A small story gets me thinking about the big picture...

Earlier this evening, I was listening to NPR as I was on the way home from the grocery store. They were, of course, talking about Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. Because of the devastation, and the problems that is causing in getting around in parts of New York and New Jersey, a reporter had taken to her bicycle to look around and see how people are coping in areas with a great deal of damage and, in many cases, no power.

She happened on a Chinese restaurant that had figured out how to keep cooking and stay open despite the power being off. Talking to someone who was on their way out of the restaurant with the food they had purchased, the reporter asked how the prices were; were they higher, lower, or the same as they had been before the storm. The response was that they were the same as always.

When I heard that, I burst into tears, right there in front of God and everybody.

That reaction puzzled me at first. It was nice that the restaurant owners weren't trying to price gouge, but it was nothing to cry about. Thinking about it as I made my way home, however, I finally realized why I had started crying.

Mitt Romney has been caught on tape, repeatedly, talking about how it's immoral for the federal government to spend money on things like disaster relief, and how he would defund FEMA, the agency that is charged with helping out in time of natural and man-made disaster. If he is elected president, he has said, he would put disaster response and relief on the states or, ideally, he has said, privatize it. And that's a big problem.

Why is that a problem?, you might be asking right now.

It is a problem because privatized disaster relief on a scale needed in the wake of events like Sandy would necessarily fall into the hands of big companies. And big business is out to make big profits, first and foremost. And so they would charge for their help. Not only would they almost certainly overcharge for their help - unlike that Chinese restaurant in the NPR story - they would almost certainly only help those who could afford the help. And in the process, those big companies would probably put that Chinese restaurant out of business to eliminate the competition, however small. Which fits right into the Romney philosophy of "if your poor, you're on your own". Not to mention one of his main specialties as a businessman, that is, taking apart smaller and underperforming companies and selling off the remains for a profit. But that is another problem, for another blog post.

This is not the way it should be. In a disaster as big as Hurricane Sandy, it is really only the federal government that is big enough to coordinate the recovery efforts and to make sure that recovery does not take years...or decades. And to make sure that the recovery reaches everyone, and does not further enrich the already wealthy on the misfortune of others.

As I commented elsewhere in the past couple of days, I really wonder when people are going to realize that "looking out for number one, and everyone else is on their own" is not a sustainable life plan in the long term. We're all in this together, and that includes the government. If we follow Mitt Romney's philosophy of politics, and probably his philosophy of life, it's going to be every individual for him or herself, and God, or whichever deity you believe in, help us all.

That is why I was crying on the way home from the grocery store this evening. That is not the America I was brought up in, and if it turns into that, any more than it has already become that, heaven help us all.

As a postscript, the Romney campaign released a statement earlier today (Wednesday) saying that if he is elected president, Mitt will support and fully fund FEMA. If he thinks people won't notice that he is changing his story...again...just because he thinks that the position he stated earlier is sure to be unpopular in states where he needs votes, he is, I hope, sadly mistaken.

How do you define "celebrity"?

I'm probably destroying my own argument here by even writing about this, but I need this question answered:

Why does anyone, anywhere, think it is necessary to report nationally that Levi Johnston got married Sunday in Wasilla, Alaska? No, really?

Just because he fathered a child with the daughter of a failed vice-presidential candidate and ex-Alaska governor who quit partway through her term, are we doomed to be subjected to reporting about every life move of Mr. Johnston's for the next, oh, thirty or forty years? What relevance does anything he does have to anyone that is not his immediate family?

I'm hard-enough-pressed to figure out why Bristol Palin, Mr. Johnston's former girlfriend and the mother of his son, Tripp (and, while I'm here, who names their kid after a stumble-and-fall, and even misspells that?) was invited - twice - to appear on "Dancing with the Stars". But, I'll give them that her mother was, indeed, a vice-presidential candidate and governor, and so that imparts some sort of notoriety to her.

But, still...how do you explain Levi, and the continued reporting of the things he does? He has never done anything even slightly notable. Really.

People do exciting and wonderful and notable things all the time, and never get so much as a mention in the media. Things that are actually of benefit to their community, to the country, sometimes even to the world. But this...this...hanger-on...why do the arbiters of what gets reported think they must breathlessly report everything he does?

Come on. There are important things going on in the world. There are interesting things going on in the world that, while probably not important, are still much more relevant to report than the fact that Levi Johnston got married.

Movie Monday: The "Klaatu barada nikto" Edition

So, I'm thinking about 1950s "flying saucer" movies today. I probably do that more than most people, since I was brought up on science fiction films, but today's reflections on the genre, or sub-genre, I suppose, since there were other types of science fiction movies that were popular in the Fifties, were prompted by my viewing last night of "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" (1956) on Turner Classic Movies.

It's the time of year for movies like this, I suppose, since we're only a couple of days from Halloween. This is when all of the science fiction, horror, monster, and slasher movies get dragged out of the vaults in an attempt to scare the living daylights out of us. But, I'm always happiest to see this particular sub-genre, even though I've seen the three films I'm highlighting here today countless times.

No, really. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers", "Invaders from Mars" (1953), and the granddaddy of them all, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951). You see, we had this thing called the Million Dollar Movie on channel 9 when I was growing up in Southern California. Every week the show would present a movie, and then show it every weeknight and two or three times each on Saturday and Sunday. People complain now about how often cable movie channels, especially, show particular films, but for those of us who grew up in SoCal in the 1960s, it isn't a new thing at all.

Anyway, those three movies got shown a lot on the Million Dollar Movie, and I'd be right there watching them. Now, I might not watch every weeknight, but I'd see the movie of the week at least two or three times on the weekend. Since all three movies were in fairly heavy rotation there, I saw them frequently.

Actually, "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is my least favorite of the three. I think that mostly has to do with the fact that the main female character, Carol Marvin (played by Joan Taylor) spends most of her time either screaming or hiding her face in the chest of her husband, Dr. Russel A. Marvin (played by Hugh Marlowe). Dr. Marvin, who is in charge of Project Skyhook, which puts research satellites into orbit, is the one chosen by invading aliens to be their contact with the governments of Earth. This puts him in danger from both the aliens and from his bosses in the government, who order him not to contact the aliens as they have requested. Of course, this being Hollywood, he goes ahead and contacts them anyway. There is a climactic saucer attack on Washington, D.C., the saucers are defeated through the ingenuity of human (American, of course) science, and the day...and the Earth...is saved.

Earth is also under attack in "Invaders from Mars", but the aliens in this film are much stealthier than those in "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers". In this one, the Martian ship burrows into a sandpit near where a boy, David MacLean (played by Jimmy Hunt), lives with his parents. David sees the landing, but when he tells his parents the next morning, they pass off his story as a dream. But David soon sees changes in his parents and tries to get help. Of course, none of the adults he goes to with his story believe him. Some of them have already been taken over by the aliens, and others just regard him as a boy with an overactive imagination. Again, finally the day is saved...maybe. One of the cool things about this movie is that the resolution, at least in the American version, is left ambiguous. Was it a dream? Was it real? And, if it was real, is the invasion really over?

There was a remake of "Invaders from Mars" in 1986. It is not nearly as good as the 1953 original, which was made on a budget of around $293,000. Possibly the only notable thing about the remake is that Jimmy Hunt, who played David in the original has a one-line role as a police chief in the remake.

There was also a recent remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I've avoided it on general principles, seeing as the original, from 1951, is a classic. I wrote an argumentative paper for a critical thinking course once which argued that the original 1951 film is not only the ultimate first-contact movie, but the perfect science fiction film. It is a little different from "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "Invaders from Mars" in that the aliens here are not invaders, exactly. Instead, they have noticed that scientists here on Earth have developed nuclear weapons, and have used them, and they are concerned that we are going to carry those weapons, and their destructive power, out into the rest of the universe. A representative of the aliens, Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie), has been sent to Earth to warn its inhabitants that if we insist on exporting our violent tendencies and weapons into space, the Earth will be destroyed. But, Klaatu is injured by a trigger-happy soldier and taken to a government hospital. He escapes, of course, and turns up at a boarding house claiming to be a Mr. Carpenter. He befriends a boy (played Billy Gray) and his mother (played by Patricia Neal) who live there, much to the dismay of the woman's boyfriend (played by Hugh Marlowe), who is convinced that Mr. Carpenter is up to no good.

The escape of the spaceman is big news, of course, and it doesn't take long for the boy to start suspecting that Mr. Carpenter might be the spaceman. With the boy's help, Klaatu/Carpenter contacts Dr. Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), an Einstein-like figure, and charges him with bringing the world's leaders together so that he can deliver his ultimatum. But no one believes the scientist and Klaatu must arrange for a demonstration to convince the world that they must listen. The message is delivered, but Klaatu is killed. But, being alien, there is technology that resurrects him, at least temporarily, and Klaatu and Gort fly off, leaving Earth to make their decision.

