Spitball Army

One of my guilty pleasures/indulgences that I have continued over many years is getting home delivery of The New York Times.  It goes great with a fresh cup of coffee (or two) on the porch or in front of the fire on a Sunday morning.  I think I’ve been doing this since I lived in Cambridge, so we’re talking over twenty years now.

It used to be that I went straight to the Arts & Leisure section, then the Weekend section, then the front section, landing eventually in the Magazine.  There I would tear out the crossword puzzle – which I collected to send to my mother, who is a crossword fiend – and work my way through the articles.  Lately, I find that Randy Cohen’s column, The Ethicist, has become the first thing I turn to after ripping the plastic bag off of the paper.  Yes, even before Arts & Leisure.

Cohen’s snarky comments sound unlike any ethics discussion I’ve ever heard, favoring humor over gravity, or perhaps it is that he makes the serious subject matter more palatable with his wit.  He certainly lightens up what could otherwise be a very dry topic.  This week’s ironic Ethicist column made me laugh out loud (and, yes, I couldn’t even wait for my paper delivery and went online to read it today!):

At the end of a long flight, I gathered my children’s scattered belongings and scooped up someone’s lost flash drive, planning to mail it to its owner. A quick check showed that the drive contains a company’s proprietary information. Some employees are named, but I cannot identify the drive’s owner. If I send it to the head honcho, he may castigate the person who failed to protect this information. If I send it to someone else, he or she may have inappropriate access to this information. What to do? — CAROLYN CANNUSCIO, PHILADELPHIA

Ethics requires not just good intentions — those you have — but deft execution, and that you . . . well, did I mention that your intentions are admirable? And your smile. I’ll bet you have a nice smile.

You should do now what you should have done when you first spotted the little lost drive: give it to an airline official or at least let the airline know you have it. When its owner realizes it’s gone, he is likely — or certainly able — to contact the airline; he has no way to contact you. Anyone might be frazzled after a long flight, particularly when traveling with kids, but your tactics impeded the joyous reunion of owner and thumb drive and led you to rummage through someone’s private files.

UPDATE: After additional, more tech-savvy, sleuthing, Cannuscio unearthed the name and address of the drive’s owner — the founder of the company, which develops theft-protection products. (The jokes just write themselves.) She adds, “The flash drive is on its way home.”

…that I can think of, is this:

Amy Winehouse will not attend this year’s Grammy Awards because her request for a visa was denied, but she will perform by satellite at Sunday’s ceremony in Los Angeles. (more)

Unless, of course, you are all amped up to see Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang do their classical/jazz hybrid number.  If so, more power to ya.  But for me…no, no, no.

This afternoon I trekked to the cinema to see There Will Be Blood, and must say that I don’t recall ever seeing a performance so flamboyant and scenery-chewing, yet so absolutely incredibly human, as Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Daniel Plainview.  Imagine Orson Welles (as Charles Foster Kane) and James Dean (as Jett Rink) being channeled by John Huston and you will have an idea of what to expect – if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know what I’m getting at.

Even though Paul Dano screams like Arnold Stang (Ray the grease monkey) in It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, I loved this “milk shake” scene (before its violent and disturbing climax), and there are so many amazing moments in this movie.  Did you notice that it wasn’t until about 15 minutes into the film that a word of dialogue is spoken?  And the filmmakers did a great job of making their Texas locations look like central California in the early 20th century.

I love how the Obama Baby rolls his R when he says “Rrrrrrrudy,” as if he was a member of The Specials.
5 February 2008, 4:20 pm.

Woke up at 6:00 am with a stiffness in my back.  I had slept in the guest bedroom, as there were piles of clean laundry stacked on my usual bed, and I was too lazy or (more charitably) otherwise occupied to finish the task yesterday.

