Conversations With My Son

Dad: (driving over an overpass) Cal, we're going over a bridge!

Son: (excited gasp) It's not a water bridge. It's just a car bridge.

Dad: Yeah.

Son: Yeah.... There's no water down there. Only cars.

Dad: Yeah.

Son: Yeah.... Boats can't go on the road. There's no water on the road. Only in the sea....


I absolutely love the prattle of a 3-year old! It will break my heart when my son is too old for it.

2 trips to the Boston Garden

Feb 3, 2007: Saw Rod Stewart with my parents and my aunt. It was a solid mostly non-embarassing show. We had nosebleed seats. Rod is still quite good-looking for a 60+ year old guy, and many of the middle aged women in the expensive seats were remarkably infatuated with him. Rod belted out most of his hits in a professional, light-hearted manner, with little stage banter and plenty of conventional 70's rock poses. He mangled a couple classics (I'm Losing You, for example), delivered the goods on Every Picture Tells a Story, Maggie Mae, and Forever young), ran through a couple of pointless cover songs (a CCR and Janis Joplin tune), and got the crowd singing on some ballads. The band was annoying. A scantily clad, 20 year old, Ann Coulter lookalike was the saxophonist when what you really want to see is a rough, grizzled Clarence Clemmons type. There were some needless solos including perfunctory drum and bass solos, and an ill-fitting banjo solo which brought I'm Losing You to a grinding halt. Also, I feel some kind of strange white guilt whenever I see a trio of token black female backup singers arrayed behind a painfully white singer. In the second set, most of this excess was reigned in, and he ran through a well-chosen selection of hits and more obscure numbers. The man hasn't written a song that I truly like since 1973's Never a Dull Moment but he does have the occasional palatable song amidst his 70's disco schlock and his 80's synth-pop dreck. It is somewhat disconcerting, however, sitting next to your Dad singing "Do ya Think I'm Sexy?" at the top of his lungs.

Feb 14, 2007: Saw the Celtics end their 18 game losing streak against the Milwaukee Bucks. Pierce was in vintage shape, and Gerald Green knocked in a bunch of consecutive 3-pointers. Pretty much everyone on the Celts played well. My Dad and I really enjoyed ourselves despite the sensory overkill of an contemporary NBA game. The inane antics of the cheerleaders and the advertisers, and the endless barrage coming out of the sound system and Jumbotron still get to you, but tonight the game was good enough that we could happily overlook most of it. The local sports radio guys keep telling us it is a good thing that the Celtics are losing because we will get a good draft pick, but the real fans, of couse, want to see W's. Personally I found that an 18 game losing streak was having a negative psychological effect on me, when coupled with the cold and the darkness of a New England winter. Getting a win went a long way towards casting off that pall. We had great seats behind the Celtics bench ($150 seats, mind you). After the game, we went back to my Dad's house and like a couple of teenagers re-watched the Tivo-ed game in the hopes of seeing ourself on the screen.

GBV

I intended to assemble a best-of-2006 list, to give some kind of aesthetic closure to the previous year, but I gave it up. The album is seemingly moribund. Everyone I know is walking around with an iPod (except me). Hell, in Newbury Comics, they play an iPod over the sound system instead of the CDs they are selling. The Tower Records I used to haunt as a college dropout went out of business this year. The legendary rock critic Bob Christgau got canned from the Village Voice after 30 years of Consumer Guides. My college roomate got fired as the editor of Spin after that magazine got bought out for a miserly sum. Album sales are way down. You get the picture. A list of albums is just not going to have the same vitality it had in the past.

So in lieu of an artificial best-of list, I put together a list which more accurately reflects my 2006 listening habits. This was the year of Guided By Voices and rap for me. Since my late-life interest in rap is somewhat embarassing, I will pass over it here and focus on my white-boy-rock demographic. For whatever reason, GBV became my favorite band, displacing Oingo Boingo. Perhaps the fact that they broke up two years ago piqued my nostalgia.