It has been said that there are allusions to Christianity in the character of Klaatu because he takes the name Carpenter and then is resurrected after being killed despite his message promoting peace in the universe. Screenwriter Edmund North has been reported as saying that he did insert the references deliberately, but as a sort of subliminal private joke rather than as a serious theme of the film. But, the story goes that the references were overt enough that the Motion Picture Association of America censor at the studio (20th Century Fox) objected to them and a line was inserted into the film which indicated that Klaatu's resurrection was only temporary.

So. Flying saucer movies. Of course, all three of these movies contain overtones, one way or the other, of the Cold War that raged during the 1950s and beyond. These are interesting, just like the allusions to Christianity in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" are interesting. But, ultimately, and overtones and allusions aside, all three of these movies are just plain good fun. Some are better than others, but all three are classics of their genre, a permanent part of pop culture, and stand on those credentials alone.

Do yourself a favor. If you haven't seen them, give them a look. If you haven't seen them in a while, revisit them. You'll probably be glad you did.

Music Sunday: Another View of the Rolling Stones Edition, plus a book review

I've never been that big a fan of the Rolling Stones. It isn't that I don't like their music; some of their songs are classic. I think it's mostly because I've always had the impression that Mick Jagger can be sort of an ass. On the other hand, I've always been sort of intrigued by Keith Richards, who seems to be a walking, talking set of contradictions. He has this reputation as being "bad, mad, and dangerous to know" (I don't know who said that first, but I've heard it over and over gain), but he is, by all accounts, extremely well read and fairly articulate for someone who has ingested the amount of liquor and drugs he reputedly has.

Well, last week, I read another book about the Stones, sort of, Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) (2009, Villard Books; 354 pages), by Bill German. Like the book I read about Led Zeppelin's 1975 US tour, and reviewed here recently, Under Their Thumb is really more about the writer than the band. Unlike the author of the Zeppelin book, Bill German acknowledges in the title that the book is really about him and his adventures as writer/editor/publisher of the fan newsletter "Beggars Banquet", which he put out more or less on his own beginning in 1978, on his sixteenth birthday, and continuing until 1996. During that time, German became friends with the band, especially with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, even ghostwriting an art book with Wood along the way.

It's a good book, with interesting insights into the life of the band and the lives of its members during a time that doesn't get that much attention. German was there during the years when it seemed that there might not be any more Rolling Stones, as the band struggled through personality clashes and disagreements and then came back bigger, but indebted to big corporations in ways that changed the band and its relationships with the music and the fans in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It is also the story of how a teenage boy, through hard work, persistence, and luck, got to hang out with his favorite rock band and make a living writing about them. Not that it was much of a living. Even though his newsletter was the Stones' official newsletter for a period of about a year and a half, he never made much money from it. It's expensive, following a bad around the world amid ever-higher ticket prices (again, thanks to its association with corporations), after all.

By the time German began to hang with The Stones, a lot of their more controversial work and behavior was behind them. They had not, individually at least, gotten any less interesting, even if they didn't quite live up to the "bad boy" image that had cultivated since their earliest days as a band, not least through the songs they recorded early on in their career.

For instance, I found this oddity, from a television performance in 1965, of "Play With Fire", that presents all kinds of mixed messages, illustrating fairly well why The Stones were the band that your parents didn't want you listening to:



Things didn't get any better when they recorded "Let's Spend The Night Together" in 1967, and then got positively dire when they released "Sympathy For The Devil" in 1968. Unlike the Beatles, the Stones were not out to play nice.

Here is a performance of "Let's Spend The Night Together" from Top of the Pops the year it was released:



Of course, Mick Jagger was not above altering the lyrics of the song to "let's spend some time together" for The Ed Sullivan Show in the US. He wanted the exposure, after all, and at that time, the Sullivan show was the ultimate in exposure. Jagger showed, however, by some pretty dramatic eye-rolls during the performance, that he thought the whole idea of having to change the lyrics was really pretty damn stupid:



"Sympathy for the Devil", of course, started rumors that The Stones were Devil-worshipers, despite the fact that it is one of their best songs, here in a much later live performance:



The Stones' reputation was not enhanced after their free concert at Altamont Speedway in California in 1969, which essentially ended the Sixties when a concert-goer was stabbed to death by Hell's Angels. Well, the bikers were serving as security (not necessarily the wisest choice for that role), and the victim, Meredith Hunter, had been waving a gun around near the stage (a stupid thing to do even before the days of terrorist threats), but The Stones took a lot of the blame for the incident, especially after rumors spread that the band had been singing "Sympathy for the Devil" at the time of the stabbing, something that a viewing of the concert footage proves to be untrue.

The picture Bill German paints of the later Rolling Stones in Under Their Thumb is much less threatening. Sure, Jagger is "a nice bunch of guys", as German is told by Richards and Wood at one point in the book, referring to Jagger's variable personas and an inability for even those closest to him to predict which one of those guys they were going to get on any particular day, or even from one hour to the next. And there is a lot of drug use and drinking, although German insists that he never did drugs with The Stones - never did drugs period. German further claims that Richards defended him in that when others accused German of maybe being a narc when he refused to snort a line. All in all, the members of the Stones as portrayed by German are much nicer, and much more human, that their reputation would have us believe.

How many days left until the election?...

...because things are just getting stupider out there.

Former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu said on CNN Thursday that he believes that former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Colin Powell has again endorsed President Barack Obama for a reason other than those Powell stated in an interview on CBS television earlier in the day.

The reasons Powell gave for his endorsement included his concern that Mitt Romney is a "moving target" on foreign policy issues and that he does not want to see Obamacare "thrown off the table." Powell also said that he supports Obama because the president got us out of one war, is in the process of getting us out of another, and hasn't gotten the country into any new wars, and that Mr. Obama's record on terrorism is "very, very good."

Powell's endorsement of Mr. Obama came even though Powell is a registered Republican.

And what was Sununu's take on the endorsement? He said that the real reason that Powell endorsed the Democratic Party's candidate for President is that they are both African Americans.

Now, this declaration from Sununu should not be surprising, considering earlier remarks from the former governor about Mr. Obama, including his comments that the President is "lazy" and that Mr. Obama needs to "learn how to be an American."

Of course, Sununu later moderated his comments about Powell's endorsement of Mr. Obama, allowing that he thinks that Powell endorsed the President because Powell supports Mr. Obama's policies. Neither the walk-back, nor the fact that it wasn't much of a walk-back and certainly not any kind of an apology for his earlier remarks, should be much of a surprise, given the Romney campaign and it's supporters' record of saying something outrageous and then pulling back without ever really disavowing what was said in the first place. It is a long record, much too long to reprise in full here.

The problem I have with all of this is that if someone from the Democratic Party got up on CNN and said that a prominent member of the Mormon church had endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy for president only because they are both Mormon, the Republicans would be out for blood, claiming religious bigotry and who knows what else. There would be outrage and angry accusations, at the very least.

How did Mr. Obama react to Sununu's remarks? He said in a radio interview today (Friday) that he would let Powell's statement stand on its own and that Sununu's remarks didn't "make much sense". Cool, calm, and collected. I doubt that we could have seen such equanimity from Romney, had the situation been reversed.

Vote, damn it...

With nearly two weeks to go, I'm ready for the election to just be over, already. Between the incessant political ads on television and radio, more campaign signs seeming to pop up on the landscape every day, and people getting less and less civil on the campaign trail and on social media of all kinds, I Just. Want. It. To. Stop.

I thought it would be better after all the debates were over. But, no. If anything, it's worse. Dueling analysts, polls that contradict each other, certain candidates who act like they don't have an obligation to explain themselves, or even outline how they intend to do the things they say they are going to do if they are elected.

Get a clue, guys. You're engaged in an extended job interview. You wouldn't hire a job applicant who refused to answer your questions; why do you think we should hire you to be the leader of the free world when you won't even supply a few details about how you intend to up spending and cut taxes to the wealthy at the same time. You know who you are; I'm not going to name names.

And then there are the games that are still being played (by partisans on both sides, I'm ashamed to say), attempting to prevent people they think might not be voting for their candidates and issues from voting at all. Cut it out, guys. You don't deserve to call yourselves Americans if you support, much less engage in, this sort of voter suppression. Another clue: voter fraud is virtually non-existent, so quit acting like it's rampant on the landscape. You're just making yourselves look like goons.

I'll be out there voting on Election Day, and if you are eligible to vote, you should be, too. I don't care if you support the same candidates and issues that I do. You should vote regardless. And you should support the right of everyone to vote, not just the right to vote of the people who agree with you. That's the way they did it in the bad old Soviet Union.

