a better way to celebrate that anniversary than to ask what a better world will look like (and then imagine ways to bring that better world closer).
In which, perhaps, I (briefly) control the weather.
Did I actually believe that I controlled the weather when I was in college?
It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
I did have a spooky relationship with the weather back then. And would (occasionally) promise (and deliver) either snow or a sunny day on demand (or tell friends that their desired weather just wouldn't happen).
Maybe I was just in tune with the meteorological truths. Or maybe it was all just hundreds of coincidences.
But I never believed that I could control the weather and shape it to my own whims.
I still don't believe that.
And yet...
I'm up in Alaska right now. Today, I spent a lot of time with two people who rely on snow for their livelihood and they lamented the lack of white stuff on the ground. "Don't worry," I told both of them, "I brought snow up with me from Los Angeles. We don't need it down there." And I promised them snow this week.
Now, you might say that I checked the forecast on weather.com (I did). And you might know that the forecast called for snow showers later this week (it did). And you might suspect that I want people to think that I'm cool enough to be able to deliver weather on demand (you'd be right).
But the forecast said the snow wouldn't start until tomorrow.
And it started an hour after I promised snow. And hasn't stopped yet.
Coincidence? You tell me. (Link with badly synced sound for Gmail subscribers.)
The Russian inventor of the weird electronic instrument that you play without touching it wanted to invent something you could play without expending any mechanical energy.
I'm pretty sure he didn't think it would one day be used for this:
This past weekend, I was at a Halloween party where someone brought a theremin. And I'm here to tell you, it's impossible to play the theremin without making weird faces. (Or at least it is for me...)
"Hey," she said, "do you want to go square dancing?"
No. But not only did I not want to go. I didn't want her to want to go.
And while it was (more than) okay for me not to want to go, looking back I can see that not wanting her to want to go was a problem. And a red flag.
That's just common sense.
But when you want something as much as I wanted her, your common sense books the first flight for the tropics, leaving you stuck in the fog.
In the 1970s, Adam Ant was heading nowhere. He was in a band called Bazooka Joe that is remembered today only as the answer to the trivia question "who was the headliner at the first live Sex Pistols show?"
But Adam watched the Sex Pistols, glimpsed the future, and broke up his band. His next band, Adam and the Ants, fused ska polyrhythms, punk energy, and glam dress-up style with pirate uniforms.
He eventually got Sex Pistols svengali Malcolm McLaren to manage the band. But McLaren had little interest in Adam Ant and soon convinced the other Ants to jump ship to join Bow Wow Wow. Undeterred (or at least not wanting candy), Ant recruited Marco Pirroni (ex of Siouxsie and the Banshees) and several others as the new Adam and the Ants. Pirroni would write or co-write most of their hits, even after Ant hung up his puffy pirate shirt for good. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
I talked her out of square dancing and talked her into going to see Adam and the Ants. She hated the crowd, hated the songs, and hated the fact that there were two drummers. I loved the energy, loved the crowd, and found the music pleasant (even if it wasn't that memorable). It was like we were at two completely different concerts.
We walked back to campus in the fog and I knew all was lost.
Even before she demanded I take her square dancing the next weekend.
Years later, at the edge of a different ocean, the fog rolled in again. And I went for a walk and realized that, although I've never owned an Adam and the Ants record, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for them. Because at least they don't play square dancing music.
The East German government, with the blessings of the Soviets, announced new rules that would let East Germans travel to the West.
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