Showered, shaved, and tended to my face, which is finally getting a reprieve from the Carac treatment it has been baraged by for the past three weeks.  Yesterday was the last of the daily treatments.  This is the second round of this treatment that I have endured: it leaves my face looking like that of a deranged raccoon and the medication is very expensive.  But, given the choice of a $250 pharmacy bill accompanied by some discomfort and ugliness, or a possible case of operable skin cancer…well, let’s just say it’s a no-brainer.

Dressed, fed the cats, and jumped in the truck to head down to my polling place to vote at 7:00 am.  I was voter number 7 in line, so I was able to cast my “gender” vote quickly.  There were two ballot boxes at the school where I vote, and one of them was down (it was sitting there like an abandoned R2D2, emitting a sad electronic beeping sound every few seconds).  If they don’t get that baby fixed, they are going to have one hellish day come lunchtime or after work.

Drove to Homewood, got a cuppa joe at O’Henry’s, loaded a bookshelf from the empty store space into the back of the truck, and proceeded back home very slowly so as not to not bump the shelves out of the back of the truck.  People in this town – it’s probably the same in every town, I guess – just do not know how to react when stuck in traffic behind a vehicle that is driving slowly.  I was honked at, yelled at, had lights flashed at me, and was flipped the bird.  What’s the freakin’ rush, folks?  Just get started a little earlier!

Dumped the bookshelves at home, then headed back out to get a few needed things for the house.  Went to Wal-Mart and bought a shower liner, bar soap, and the new Jack Johnson CD ($9.72, and I just happen to know that the base cost on this bad boy is at least $10.35).  Then went to Home Depot and got new paint (Behr’s “White Corn” – it is a lot lighter in tone than the website page sample) for the bookshelves, and brushes.  I then rolled on home.

So, it seems that the Jack Johnson CD was priced as a “loss leader.”  I have to question the effectiveness of that as a sales model when there are only 10 copies of the item (I saw them all, as the clerk – if you want to call her that…she was really no more than an employee – had to open a box to find them for me), and the item is not out on the shelves, and thus obviously not even positioned.

And let me add one more thing about driving.  As I was pulling out of my driveway on my way to shop at the corporate megalith retail outlets (and did I mention that, being in Birmingham, they both charge the cursed 10% sales tax?), a car came barrelling around the corner and was  behind me as I started up the street.  I noticed in my rear-view mirror that this guy was weaving back and forth between the lane and a position where he was straddling the line down the middle of the street.  Now, I wasn’t hauling a 100-pound wooden bookcase, so I was driving at or slightly above the speed limit – besides, this is a residential neighborhood with plenty of small children, and as a neighborhood, we try to keep it safe and look out for one another.  The fellow behind me was having none of that, and after enduring one block of my driving, he accelerated and passed me doing about 50 mph in a 25 mph zone.  He passed a woman on her morning run, jogging toward us, and she actually stopped dead in her tracks and made a large “slow down” gesture at him, with both palms down, pushing them toward the ground.  He just kept gunning it down the street.  His Alabama plate number is AT25102.

10:36 am.  The house phone rings, and the caller ID says HEALTHSOUTH COR (meaning Healthsouth Corporate center, south of town).  I have a friend who works there, but knowing he would most likely be calling me on my cellular, I let the call go to voice mail.  When I check the message, it is from a woman identifying herself as “Ella, a volunteer for Barack Obama.”  She told me where my polling place is, the address, and encouraged me to go vote today and, especially, to vote for Barack Obama.  I turned off the phone and then I got to thinking.  Since this call came from Healthsouth, does that mean that Healthsouth is paying this person to do political canvassing?  Well, they are paying her, but she is a “volunteer,” so she is allowing Healthsouth to finance her “free” work for Barack Obama.  Having been a business owner for nearly the last 17 years of my life, I would have been mortified upon notification, yet appreciative to the source, to find out that this nonsense was occurring at my company, and that I was paying for it (incidentally, this reaction has absolutely nothing to do with my candidate preference, which today is approximately 40% Clinton + 29% Obama + 31% Huckabee).  So, I called back the phone number on my caller ID, which turned out to be the main switchboard number at Healthsouth, and asked for the Human Resources department.  Then I passed the content of the call on to the astonished woman on the other end of the line, who was not Ella.  I did not feel smug or self-righteous.