You can even vote early in a lot of states. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. I was raised that you vote on Election Day, and unless your are incapacitated or know you will be away from home on the day, you go down to your local polling place and you vote on that day. But, the option for early voting is there. Use it, if you can, or if you think your boss won't let you off to vote on Election Day. They are legally obligated to do so, but many still don't.

Just vote.

There are some other things I would like to say, but I'm really trying to not contribute to the ridiculous amount of partisan rambling that has been going on leading up to the election. I also don't want my head to explode when I start thinking about some of the stupid things candidates have been saying this election cycle. You know who you are, too.

So, I'll just leave this here for you.

And, VOTE.

I wonder what grades Mitt made in geography class...

Apparently, Mitt Romney slept through his geography classes in high school and college.

In last night's debate with President Obama, Mr. Romney said that Syria is Iran's route to the sea. Did the fact that there is a big chunk of Iraq or Turkey between Iran and Syria, depending on how far north or south you are on Iran's western border, completely escape Mitt? Has he not noticed that Iran has about 1,500 miles of coastline along the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman that gives that nation a clear water path to the Arabian Sea and then to the Indian Ocean?

Basically, this means that Iran doesn't need a land route to the sea through another country. Not even to get to the Mediterranean Sea to menace Israel, if that's what Mitt had on his mind. Because, you know, there's always the Suez Canal. Why use a land route to get to the Med when you can, oh, sail there?

Maybe it's just me, but this whole thing has given me a mental image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad schlepping a warship across Iran and Syria to the Mediterranean Sea. Funny, but not very practical.

Of course, Romney's crack team of campaigners have ridden to their candidate's rescue (something they seem to do a lot), insisting that what Mitt really meant was that Syria is of strategic importance to Iran. Which is probably the case.

But, you know, if that's what Mitt meant, then that's what Mitt should have said. Because what he did say, that Syria is Iran's route to the sea, just makes him sound ignorant of the basic facts of geography, at the very least.

Now, me? I want a president who shows at least some evidence of knowing his geography.

Movie Monday: The I Can't Not Watch Edition

Over the weekend, I ran across a discussion online regarding the movies that we just can't seem to resist watching whenever we find them on television, be it broadcast, cable, or on demand.

I think it is true that we all a list like this if we like movies at all. If you're like me, and you love movies, you probably have a long list of them. They're those movies that you love and will watch whenever you can, not because they are necessarily good movies but just because there is something in them or something about them that speaks to you, one way or another.

In the discussion online, participants were asked to stick to a list of ten movies. There is no way I can do that, but I managed to limit my first list to thirteen, and then added another to that after stumbling on That Thing You Do! (1996) late last night on cable. It's one of those movies that I've loved ever since the first time I saw it in the theater when it first came out.

Thinking about it this morning, I added a few other movies to the list. I can't rank them from best to worst, or most liked to least liked but will watch any time, and so here is my list in order of when they were first released. They are:

The Mummy (1932)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
The Trouble With Angels (1966)
The Doberman Gang (1972)
The Turning Point (1977)
Grease 2 (1982)
The Right Stuff (1983)
Road House (1989)
Empire Records (1995)
Twister (1996)
That Thing You Do! (1996)
Almost Famous (2000)
Zoolander (2001)
The Princess Diaries (2001)

As you can see, some of the movies on this list are not what anyone would consider great cinema. Those are the movies that I will watch because of some personal or locational connection I have to them. For example, the reason I will watch The Doberman Gang anytime, anywhere is that it was filmed in the town where I grew up. It's a bank-heist movie, and the bank branch that was robbed in the film was the branch where I had my savings account as a child and teenager. The theater shown at one point in the movie was the theater where I went to the movies on a weekly basis for years. In fact, it was the theater where the premiere of the movie was held, and which I attended. It was kind of funny, because they had used the real tellers from the bank to play the tellers in the film, and they were sitting right behind me at the premiere. Every once in awhile I'd hear an astonished, or a gleeful, "There I am," as one or another of them came on the screen. There are several other places I knew well growing up that appear in the movie, including a quick glimpse down the street I lived on at the time and an equally fast look at the side and back yard of the house where I babysat regularly.

I've also got a personal stake in viewing Grease 2, which really is a pretty bad movie. However, it was filmed at the campus where my high school graduation was held. It was not the school I attended my senior year, but my school didn't have any facilities to hold graduation ceremonies, and so we used the football field at the "other" high school in town. So, whenever I want to see where I graduated, all I have to do is pull out the DVD of Grease 2 and it's there, in the scenes that take place on the football field and track.

The other movie on the list that I have a locational tie to is Road House, part of which was filmed in and around the town I lived in and the town where I went to college for awhile. While I never saw any of the filming or ran into any of the cast or crew, I got a lot of laughs from the women in the small central California town I lived in who, for the duration, were intent on tracking down Patrick Swayze, who starred in the film. Personally, I would have been much more excited to meet Sam Elliot, who was also in the movie, but that's just me.

I also noticed as I was keyboarding the list here, that there are several films that center around music one way or another. A Hard Day's Night, That Thing You Do!, and Almost Famous all center around bands, while Empire Records chronicles a day in the life of an indie record store. This should be no surprise, since anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I love music.

There are also some classics on the list, of course. I'm sure you can pick them out. And the others? Well, I just like them. Sometimes I'm not quite sure why. The Princess Diaries is really a movie meant for teenage girls but, although I can't put my finger on why, there is just something about it that makes me go back to it again and again. With Zoolander, on the other hand, I know exactly why I like it enough to see it again and again: it is possibly the most absurdly funny thing I've ever seen. It is the performances and the fact that I love the ballet that brings me back to The Turning Point again and again.

So. Now you know which movies I cannot resist seeing over and over again. My question to you, readers, is what does your list look like? Feel free to share in the comments section.

Music Sunday: The Magnitude 5.3 Edition

This week's Music Sunday is brought to you by Mother Nature.

No, seriously. Last night at nearly midnight, my region of the world experienced a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. The quake was centered near King City, California, but some of us here in Fresno felt it as a sharp jolt followed by fifteen or twenty seconds of sort of quivering ground motion, during which my floor lamp continued to sway. My poor stomach continued to quiver for some time after that, since I don't like earthquakes at all - probably a function of having been in too many of them, which is a topic for another day.

Anyway, as always happens when I feel a quake, Carole King's song "I Feel The Earth Move" popped into my head shortly after the tremor and has been running on a loop ever since, and so I decided that it was only fair and proper to share some of King's music with you all today.

King has been writing, by herself, with her former husband Gerry Goffin, and with others since the mid-1950s, and her work has been covered by singers and bands in virtually every genre of music. She wrote or co-wrote 118 songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 between 1955 and 1999, and she has four Grammy awards and has been inducted into both the Songwriter's Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Those are some serious credentials. Also, it means that there is a lot of her music out there to choose from.

Of course, I have to share "I Feel The Earth Move", which went to number one on the Hot 100 in 1971. And, although the song is not about earthquakes, at least not the geological kind, the beginning of the song is used in an earthquake exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry in Portland, Oregon. This performance comes from the BBC in the year the song was released:



"I Feel The Earth Move" was actually a double A-side single with "It's Too Late", which King co-wrote with Toni Stern, and which also hit number one in Billboard in 1971. This performance is from the same 1971 BBC show as the previous clip:



Here's another performance of "It's Too Late" that I found. This time, King performs with James Taylor, in 2007 at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, thirty-six years after the BBC performance:



James Taylor recorded what is probably the most famous of the covers of another Carole King song, "You've Got A Friend", a song that has been covered by singers and bands in just about every genre of music that exists. This performance looks like it was given around the time that Taylor's cover of the song was released, also in 1971, which was a big year for King. If you look closely, you can see King playing piano in the background:



And, because I'm fascinated by the way singers and songs grow and evolve over the years, here is another live performance of the the song by James Taylor, this time from 2009:



In another aspect of her career, some of King's songs written with Gerry Goffin turned up, along with songs from other writers of the era, as songs for The Monkees. Some were love songs; this one, for example, from 1966, is "Sometime in the Morning":



On the other hand, "Pleasant Valley Sunday", also by King and Goffin, was a piece of fairly sharp social commentary, proving that they could write good songs that were not love songs and that The Monkees might not be as harmless and "prefab" as most people assumed they were:



One of these days, I'll do a Music Sunday post on why I think The Monkees were not the blight on pop music so many critics at the time, and now, seem to think they were. But that will be another day. For now, enjoy your day, and here's hoping you don't experience any earthquakes.

In which your faithful writer gets philosophical...

You never know where you are going to come upon something that just blows you away with its message. That happened to me today when another knitter posted the follwing video over on a board at Ravelry. This is a slightly longer version of the same bit, with a little context at the beginning, with the narration from the audio book version of the book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994, Random House), by Carl Sagan:



Now, some people might argue that all the perspective given in this clip does is make us seem obscure, insignificant, and without meaning or purpose.