I was somewhat into GBV in college when my aforementioned roomate and I had a minor religious experience upon spinning a review copy of the Bee Thousand LP. (Yes LP). Even though we both loved it, neither one of us ever felt the need to seek out any of their other albums. It is such a perfect album, but I guess we both assumed it was the apotheosis of some sort of minor subgenre -- lo-fi, whimsical guitar rock -- that was not worth probing too deeply.

In the past year, I started going back and buying their older albums. I rebought Bee Thousand during my first trip to Madison WI. Since then I have bought every album they released after 1991. I listened to those 8 or 9 albums endlessly this year. (I do have a crummy corporate job but it does permit headphones). I read a book on GBV during my second trip to Madison: Guided by Voices: A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll. At some point, I rented the movie Bubble from my local library, only to find, as the credits rolled, that Bob Pollard did the soundtrack, so it is defintely the year of GBV for me. I will not try to describe why I love them since you are either in the cult or not by this point, and I am not interested in evangelizing. I will just say they are a band that fully deserves their cult-like following. I may be too late to the picnic to consummate my relationship with the band (Bob Pollard broke it up in 2004) but they gave me a couple hundred hours of listening pleasure this year:

Top 10 Guided By Voices Songs (in painfully considered order)

1. Gold Star For Robot Boy – Bee Thousand
2. Ghosts of a Different Dream – Under the Bushes, Under the Stars
3. The Closets of Henry – Half Smiles of the Decomposed
4. Tractor Rape Chain – Bee Thousand (*)
5. Jane of the Waking Universe – Mag Earwhig!
6. Dirty Water – Earthquake Glue
7. Learning to Hunt – Mag Earwhig! (*)
8. Game of Pricks – Alien Lanes
9. Peephole – Bee Thousand
10. The Brides Have Hit Glass – Isolation Drills

Honorable Mentions (Songs 11-20 in arbitrary order)

• I Am a Scientist – Bee Thousand (*)
• Non-Absorbing – Vampire on Titus (*)
• It's Like Soul Man – Under the Bushes, Under the Stars
• Everybody Thinks I'm a Raincloud - Half Smiles of the Decomposed
• I am a Tree – Mag Earwhig! (*)
• The Enemy – Isolation Drills
• Bulldog Skin - Mag Earwhig! (*)
• Expecting Brainchild – Vampire on Titus
• My Valuable Hunting Knife – Alien Lanes (*)
• A Big Fan of the Pigpen – Bee Thousand

*: Also on greatest hits album

Must Have Albums

• Vampire on Titus (1993)
• Bee Thousand (1994)
• Mag Earwhig! (1997)
• Half Smiles of the Decomposed (2004)

Nice to Have Albums

• Alien Lanes (1995)
• Under the Bushes, Under the Stars (1996)
• Isolation Drills (2001)
• Earthquake Glue (2003)
• Human Amusement at Hourly Rates (Greatest hits)

Albums to Skip

• Do the Collapse (1999)
• Universal Truths and Cycles (2003)
  

Publishers dont think much of us

I was somewhat amused when Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I just found it somewhat amusing that one of the most famous children's books of all time had to be bowlderized of the word "philosopher" in order to be palatable to American children.

As a lover of mathematics, I was a little bit indignant when Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem was republished as Fermat's Enigma. I mean, Fermat's Last Theorem was the holy grail of Mathematics for 400 years, and it was univerally referred to as FLT. Renaming it to Fermat's Enigma based on some publisher's market research (or personal whim) is a bit of a horrorshow.

Now I find that the book I ordered for my sister's boyfriend for Chrismas has also been given the Americanized-Title-Treatment. I ordered a book from Amazon that I thought was an American-published book named "Killing Bono". When it arrived (about 2 weeks after Christmas) I received the original UK version of the book entitled I Was Bono's Doppelganger.

So, us American's can't deal with philosophers, theorems, dopplegangers, eh? I'm thinking I should be offended by this.

And we have a contender...

For worst headline of the year:

"Spears Falls Asleep in Vegas Nightclub"

This was actually the major headline on my news portal today and it wasnt even in the "entertainment news" section. It was just above some article on Gerald Ford's funeral. If you click on a headline like this, I cant be friends with you....sorry.