3:15 pm.  I spent the last 2-3 hours painting the bookshelf sections under cover of my front porch – they’re too heavy to lug around to the garage, and the weatherman has been beating the drum on this election day with warnings of storms a-comin’.  After the second coat, the original grey-blue paint has vanished under the white corn, and I think these will very nicely complement the earthy tones that are throughout my home.  I can’t wait to see them inside.  Ziggy, my male cat, was really frustrated that he couldn’t be out on the porch where I was – if he didn’t track all over the wet paint, he would have tried to eat it – and sat inside behind the front door howling like a dog.  Because he is a puppycat.

I will be watching the election returns tonight, like many of you, and hoping that Judge Scott Vowell, in his infinite and balanced wisdom, will not rule against the validity of the Jefferson County  Commission election results.  See?  Weird election shit happens EVERYWHERE, not just in Florida.

Damn!  I missed it…the Josh Ritter Live at the Artists’ Den segment already aired on Ovation.  If, like me, you missed it, it will re-air on February 21st.  Here’s a clip (courtesy of ovationtv.com):

I nearly hit the floor when my friend Ben gave me this painstakingly and lovingly made reconstruction of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, as a farewell tribute to my teenaged record store, which has flown the nest after 16 and a half years.  The version he handed me that day this past December was printed on canvas and it is BIG!  I am still trying to find the perfect place for it in my increasingly crowded little cottage.

Ben and I worked together on the CD samplers that my store produced annually.  He realized my sketches and ideas into miraculous little works of art, and many of the artists that were featured on those discs found their way into this collage, as well as family members, related celebrity types and icons from the store’s history, and a few oddities.  That’s Ben – always keeping it real by keeping it surreal and kitschy and unexpected.  Personally, I think it took a healthy slice of genius to concoct this so artfully, but Ben would most likely deny the praise.  Whatever.  I’ve simply stated my case, and I’ll stand by it.

How many of the figures that aren’t in the original can you identify?  Here’s the Beatles version, for reference:

k.d. lang / Watershed

I’ll admit that I’ve have shied away from the more pop-oriented k.d. lang albums over the years, preferring projects like the narrowly-themed Shadowland and Drag, where lang focused her undeniable talents on a more sharply-delineated musical landscape (Patsy Cline-era country music and late-night crooner tunes, respectively).  Watershed fits squarely in the pop category, and its production is subtle and completely in service to lang’s gorgeous voice.  Indeed, there are few singers around today with the ability to sing in the lush and sensual tones that lang possesses – think of Linda Ronstadt without the bombast, and you’ll know what to expect here.  Sadly, the material – much of it written by lang herself – seems run-of-the-mill and moon-june-spoon, and doesn’t come close to matching the execution.  As with many of the later Ronstadt albums, repeated listens to Watershed only reveal the monochromatic texture behind the delicious and tempting facade.

Cat Power / Jukebox

Chan Marshall follows up her remarkable The Greatest with a second album of covers and, unlike 2000’s largely acoustic The Covers Record, Jukebox is a full band project.  My first listen to this recording – on an advance CD provided by Matador Records – left me scratching my head: all but two of the album’s twelve tracks ended with an extended fade-out.  Were these songs merely cobbled together from jam session outtakes where the band and Marshall couldn’t figure out how to close the song?  Surely, whoever handles such things wouldn’t have been so careless with the artist’s reputation – on the heels of a critically-acclaimed release – as to toss together twelve cover jams and attempt to call it an album!  I called someone at the label level to find out if there had perhaps been an error in the mastering of the advance CDs, but no answer ever came back.  Not wanting to believe – in fact, refusing to accept – that such idiocy could indeed exist in the music business (insert winking emoticon here), I waited a couple of weeks and bought a hard copy of Jukebox to see how it compared.  Happily, each of the previously faded-out tracks had an additional 15 seconds attached to the end, and ended as if the band knew what they were doing.  Now, we’re talking!  Jukebox is full of surprising re-interpretations, notably the opening “New York, New York” and Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.”  Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is a near-recitation of the lyric over a swaying piano and organ pulse.  “I Feel,” by the rap group Hot Boys, is a revelation in a stripped-down and barely recognizable piano and voice version here (it is included on the 5-track bonus CD in the deluxe version of the album).  The band hits a steady groove throughout, much like the session musicians did in The Greatest, minus the Memphis horns.