I don't think that is true. I think it points out an important truth. We are all here. "Every human being who ever was," as Carl Sagan puts it in this clip, has lived and died here. A few have left for a few days, weeks, or months and ventured out and down the street a little bit, cosmically speaking, but they started here and ended here, on planet Earth. We're all stuck here.

The Spaceship Earth meme got overdone in the 1960s and 1970s, as those few of us began to venture out beyond the Earth's atmosphere, so much so that it became a cliche. But, for all that, it isn't any less true. We are all, very literally, in the same boat. Every ethnic group, every religion, every nationality, has to share this little bit of living space. And the truth is, if we don't start learning to be nicer to each other - all of us - the boat is going to sink and we will all drown in our own animosities.

During the L.A. riots after four Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King during an arrest, Mr. King himself asked: "Can we all get along? Can we...can we get along?" And people laughed. The quote became a big joke. But it isn't very funny. As Nick Lowe wrote in a song from 1974, "What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?" How did we become so hard and cynical that asking for those things is treated as stupid?

Historically, we haven't been very nice to each other. I know that. But you would think that as species, we would have learned a little bit in all the millennia that we've been "civilized". But, no. We still maim and torture and kill each other for the stupidest things. One of our US presidential candidates recently and famously expressed his feeling that some of his fellow human beings are not entitled to food, shelter, and health care, just because they don't have as much money as he does and haven't had the fortune in life that he has had. Kids regularly bully each other on the playground just because they look different or talk different or are interested in different things.

Why haven't we learned to be excellent to each other, rather than being cruel and petty and nasty over the most insignificant things?

Does asking that make me hopelessly naive? Doesn't matter to me. I'm just fine with being a naive idealist. So much better than being a jerk.

Hat tip, by the way, to AZHikerChick, over on Ravelry, for turning me on to the video from Pale Blue Dot.

Coffee? No, Thanks...I'd Rather Not Torture My Taste Buds

Making my usual rounds of the Internets this morning before I start on the list of things I need to get done today, I came upon this post from John Scalzi, over at his blog, Whatever, in which he proclaims that coffee "tastes like ass".

It is so nice to find someone else who agrees with me about coffee. Which is to say, someone else who thinks coffee tastes nasty.

I get so tired of people looking at me like I've suddenly sprouted a second head out the top of my regular head, complete with a third eye in the middle of its forehead, when I say that I don't like coffee. I have to confess that I haven't really researched the history of coffee - I don't care enough to put in the time to do that - but I have wondered from time to time what the deal is...how did our culture here in the United States come to the point where it is assumed that everyone drinks coffee, and that people who don't do so are somehow wrong. No, really. I've heard people insist that unless you drink coffee, you are not a proper adult.

It is just as tiresome when people ask me, "Is it because you used to be Mormon?"

No. My distaste for coffee - for all hot beverages, for that matter - came long before I ever was a Mormon. My dad started trying to turn me into a coffee drinker when I was about ten years old. My mom didn't drink coffee, and so he tried to get me started on it so that he would have someone to have a cup of coffee with in the morning.

His efforts never succeeded. Even getting past the fact that coffee is hot, which is difficult enough for me to get beyond, it just tastes awful. I don't care how much you dress it up with cream, sugar, or other flavors, there is still that underlying bitter, acidy taste that Is. Just. Not. Right.

The funny thing was that my mom always used to say that while she didn't like the taste of coffee, she loved the smell. I've heard others rhapsodize about how wonderful coffee smells.

No it doesn't. It smells as bad as it tastes.

But, you know, I'm not the judgmental type. So, go ahead. Drink that coffee. I don't understand the attraction, but whatever. Just don't act like there is something wrong with me because I don't drink it. Would you like it if I insisted that you are not a proper adult because you don't like the thing you really, really don't like? Say, broccoli? Peas?

I didn't think so.

Music Sunday/Monday: The Flying High Edition (and that's not a drug reference)

If you're looking for Music Sunday, I have to apologize for being a little tardy this week. I was busy for much of today with other things, chiefly watching Felix Baumgartner taking the most awesome skydive in the history of, well, skydiving.

I have to admit, I did not watch the event live. There were just too many things that could have gone wrong, and I could not make myself watch. However, once I knew that everything had gone as planned and he was back on the Earth safely, I sat down and watched the rebroadcast of the event. It was amazing.

I also have to confess that I've never, ever had any desire to skydive. I just don't understand why anyone would want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Yes, I know; that's not an original observation. It does, however, sum up my feelings about the subject perfectly.

Baumgartner's jump today is something orders of magnitude different, though. He rode a pressurized capsule, tethered to a helium balloon, up about 24 miles and then stepped out on a little platform said to be about the size of a skateboard before stepping off for a descent that started with a free-fall of over four minutes. Along the way, before deploying his parachute, Baumgartner exceeded she speed of sound by a significant amount, the first time anyone not in an aircraft has broken the sound barrier. And, after all that, he landed on his feet.

Being the history geek that I am, I think a little historical context is a good thing. And that context is this: Baumgartner's jump, and his achievement as the first human to break the sound barrier without benefit of aircraft, came on the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager's flight to become the first human to break the sound barrier with benefit of aircraft. I just hope I don't have to explain who Chuck Yeager is. If you don't know, go watch the film, The Right Stuff, or read the book of he same name, by Tom Wolfe.

Some people see what Felix Baumgartner did today as a stunt, on a par with Evel Knievel's jumps over rows of cars or his attempt (much less successful than Baumgartner was today) to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in some sort of souped-up, rocket-propelled motorcycle. And there is little doubt that Baumgartner was partly motivated by the challenge of doing something no one has ever done before.

But today's achievement was much more than just thrill-seeking. What Baumgartner proved today that can be achieved could be the first step in making space flight safer than it now is. This might have been a stunt, but it was a stunt that collected scientific data that could someday save lives.

But, since it is still Sunday (barely, and not anymore in most of the world)...and there is a song for every occasion and an occasion for every song, I'll leave you with some flight music:

Even though this has nothing to do with skydiving or spaceflight, as I watched the balloon taking Baumgartner aloft today, I kept thinking about this song, "Up, Up and Away", by the Fifth Dimension, from 1967:



And then there's this, Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly", in a live performance from 2006. Some of the lyrics: "I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings/Coming down is the hardest thing", could be seen as appropriate to the day in their own way:



Pink Floyd also recorded a completely different "Learning to Fly":



And, not music, but I found this while I was looking around for some music to share with you. It is a dramatization, from The Right Stuff, of that first time the sound barrier was broken. Just, you know, so you really will know who Chuck Yeager (here portrayed by Sam Shepard) is, and what he did:



Well, it has slipped into Monday while I've been writing this, so I'm not sure what to call this. Music Sunday/Monday? It'll have to do, I guess.

Music Sunday: The Led Zeppelin Edition, plus a book review

As I mentioned a couple of days ago here, during the past week I read LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour (2010, Gotham Books; 217 pages), by Stephen Davis. Davis has written about the band before, in his Hammer of the Gods (1985), which was criticized as sensationalized and inaccurate by the members of the band. I haven't read that book, but due to its reputation, I didn't expect much from LZ-75.

As it turns out, LZ-75 isn't really about Led Zeppelin, but more about Davis's experience covering the band's 1975 American tour. He made it sound just a miserable time, and again highlighted the drinking (primarily by John Bonham who, of course, isn't around to defend himself), the groupies, and the difficulties both musical and technical, of the tour. He makes sure to point out that in its early years, Led Zeppelin was routinely discounted and criticized by Rolling Stone Magazine, a publication that Davis worked for during that time. I think it is interesting that Davis couldn't get an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the 1975 tour after he was told that an assignment with a reputable publication was a requirement for him to have access to the tour, but ended up getting the assignment he needed from The Atlantic Monthly, not a publication known for its rock/pop music coverage. It is even more interesting that the article Davis eventually turned in based on his experiences on the tour was not printed by the magazine. Well, things like that happen in publishing, but one wonders exactly why they declined the article. Davis's excuse is that the "elderly" editor-in-chief of the magazine "hated" his article (p. 194).

LZ-75 was only ever written, according to the author, because he found his long-lost notes from the tour and thought that "there was a story that could be told" (p. 4). But, it seems to me that it is more Davis's story than they story of a band on tour. Which could have been interesting, but ultimately wasn't, especially. The most interesting thing in the book, from my perspective, is Davis's reporting, in a few pages, of a meeting between Jimmy Page and William S. Burroughs, in which the two men discussed, among other things, crowds and the control of them in the context of the live rock and roll show. In these discussions, Page seems most interested in balancing the energies of band and crowd so that things don't get out of hand, while Burroughs seems obsessed with the times when crowds have gotten out of hand, with disastrous results.