Two Totally Futile Actions

1. Pushing the "Close Door" button on an elevator. Has anyone ever noticed any correlation whatsoever between the pushing of the button and the speed of the door closing? I haven't. People hammer away at them to alleviate the embarassment of standing in an enclosed space with a stranger. People, they don't work. From a more abstract viewpoint, buttons are the wrong design metaphor for the "close door" feature. The existence of a button implies that something will immediately happen when you push it -- a buzzer will go off, a light will turn on, a trap door will open, a death ray will shoot from an overhead laser gun and destroy the guy next to you, etc... Pushing a "Close Door" button or a traffic light button for that matter, is a request for something to happen in the short term future.


2. Asking someone to raise their voice for an extended period of time. When a mumbler is giving a presentation at work, for example, someone will always ask them to raise their volume. People cannot do this. People have grown up their entire lives with their current voice volume, and cannot speak at a volume higher than that without feeling acutely self-conscious and embarrassed. They might raise their voice for 10 seconds but then will instantly revert back to the original volume.

Inspirational bumper sticker

This bumper sticker forced me to question my deeply-ingrained Enlightenment values as I navigated between a senior citizen and a cell-phone talking soccer Mom on my evening commute tonight:

"Reason is the illusion of reality"

To the owner of the Plymoth Voyager, thank you for introducing me to the concept of Universal Sufism. My commutes have been such an intellectual dead zone until tonight.

Marketing Genius

I am glad to find out that there is some structure to this marketing campaign. It seems to partake of elements from a standard treasure hunt. When I first heard the ad on the radio, it sounded like a contest devised by aliens who know nothing about the way human beings actually interact. Now I think it is kind of brilliant.

Requiem from a Recent Initiate

Robert Altman just died at the age of 81. I happened to just watch Nashville for the first time the week before Altman died and it really blew me away. It may not be for everyone. There is a LOT of music; there is a lot of characters without a unifying plot; and Altman's technique of recording sound so that the characters on the screen talk only slightly louder than the din of the surrounding crowd may befuddle the hard-of-hearing. But it is truly an artistic vision. If you love artsy movies and my disclaimers dont scare you away, then you may love it also. I have not seen many other of Altman's movies, besides Gosford Park, which I couldnt follow; and Short Cuts, which I was too young to appreciate. In any case, I no longer poo-poo the idea of watching Altman's last movie: A Prairie Home Companion. The concept of that movie struck me as strange and unappealing at first, but having seen Nashville, I think I can envision how Altman could make such material really interesting.

Eventually, we all turn into "The Man"

After 32 years of being completely alienated from the entire world of stocks and bonds, and in fact despising the entire culture of money and business, I recently took the plunge and put some into the market. I can see where people get hooked on this crap. I am fairly confident that the fact I made a 25% profit after 1 month of investing, will turn out to be a REALLY bad thing in the long run for me. But please, while I am busy flagellating myself for betraying my youthful, Liberal, artistic personality, please keep buying the fine products put out there by Apple computer ;)

With No Money We'd All Go Crazy

Today is the latest installment in one of America's most loathsome traditions: the after-Thanksgiving shopping orgy, appropriately known as Black Friday. Anyone who went to a 12:01 sale last night deserves an hour in the stocks. The managers at those chain stores who are so greedy that they flouted Massachusetts law and opened on Thanksgiving deserve a felony caning. I guess I have a modicum of understanding for the Asian grocery chain that opened its doors since most Asian people do not celebrate the holiday anyway. But CompUSA -- shame! Many large retailers only close their doors on 2 days a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. If 2 days a year is too much of a restriction to place on your unfettered greed, may you hawk your plasma televisions in the 7th citcle of hell! Christmas is obviously next. Corporations are so sociopathic that they cannot tolerate culture, history, tradition, or humanity to inconvenience them in any way. And any of you soulless, retail-shopping junkies who can't resist the sales -- you deserve the Capitalist dystopia you've already got.