Curt Perkins / Get Something Started

While attempting to uncover the mystery of “Where Are We Going” (see this previous post), I landed on this album by Curt Perkins, sometime member of the Josh Rouse band.  Curt was in the band that played this tune at the October 2003 Workplay gig, and apparently had been saving it for inclusion on his own Get Something Started, released mid-2007. 
[audio:Curt_Perkins___Where_Are_We_Going.mp3]
The album is a chilled-out retro-fest, owing an obvious debt to the laid-back soul and soft rock that was also an influence on Rouse’s 1972 and Nashville albums.  Combine a Curtis Mayfield groove (“Can’t Stop”) with a Stephen Bishop radio vibe (“California”) and a creamy mid-range vocal style reminiscent of Teddy Thompson, and you have another terrific collection of backward-looking pop-rock similar to that being explored by Perkins’ contemporaries David Mead and Daniel Tashian.  An enjoyable listen.

Get Something Started is available for download at amazon.com ($7.99, below) and iTunes ($9.90).  Amazon also sells a hard CD version ($14.25).

This set list was nabbed after a Josh Rouse concert at Birmingham’s Workplay Theatre in October 2003.  I tried to determine the date online, but both Josh’s site and the Workplay site do not have archives going back that far.  Band member Daniel Tashian’s blog started up in January 2004, so there is no mention of the show there, either.  If anybody out there can inform me of the date, I will exactify this post.

It was an outstanding, energetic show.  Josh was touring to promote 1972, and the band was a 5-piece.  My memory also tells me that the closing number was “Flight Attendant,” as part of an encore, so there may have been one or two other songs at the head of the encore that didn’t make the set list.

The cover of Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” was awesome, as I recall.

What is “Where Are We Going?”

Josh signed it.

I compiled a playlist a while back to complement a little writing project that I’ve been working on for, oh, the last 35 years or so.  One of the pieces that I chose fit the mood of some of the source material incredibly well.

Eerily well, as it turns out.

The bulk of the written material I am working with is a collection of letters from a young Minnesota woman to her newly-wed husband, who had been shipped off to parts unknown during the second World War.

The piece of music is a movement from Edvard Grieg’s incidental score to Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, entitled “Solveig’s Song.”

[audio:Ilse_Hollweg_with_Thomas_Beecham___Solveigs_Song_(Grieg).mp3]
Sir Thomas Beecham is conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
The vocal soloist is Ilse Hollweg.

I had no idea at the time I selected this track what the lyrics were about (I hadn’t read the Ibsen play or closely examined the CD liner notes).  The music just seemed emotionally appropriate.  So there it sat for a few unbothered years, in my computer, sandwiched between Helen Morgan’s rendition of “Bill” from Show Boat, and Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel.

Recently, I unearthed an English translation of the text from the original Norwegian, crafted by Adam Taylor.  The parallels between the plights of the Minnesotan bride and the character of Solveig were remarkable!

The winter may go, and the spring disappear,
Next summer, too, may fade, and the whole long year,
But you will be returning, in truth, I know,
And I will wait for you as I promised long ago.

May God guide and keep you, wherever you may go,
Upon you His blessing and mercy bestow.
And here I will await you till you are here;
And if you are in Heaven, I’ll meet you there.

If nothing else, this showed me just how attuned to the text Grieg was, as his music communicated the sorrow and longing so completely, and surely could have done that job even without the touching text.