Other than that, I can see few reasons to recommend Davis's book. But, it gives me a chance to share some of Led Zeppelin's music. First up is "Kashmir", which is from the album "Physical Graffiti", which was released during the tour chronicled in Davis's book. I find it interesting that, while Davis makes a big deal about the fact that Rolling Stone Magazine was both critical and dismissive of the band in its early years, six of their songs placed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Kashmir" came in at number 141 on the list. This live performance comes from May 24, 1975, at Earls Court in London:



Of course, the Led Zeppelin song to place highest on Rolling Stone's list is "Stairway to Heaven", the most requested song of the 1970s. It placed at number 31 on Rolling Stone's list and in 2000 it placed number 3 on VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs. I believe I shared this song a few weeks ago here, but with it's reputation as one of the greatest song ever, I feel comfortable sharing it again, especially since this is a different live version than I shared before, this one being from another of the 1975 Earls Court shows, on May 25, 1975:



"Whole Lotta Love" came in at number 75 on Rolling Stone's list of greatest songs:



The other three songs that made Rolling Stone's list were "Black Dog", at number 300; "Heartbreaker", at number 238; and "Ramble On", at number 440.

And, because I love drum solos, here is John Bonham's "Moby Dick" drum solo from Led Zeppelin's January 9, 1970 show at Royal Albert Hall in London:



Besides the six songs that Led Zeppelin placed in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Songs, at least three of the band's albums placed on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the band itself came in at number 14 on the magazine's list of 100 Greatest Artists, Jimmy Page placed at number 9 on Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, and Robert Plant came in at number 15 on the magazine's list of 100 Greatest Singers.

It seems to me that, in the end, Led Zeppelin won the argument with Rolling Stone about its worth as a band.

Three books in four days...

I haven't done that in awhile. Finish reading three books in four days, that is. You know, ignoring things that need to get done and staying up much later than I should considering the time in the morning the alarm is set to go off, all because the book I'm reading is just too good - or at least too involving - to put down.

Well, that was the case for two out of the three books I finished reading between Saturday and Tuesday just past. The other one got read just because it wasn't that long, was pretty easy reading, and I wanted to get through it to know if I could use some of the information from it to help construct next Sunday's Music Sunday post.

The first book I finished, on Saturday, was Summer of the Dragon (1979, Tor Books; 277 pages), by Elizabeth Peters. It's a romantic mystery from the same writer who has given us the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and while it is slight in many ways, it was a fun read. The story concerns D. J. Abbot, an anthropology student who secures a summer job working for eccentric billionaire Hank Hunnicutt. The main attraction of the job is the fact that Hunnicutt lives in northern Arizona, 600 miles away from her family. It isn't that D. J. doesn't love her family; she does. But they are, well, a bit eccentric themselves, and she would rather not spend the entire summer with them.

Hunnicutt is looking for a summer intern because he has found something in the desert. Although D. J. and her advisor at school suspect that this something probably isn't really anything, since Hunnicutt has a reputation for interests that are not entirely scientific and is known to surround himself with mediums, UFO enthusiasts, treasure hunters, and other fringe types. However, the pay is good and the scenery will be different, so D. J. takes the job. But, when she arrives in Arizona, D. J. finds more than she bargained for. Hunnicutt is being very mysterious about what he has found, most of the hangers-on at Hunnicutt's ranch are positively hostile toward D. J., and mysterious things are happening. But D. J. likes Hunnicutt from the beginning, and finds his right-hand man quite attractive despite his abrasive personality.

Developments move quickly, and soon D. J. is in over her head. It's a fun story. I won't claim that some of the characters are not rather flat and stereotypical, but that didn't hurt my enjoyment of the story overall. As a bonusm the archaeology is accurate; after all the author is an Egyptologist with a doctorate from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Summer of the Dragon, in short, isn't great literature, but it's a quick, fun read. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes a good story trumps great literature.

I'll only mention the book I finished - in fact, read in it's entirety - on Sunday briefly, because it is going to be part of Sunday's music blog post. I'll just say here that it was LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour (2010, Gotham Books; 217 pages), by Stephen Davis. It was another quick read, but not my favorite book about the music industry, a genre that I enjoy a lot. It isn't a bad book, but it seemed to me it was more about the author's experience on tour with Zeppelin rather than really being about the band or the tour itself. But...more about that in a couple of days.

The third book, which I finished reading on Tuesday, was Bones Are Forever (2012, Scribner; 288 pages), by Kathy Reichs. This book tells another story in the further adventures of Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist, upon which the television series Bones is based. There are no similarities between the character in the books and on the TV series other than her name and her occupation, but that's okay. The books are very good, and I enjoy the TV series immensely. I just accept that they are two very different things.

In this, the fifteenth book in the series, Temperance finds herself investigating the deaths of four newborn infants over several years, all apparently born of the same woman. The mother has disappeared, and Brennan and detective Andrew Ryan, with whom Brennan has a past, find themselves searching all over Canada to find her. Starting in Montreal, they follow her trail to Edmonton and then to the far north, to Yellowknife, where, they find, things are not entirely what they seemed when their investigation began.

I hesitate to say any more about the story, for fear of giving away too many spoilers. I will say that Bones are Forever is a good book, well worth the time spent in the reading. Reichs has once again constructed an exciting, engrossing mystery, something she is very good at. The characters are well-drawn. The plot is just convoluted enough to hold the reader's interest without going overboard with twists. For someone like me who has read most if not all of the books in the series, the main characters continue to grow and remain interesting, an unusual and not inconsiderable attraction in series mysteries.

Music Sunday: The Everybody's Got An Opinion Edition

Last week, I shared a few of my own favorite songs. It wasn't a "favorites" list, exactly, because I didn't rank the songs in any order and because there are songs that I like at least as much as some of those I shared that I didn't include. It also wasn't a "best" list, because I don't really believe there is any objective way of deciding what is the "best" in art of any kind.

It seems, however, that everyone has an opinion on what the "best songs" are. Of course, Rolling Stone Magazine has it's "500 Best Songs of All Time" list. And I happened on another "best" list, this time the "100 Greatest Songs Ever" list from a blog called Consequences of Sound, which made its list on the occasion of the 5-year anniversary of its existence. Reviewing the two lists, I found some interesting comparisons among the top ten songs from each list.

There are just two songs that made the top 10 on both lists.

Rolling Stone chose Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" as the greatest song of all time, while Consequences of Sound put Dylan's song in the third slot on its list. This live performance was at Newport:



The other song that made both top 10 lists is Aretha Franklin's "Respect". Rolling Stone puts it at number five, while Consequences of Sound rates it at number eight.



Three other artists made both top ten lists, but with different songs. Consequences of Sound rated the Beach Boys at number one, with "God Only Knows", from their classic album "Pet Sounds", while Rolling Stone placed their "Good Vibrations" at number six.





The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" comes in at number five on the Consequences of Sound list, while The Beatles don't show up until number eight on the Rolling Stone list, with "Hey Jude". You'll want to watch the video for "A Day in the Life" closely for some interesting, and perhaps unexpected, guest appearances.





Rolling Stone Magazine rates "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", by the Rolling Stones, as the number two song of all time in it's greatest list, while the Stones don't show up until number seven on the Consequences of Sound list, with "Sympathy for the Devil".





Otherwise, the two lists have some very different choices. For purposes of comparison, the Rolling Stone Magazine top ten reads, in full:

1. Bob Dylan, "Like A Rolling Stone"
2. The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
3. John Lennon, "Imagine"
4. Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On"
5. Aretha Franklin, "Respect"
6. The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"
7. Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"
8. The Beatles, "Hey Jude"
9. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
10.Ray Charles, "What'd I Say"

The Consequences of Sound top ten list reads, in full:

1. The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"
2. Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"
3. Bob Dylan, "Like A Rolling Stone"
4. Michael Jackson, "Man in the Mirror"
5. The Beatles, "A Day in the Life"
6. The Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray"
7. The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"
8. Aretha Franklin, "Respect"
9. The Notorious B.I.G., "Juicy"
10.Radiohead, "Idioteque"

The biggest different between the two lists, from my point of view, is that I know, well, all the songs on the Rolling Stone list, while there are three songs on the Consequences of Sound list that, to be honest, I had never even heard of before I read that list (those would be "Sister Ray", "Juicy", and "Idioteque"). I should probably go investigate those, to see what I might be missing.

What the two lists point out is that, everybody has an opinion regarding music. No two people have exactly the same taste in music, and that is to the good, I think. What I am wondering is, what is your top ten list of "best" or "favorite" songs? Drop me a comment and let me know. Did any of your favorites make either of these lists? What do you think of these lists? In relation to your favorites, do they match at all, or do these published lists miss the point entirely in comparison to the music you like?

Book Review: "How to Think Like a Neandertal"

As you know if you've read very much of this blog, I am a huge anthropology geek. It's what I studied in school. It's what I've loved since I was seven years old. And so, when a good friend who is currently studying anthropology at Cal recommended How to Think Like a Neandertal (Oxford University Press, 2012; 210 pages), by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, I immediately requested it from my local library system.

Wynn and Coolidge, an anthropologist and a neuropsychologist respectively and both professors at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have been studying the evolution of cognition for several years. Part of the result of their study is this book. It's fascinating stuff, written with enough rigor that it is a text for the course on Neandertal cognition that my friend is taking at Cal, but it is also accessible to the layperson. No, not just accessible. It is a well-written, informed, and witty look at how Neandertals might have lived and thought during their time on Earth, from around 200,000 (or a little earlier, depending on which expert you consult) years ago to about 30,000 years ago, when the last of their kind died, probably somewhere on the Iberian peninsula, where they had been pushed by the dominant anatomically modern humans who had arrived late in their history, from the Neandertals former range across much of Europe and western Asia.

The authors cover the expected ground: how Neandertals lived and hunted, including what their tools and weapons reveal about what kind of thought processes they might have used. And really, what the Neandertals left behind in the form of campsites, food remains, tools, and weapons, plus their own remains, are all researchers like Wynn and Coolidge have to go on to figure out how the Neandertal mind worked. Thoughts themselves, after all, do not fossilize. Wynn and Coolidge speculate on what kind of family life the Neandertals had, and point out that it is clear from the remains of some Neandertal individuals that they helped out their fellows who were injured or ill, at least in some cases. However, the authors also show that evidence earlier interpreted as proof that Neandertals buried their dead with religious ceremony and therefore had a concept of an afterlife really only shows that they took some minimal care of their dead but then probably later pushed the bones aside in a manner that was no more caring than their treatment of the bones of the animals they killed for food. And, in fact, they share evidence that at least some Neanderdertals practiced cannibalism at least some of the time.

Aside from matters of survival, Wynn and Coolidge also explore such topics as whether or not Neandertals had language, concluding that the Neandertals probably did have language, at least to some extent. They also explore what Neandertals' personalities were like, explaining their belief that Neandertals were probably stoic, pragmatic, unimaginative for the most part, empathetic and sympathetic to the extent that their pragmatism would let them be, but likely intolerant of change, not welcoming of those outside their local group, and dogmatic. The authors also take up the subject of whether Neandertals slept and dreamed as we do and what that says about their capacity for memory and ability to learn. The Neandertals probably did have REM sleep, but their dreams were probably not as creative as those of modern humans, and they probably did not have as much working memory capacity as we do. They also ask the question, could a Neandertal tell a joke or clown around? The conclusion Wynn and Coolidge come to is that the Neandertals could smile and laugh, as we do and as chimpanzees do, but they probably could not tell a joke, although they do say that there might have been some Neandertals who would clown around to elicit laughs from other Neandertals.

The authors also analyze what it would be like for a Neandertal to live among modern humans today, and what it would be like if a modern human could time-travel back to the time of the Neandertals. They conclude that adults of either species would not deal well living out of their time and with those not of their species. However, they also say that a baby Neandertal raised by modern humans or a modern human raised among Neandertals would likely be able to function in a society not naturally theirs, although not in all roles and not as well as natives to the society. They also say that a Neadertal raised in modern times would probably fit in somewhat better than a modern human raised by Neandertals.

This is a good book. It is not dry and dusty prose even though the science here appears accurate and rigorous. It is obvious that Wynn and Coolidge enjoy their subject, which they write about with humor and vitality. Just a glance at the chapter titles will tell you that - the chapter on humor is titled "A Neandertal Walked Into a Bar...". There is even a reference to time travel and Doctor Who in the chapter on how Neandertals would fare in modern times and we in theirs, with the authors providing a definition for "Doctor Who" in the glossary for their readers who are not Whovians.

More science writing should be like How to Think Like a Neandertal, and just for that it deserves to be read widely.

Music Monday (this week only): The Some of My Favorites, Plus Video Discoveries Edition

So, Sunday was a little busy for me this week. I had something all planned for Music Sunday, a little celebration of Bruce Springsteen's birthday. That's a little redundant now, since his birthday has passed, but in a slightly tardy recognition of the day, here is "Born to Run", which will probably always be my favorite Springsteen song.



Something I've tried to avoid here most of the time is simply inflicting my own favorite songs on you. However, if you're a music lover of any kind, you will know that there are days when you just want to hear what you want to hear. This is that kind of day for me. Despite the fact that autumn is here in the Northern Hemisphere, the high temperatures are still in the 90s F, which displeases me a great deal. Additionally, my job search isn't going well, my allergies are still in full rage, and I'm in a generally cranky mood. So, today I've been in search of my favorite music.

First of all, not because it is my absolute favorite song in the world but because I think it is apropos of the current political, economic, and social climate, and because it is a brilliantly written song, here is John Lennon's "Working Class Hero". It is certainly, in all its rawness, my favorite Lennon song.



Perhaps my favorite song of all, if I had to name one, is this one, "Desperado", by The Eagles. As sad a song as it is, I love it's call to the loners and the lonely to let someone in, to let themselves be loved, and it's recognition that it is probably much more difficult to be loved than to love.



Gordon Lightfoot is one of my favorite singers and songwriters, and this is not only the first song of his I ever heard, but my favorite among many favorites of his work, "Don Quixote":



While I was looking for that song, I happened on this video, that I've never seen before and did not know existed, a 1969 duet of Lightfoot's song "For Lovin' Me", performed with Johnny Cash. The quality of the sound and video aren't wonderful, but the song and the performance both are:



Going from favorite songs to favorite bands, I had to include something from U2. The problem here is that there is no way I could begin to pick out a "favorite" U2 song. While I was looking, however, I stumbled on something else I didn't know existed, a video for the song "Electrical Storm", a collaboration between the band and Anton Corbjin. Corbjin's filmmaking is often surreal, and so is this. But, it is so striking that I could just could not stop watching:



But, although I can't choose one U2 song as a favorite, one of the songs on that list has to be "One". There are at least three "official" videos for "One". This is by far my favorite and, I think, the most remarkable of the three:



And with that, I'll close this Monday Edition of Music Sunday. I hope to be back to the regular schedule next week.

Autumn is here...and a short review of the history of September 22

It's the first day of autumn. Or, if you are in the Southern Hemisphere, the first day of spring.

So, of course, there are reports of snow in parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin. According to Weather.com, this snow, which is enough to stick in some places, is about a month earlier than its usual first appearance, based on long-term averages. On the other hand, it's sill in the 80s and 90s in the southern tier of states, and the predicted high in Phoenix, Arizona for today was 107 degrees Fahrenheit, with 101 degrees predicted a bit farther south, in Tuscon.

Here in my neck of the woods, it was predicted to hit 99 F today, but I don't think it managed to get quite that hot. I wouldn't know. I was only out briefly during the day, well before the hottest part of the day.

Anyway, with it being the autumnal equinox and all, I thought it would be a good day to see what happened on this day in history. So, I wandered over to Wikipedia (which isn't that bad a place, as long as you aren't using it as a source for academic papers, you fact-check what you find there, and you realize that their philosophy is that anything that has been published is an authoritative source) to see what they had to say about what has happened on September 22 through history.

First of all, I found, it is the 266th day of the year; it would have been the 265th day, but this year was a leap year. There are 100 days left in the year. Just what I needed to be reminded of - that Christmas is right around the corner.

There is quite a list of events that happened on this day. A few stood out. On this day in 1692, the last hangings for witchcraft in what is now the United States took place, which serves as a good reminder that religious extremism isn't anything new. But, it does beg the question of why, all these years later, so many people still go to extremes in their religion.

Those are not the only historically notable hangings that happened a September 22: in 1776, on this day, Nathan Hale was hanged as a spy during the American Revolution. General George Washington had asked for volunteers to go behind enemy lines to try to find out where the British were planning on landing in their invasion of Manhattan Island. Hale was the only volunteer. He was captured by the British and hanged at the age of 21. Hale is now the official State Hero of Connecticut, his home state.

There are also other religious events that happened on September 22. In 1823 (or 1822, depending on the source), Joseph Smith said he found the Golden Plates that he claimed to have used to translate the Book of Mormon. There are a few versions of the story, but the general account is that it was on September 22 in one of those two years that he first found the plates, guided by a vision from an angel who said his name was Moroni. Although Smith did not get the plates when he first found them - he said that the angel prevented him from doing so - several years later, in 1827, also on September 22, he was allowed to take the plates and commence his work with them. After he was finished with the translations, so the story goes, the plates were taken from him. So, you know, no physical evidence of them exists. Additionally, there are also several versions of the story of how he translated them to get the Book of Mormon. Honestly, trying to pin down what really happened in Mormon history is like trying to...well, like trying to pin down what position Mitt Romney really holds on an issue.

Maybe we should ask Mitt about the plates. He's Mormon, after all. He served a mission for his church. He might like to get his mind off his campaign for president, seeing how it hasn't been going that well for him lately.

Not related to either hangings or religion, so far as I know, this is the day in 1888 that the first issue of National Geographic Magazine was published. National Geographic has come in for its share of criticism from time to time in the years since that first issue, and not just for its role as young boys' go-to publication for seeing photos of topless women before Playboy got its start. Personally, though, I like National Geographic. It has fed my inner archaeology and anthropology geek since I was very young.

On September 22 in 1896, Queen Victoria surpassed her grandfather, George III (who, of course, was the monarch that the American colonists rebelled against), as the longest reigning monarch in British history. George III reigned for 59 years and 96 days, while Victoria eventually reigned for 63 years and 7 months and remains the longest reigning British monarch and the longest reigning female monarch in history. Queen Elizabeth II is gaining on her, though; Elizabeth has been on the throne for 60 years and a bit over 7 months as of this writing.

Speaking of queens, as we have been - September 22 is the birthday of Henry VIII's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Oh, they weren't married for long - just a bit over 7 months - before Henry had the marriage annulled, and she was never officially crowned as Queen Consort. Which makes sense, as it is difficult to be a consort when the marriage was never consummated. But, by virtue of being married to Henry, she was the Queen in practical terms for that time. And in many ways, Anne was the luckiest of Henry's wives. She never had to sleep with him, which had proved dangerous for his earlier queens. He divorced Catherine of Aragon because she couldn't give him a son. He had Anne Boleyn beheaded, supposedly for high treason, although it had a lot to do that she bore him only a daughter and then miscarried a disputed number of times, including the miscarriage of a son. His third wife, Jane Seymour, died of complications of childbirth less than two weeks after giving birth to Henry's son, Edward. Once Henry decided that Anne of Cleves wasn't really a suitable wife for him, he asked her for the annulment, which she wisely consented to. He gave her a substantial settlement, invited her to court often, and was referred to afterward as "the King's beloved sister". Anne outlived Henry's two latter wives, Catherine Howard, who was beheaded for not having disclosed her previous sexual history to the king in a timely manner, which Parliament arranged to have called treason, and Catherine Parr, who survived Henry.

So, all in all, a fairly interesting day in history. At least for us history geeks.

I Miss You, Daddy, Happy Birthday

It is September 17. Today would have been my father's 90th birthday.

Difficult as it is to believe, Daddy has been gone for thirty-five years. I still miss him. He was my fishing buddy, my movie buddy, my science fiction enabler. He was the one who taught me the love of books and that everything - and I mean everything - is interesting, one way or another.

He was also the most intelligent person I've ever known. He only had a high-school education, but that didn't stop him from reading everything. If there wasn't another book around, he'd go off and pick out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and read that. He and my mom bought me that set of encyclopedias when I was in the eighth grade, from a vendor at the Ventura County Fair. But I suspect that I was only an excuse so that he could buy them for himself. The books, and the bookcase that came with them, lived in my room, but he helped himself to a volume on a regular basis. All that reading, in encyclopedias and elsewhere, must have paid off. I have witnessed him more than holding his own in conversations with people with vastly more formal education than he ever had the opportunity to get.

I think I've probably written here before about how Daddy was always arranging educational experiences for me. When I was five and we went to the drive-in one summer night, he arranged for me to get a tour of the projection room so that I could see exactly how the movies got onto the screen. We made regular trips to places like Griffith Park, to the observatory and planetarium, to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and to the county art museum. He gave me books to read.

Actually, before he gave me books to read, he gave me reading. You see, when I was very young, Daddy made sure he told me a bedtime story every night. Except, I kind of got stuck on one, and started insisting that he tell me the story of "Rumpelstiltskin" every single night. It didn't take that long for him to get bored, telling the same tale night after night after night. So, he started improvising. He'd change the story around and add bits, trying to make it more interesting for himself. Except that I knew how the story should go, and I'd insist that the tell it "the right way". Finally he got tired of that, and told me, one night, that if I ever wanted to hear that story again, I was going to have to learn to read it to myself. Which is how I ended up reading by the age of three.

By the time I was about seven or eight, he had started giving me science fiction novels to read. I had tested out as reading on an adult level when I was seven, at least partly thanks to the availability of a bookshelf full of Readers' Digest Condensed Books that my mother received, volume by volume, every three months but never really read. So, when he started handing me Bradbury and Clarke and Heinlein to read, I was ready. He'd already primed me by introducing me to science fiction films much earlier. But he also encouraged me to read other things, especially non-fiction.

He didn't just give me books to read and leave it at that. We discussed what I read. When I said I thought something was boring, he would tell me why it wasn't. His mission wasn't a complete success - there are still things that don't interest me that much - but he did succeed in instilling in me an appreciation for the whole world around me.

He also made sure I grew up knowing that all people are valuable. He had friends and acquaintances in many different ethnic groups, and he taught me that it is important to judge people by who they are, not what color their skin is or where their ancestors came from before Dr. King ever gave his speech to that effect. He had no tolerance for prejudice and made it clear that he expected me to follow his lead in that respect.

On the other hand, from the time I was able to do so, Daddy respected my right to disagree with him about things, including politics. I knew so many kids when I was growing up who were expected to parrot their parents' beliefs and who were punished when they did not. But Daddy always said that as long as I could defend my position on something intelligently, it was all right for me to hold that position. It's possible that this only worked because we agreed on most things. On the other hand, we argued about a few things on an ongoing basis. One of the things we argued most often about was the necessity for the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II - he believed it had been necessary and I do not - but even in those arguments, he didn't try to use his parental status to shut down my arguments, even though the subject was a lot more personal to him that it ever could possibly have been for me.

You see, Daddy spent two years as a prisoner of war in Europe during World War II. Or, as he sometimes called it, his time as "a guest of the Germans". He was a radio operator on a bomber operating out of North Africa and one day his plane was shot down over Italy. Parachutes being what they were then, he landed in a walnut tree (perhaps fitting, since that's what the family had on their land at home in California). He was taken prisoner and shipped off to Stalag 17 (yes, the one the movie was about), in Austria. He never talked about the bad stuff, only the things he found amusing. Things like the time he was shot in the leg by a guard during a baseball game. Forgetting momentarily where he was, he started over the fence to retrieve a ball that had been hit too hard. I suppose it was understandable why the guard shot first and asked questions later, since people were always trying to escape. I'm not completely sure why Daddy thought that getting shot was funny, but he laughed every time he told that story. I don't know if that was the wound that earned him his Purple Heart, but I kind of hope it was.

I suspect that his time as a prisoner of war is what made Daddy as laid back about most things as he was. Oh, things would get to him and he'd get angry once in awhile, but mostly he just sort of went with the flow. One of the things he didn't talk much about was the end of the war, when the Germans marched most of the thousands of POWs in the camp clear across Austria, trying to get away from the Russians, who were on their way. He mentioned that it had happened, but it wasn't until I did some research a few years ago that I discovered that the march was clear across the country and that when prisoners couldn't keep up, the guards just shot them and left them to die. It seems to me that an experience like that, once survived, could tend to lead to the feeling that most of the frustrations of everyday life weren't really much to worry about in comparison to that life-or-death situation. I suspect, also, that the experience had a lot to do with Daddy's unwillingness to have firearms around. He'd probably had more than enough of guns by the time his POW experience was over.

Even without the guns, being in a German POW camp had to have been an iffy situation for Daddy. After all, he had been born in Germany. Although his family came to California when he was just two and a half years old and he didn't speak German, he understood it quite well. He always talked about how it had been very, very important that the guards and other camp officials not discover that he could understand what they were saying when the spoke German. It could have, he said, been very, very bad for him if they had known.

That experience probably led to another of the important things that Daddy shared with me, although he also got a healthy dose of it from his father. Daddy always instilled in me the belief that it is important to always question authority. He made sure that I knew the difference between questioning authority and flouting it, explaining that challenging authority was not about just ignoring it for the hell of it and doing what you wanted to do instead. But his belief that it is not healthy to just do what you are told because someone in authority told you to do it probably also came, at least to some extent, from having lived under the authoritarian Nazis during his time as a POW. He taught me that it is always important to find out why someone in authority wants you to do something, and then evaluate whether that thing is in your best interests, or simply in the best interests of the authority who wants you to do that thing. This went double, he always said, if the person is a politician. He didn't like politicians much.

So, yes. It's been thirty-five years, and I still miss my father. I am the person I am because of him, because of the time he took to teach me thing things he did...that everything is interesting. That you have to be able to support your opinions logically. That other people don't always have your best interests in mind. Also, that fishing is fun even if you don't catch any fish. That everyone matters, not just the rich or the famous or the powerful. That it's easier to be kind than to be rude. That history matters. That science is a good thing. And, oh, so much more.

Music Sunday: The Lots of Love Songs, Dysfunctional Categories, Edition

Sometimes it is difficult to find a theme for these Music Sunday posts. Last week, for example, I went for the birthday theme because I really couldn't come up with anything else. This will probably happen again in the future. Some days it's just harder to feel the music than others. But sometimes the theme of the week comes easily, and from some seemingly unlikely places.

This week, for example. This week's theme came to me while I was reading a book.

This isn't really unusual in itself. I read a lot (if you're a regular around here, you know that about me already), so it figures that at least sometimes I will get ideas for this blog, both generally and in regards to Music Sunday, from things I'm reading. It seems a little more unlikely, however, that I would get an idea for a Music Sunday blog post while reading a book written by an anthropologist and a neuropsychologist...a book that is titled How to Think Like a Neandertal(by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge [2012, Oxford University Press; 210 pages]).

Yet, this is exactly where I found today's theme, love songs. In the chapter that discusses the idea of whether or not Neandertals had a concept of marriage, and whether their style of pair-bonding was similar to that of modern humans, the authors pointed out that there are only two primates (and, yes, we are primates) that always pair-bond for life and are thus truly monogamous. Modern humans are not one of those two species; that very short list consists of gibbons and siamangs (p. 82).

That got me thinking - a dangerous thing, as I note here from time to time. What it got me thinking was that the fact that because humans do not naturally pair-bond for life, but most often rely - at least in Western culture - on things like romantic love to hold relationships together, we have developed a wide range of love-song types.

Love songs, of course, are not the only kind of songs we have. But, in truth, they probably make up the vast majority of songs in Western popular music. So, I thought that on this Music Sunday it would be nice to look at some of the variety of forms of love songs.

Or, maybe, not so nice, as in the case of the obsessive love song. This type of song is, I think, exemplified by "The Spy", by The Doors:



A more recent example of the obsessive love song - you might also call them stalker songs, really - comes from The Police, in the form of "Every Breath You Take", here in a live performance in Madrid from 2008:



And there is the "I love you but you don't love me and I'm so sad" song. There are a lot of these around, but the one that always comes to my mind first is "I Honestly Love You", by Olivia Newton-John, released in 1974. I'm not sure when this performance, taped at the Sydney Opera House, took place:



A sub-category of this kind of love song is the "I love you and I need to tell you, but will I ever get the chance?" song, exemplified by Heart's "Alone":



Lest you get the idea that this is a category of song that only women sing, here is an example of another sub-category, the "I love you but I can't tell you because you belong to someone else" love song, this time sung by a male to a woman with an engagement/wedding ring on her finger. This is "Midnight Confessions", from 1968, by the Grass Roots, which got to number five on the Billboard Hot 100:



Apropos of absolutely nothing, "Midnight Confessions" was my favorite song when I was in the eighth grade.

Another category of love song, the "I love you but you're so far away, please be true to me because I'm being true to you", is illustrated by Journey's "Faithfully", which could also be put in the category of the "it's so hard being in love with a working musician" love song:



There is another permutation of the "musician on the road" love song, the cautionary "beware of musicians that tell you that they love you, because they're probably lying" song, here illustrated by R.E.M.'s "The One I Love", which starts out with "This one goes out to the one I love" but then confesses that the object of the singer's love is just "a simple prop to occupy my time", followed by the later admission that "another prop has occupied my time". Yeah, life on the road can be hard, and not just for the traveling musician, but also for all the ones he (or, presumably, she) has left behind. No real pair-bonding going on here:



Another category of love song is the "I don't love you anymore, please let me go" song. My favorite example of this sort of song is "If You Could Read My Mind", by Gordon Lightfoot. Here, he doesn't blame his former love, and he isn't even really glad that he doesn't love her anymore. He doesn't really understand why, but "the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back". Yeah, love songs can be really depressing sometimes:



And then there is "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill, originally released as a single in 1978. This song has made many "worst songs" list. On the other hand, I've also heard it called "the ultimate love song." Well, I suppose that depends on one's attitude toward love and taste in music. It definitely fits here, however, as perhaps be best example in the category of the "I love you, but this whole love thing is really, really complicated and I'm so confused right now" love song:



Maybe one of these Sundays I'll share some happy "Silly Love Songs" (and maybe even that Paul McCartney and Wings song, which isn't really one of my favorites, honestly). But not today, because this post has already gotten long and out of hand, even though I could have probably come up with as many more categories of love song as I've shared here today.

Oh, and just a word of apology for the videos I've shared that have ads at the front of them. When I haven't been able to find those with no ads attached, I've tried to find those with either the shortest ads, or ads that can be skipped after a few seconds.

Music Sunday: Musical Birthdays Edition

Having celebrated my own birthday recently, I've got birthdays on the brain I guess. So, after seeing a post on one of my favorite forums mentioning that today was Otis Redding's birthday, I decided to see who else in the music world has birthdays this weekend. Several, as it turns out.

First of all, there is the late, great Patsy Cline, who was born on September 8, 1932. Primarily a country singer, Cline's music transcends all genre boundaries. One of her best known recordings is of Willie Nelson's "Crazy", here in a performance from 1962:



Another favorite from Cline was "I Fall to Pieces". This performance is from just out 10 days before she died in a plane crash in 1963:



Otis Redding, who was born on September 9, 1941, also ended his life in a plane crash, before, before "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" could even be released. In fact, he recorded it just a couple of weeks before his death in 1967 and added overdubs just a day or two before the crash, and the song was not released until January 1968:



Before this turns into the "Singers Who Died in Plane Crashes" edition of Music Sunday, I think we should move on.

Yesterday was also Pink's birthday. Pink was born Alecia Beth Moore in 1979, and has had a string of hit records. My favorite of all the songs she's released is this one, "Stupid Girl", which asks a question that is probably one of the most important questions we can ask in today's celebrity-mad/paparazzi-fed culture: "Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?" With it's parody, both in lyrics and in the video for the song, she makes the point that fitting in with the dominant pop culture is not the only path for girls, or for anyone else, today:



And then there was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". The fact that today is Doug Ingle's birthday is basically just an excuse to share this song, the title of which is said to be a slightly mangled version of the phrase "In The Garden Of Eden". I loved when it came out in 1968, when I was 11 years old, and which I still love in all it's 1960s-psychedelia-laced excess today. Ingle was the organ player and vocalist and one of the founding members of Iron Butterfly, although he left the band in 1971. The song took up the entire second side of the album, and was longer than just about anything rock'n'roll fans had heard up until then:



I want to give a hat-tip to Nina809 over at Ravelry, for posting "Dock of the Bay" over there and giving me the idea for today's edition of Music Sunday.

I finally finished reading a book...

I finally finished reading a book.

This was a big problem, apparently, in August. Didn't finish reading one book all month. Started a few. Rejected a few. A couple had to go back to the library, even though I wanted to finish them. I had other things to do. It was kind of a weird month.

But...then came Shadow of Night (2012, Viking; 584 pages), by Deborah Harkness.

I'd been waiting for this book to come out for awhile...ever since I read the first book in the trilogy, A Discovery of Witches. It was one of those books that I powered through because it was so good. Then, I got to the end and...cliffhanger. It didn't take me very long to find out when the sequel was scheduled to be published. Fortunately, it was only a few months. Because, you know, I wanted to know what happened next to Diana and Matthew. When we left them at the end of the first book, they had just dropped from the present day into Elizabethan London.

Shadow of Night picks up right where A Discovery of Witches leaves off, and follows Diana, a reluctant witch, and Matthew, a vampire, who have fallen in love and married, as they return to his ancestral home in France, go back to England, visit Prague and the lecherous Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who wants to possess Diana, and then back to London, all in search of the alchemical text that Diana discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford before it disappeared back into the stacks, and which it seems the whole world of creatures - witches, vampires, and daemons - want to get their hands on. Danger and intrigue seem to follow the couple wherever they go.

I really don't want to say any more about what happens as the plot unfolds; suffice it to say that a lot happens, and if you read it you will laugh, you will cry, and you will not want the story to end. Or, anyway, those were my reactions as I read. And I will warn you - there is no word yet on when the third book in the trilogy will be forthcoming. But if you are a fan of historical fiction, or of historical romance, don't put off reading the first two books in the trilogy. They really are a treat, romance for those who don't usually read romance novels (that would be me), with history that has been researched by an expert - Ms. Harkness is a professor of history at the University of Southern California.

Really. Go read Shadow of Night and, if you haven't already, A Discovery of Witches. The writing is wonderful, the story involving, and the cast of characters - a few of which you will recognize from history - fascinating.