Month: September 2011

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Decision by committee

Actually, that’s wrong, come to think of it — in Buffalo, we don’t make decisions by committee. We have committees listen to people talk about the issue, and then the committee makes another committee to make the decision! Ye Gods.

For those not in Buffalo, there’s been controversy ’round these parts about…food trucks. Not big trucks delivering food to stores and restaurants, but literally “restaurants on wheels”. These are trucks outfitted with food prep equipment in the back, and they basically drive to a spot, hang out their shingle for a few hours, and serve food to customers. Several food trucks have taken to the streets of the City of Buffalo, much to the pleasure of folks who work downtown, and yet much to the displeasure of actual restaurants downtown, who have been lobbying the city government ferociously to “regulate” the trucks. Of course, the restaurants’ notion of “regulation” would basically make doing business downtown nigh impossible for the food trucks, who really need to have access to downtown customers if they’re going to be viable enterprises.

Alan Bedenko has been doing yeoman duty on these issues, which provide a fascinating microcosm on the various problems with Buffalo: how hard we make it for businesses to take root here, how insular we can be, how our tendency to “circle the wagons” has almost led us to a state of permanent wagon-circling. Here’s hoping this can be a step away from all of Buffalo’s past tendencies to keep its pistol firmly aimed at its own foot.

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Page One: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Page One: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

I get a feeling that I’m not supposed to like Jonathan Livingston Seagull (by Richard Bach), but while I certainly admit that it’s cheesy and its mysticism can be kind-of bizarre, I’ve determined that I’m unlikely to ever lose my soft spot for this book. So much of Bach reads like a New Age mystical version of Nicholas Sparks (minus the insistence on having someone in each book die horribly), but even now I still occasionally get the desire to dip into him a little bit again.

I wrote a couple of years back about my experience with Richard Bach, and that’s generally how I still feel about him today. But that one quote from Jonathan — “You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love” — still speaks to me.

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Something for Thursday

You know what, folks? It’s sunny and cool in Buffalo (for now, anyway — rain and chillier temps are in the forecast), I’m taking today through Monday off from work, The Wife and I are escaping town tomorrow evening (without The Kid!) for my Belated Birthday Bacchanalia (The Wife almost always works on my birthday, so we usually postpone a few days) which includes our yearly trip to Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, and some other stuff’s going on that has me happy as a clam, so…here’s a bit of infectious 80s bubblegum!

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She’s all grow’d up now

In one of the least surprising developments for anyone who’s been following her, Jennifer has made it official and done got engaged. I characterize this as a ‘least surprising development’ because she’s been referring to her future husband as “He Who Makes Me Smile” since pretty much the first time she revealed on Facebook that she’d been dating the guy. And when she poured out a lot of grief after the recent passing of his mother, well…the engagement is mere formality, because from what I can see, these two are already married.

And dammit, good for them!

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Never minded….

Yesterday I mentioned that my birthday is also the date of release for The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Sheila O’Malley points out that just a couple of days earlier is the date of release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the seminal album from 1991 that changed the landscape of rock music for good.

Here’s the thing: I never liked Nirvana. I didn’t hate Nirvana, mind you. But Nirvana made absolutely zero impact on me, one way or the other. It was the strangest thing: a cultural touchstone that slid right past me, and to this day, it remains a touchstone that remains outside my own experience. I eventually came to the Beatles, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever come to Nirvana.

Part of it was the timing: I was in college, which you might think would make me more attuned to this kind of thing at the time, but I was studying music at the time, and my musical passions were almost entirely focused on classical music. At the time I hadn’t started exploring Celtic music, and I’d stopped listening to rock almost entirely. I was totally unaware of that Nirvana was, what they represented in terms of the evolution of rock music, how they represented a break from what had gone before…all of it. Nirvana was, for me, a band with an album. Same as any other band with an album.

Part of this, though, was something else, something that I’ve been mulling over for a while. I’ve come to realize over the last few years that one of my personal idiosyncrasies is that I just don’t tend to explore movements in popular culture as they’re happening. Books come out that are viewed almost immediately as deeply important, no matter the genre, and I just file them away for future reference. Ditto movies, and music, and even teevee shows. Highly-regarded fantasy novels come out, and it takes me years to get around to reading them (The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Name of the Wind). I like Stephen King, but of his last dozen or so novels, I’ve only read Lisey’s Story (post forthcoming), and I’ve never read any of his Dark Tower books. I yield to no one in my love of Star Wars…and yet I haven’t read a single “Extended Universe” novel in fifteen years.

Music? I couldn’t even tell you what I’ve missed. At work, a couple friends and I like to play with Internet trivia quizzes when we’re on lunch break. Sometimes we do music quizzes — “Identify the song clip” and that sort of thing — and when we do, I’m generally useless for answers once we get to music past, say, 1990. Oddly, I’m more well-versed now in pop music than I’ve been in years, mainly through osmosis from what The Daughter listens to.

Teevee is the same way. I’ve yet to watch a single episode of The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, or even The Sopranos. And I’m not sure I ever will, because at this point I’m not sure my interests will ever take me there. And that’s what it’s all about, really — the fact that I tend to follow my interests with little or no regard for what the “cultural movements” are. This isn’t to say that I deliberately avoid what’s popular; I know people who do that, and I think it’s silly — I tend to see a lot of validity in the “fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” argument — but when I note things that are popular, my reaction tends to be, “Huh. File that away for future reference.”

Anyway, happy anniversary, Nirvana and Nevermind.

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The time for all things must pass into memory….

Three obsolete things

Three things I can’t much use anymore.

I got a lot of years out of that CD player, and it just might still play — I’m not sure, I haven’t used it in a long time. I used to carry it on walks a lot or at the Y during my cardio workouts, but for obvious reasons I wasn’t able to use it during weight training, which is why I got an MP3 player, which I can slip into the pocket of my gym shorts and thus keep on listening to music whilst working out.

And then there’s my old cell phone. This actually isn’t my first cell phone; that honor went to an Audiovox phone I had for a couple of years back around 1999 and 2000. I’m not even sure that phone is still around…but anyway, the Motorola Razr pictured here was my phone from 2007 to, oh, 2010 or so, when we decided to upgrade, which is the phone I still use. (And which, by the way, is a fine MP3 player in itself, so now I don’t even use my original MP3 player all that much!)

Finally…there’s my Borders Rewards card. Oh well. This card saved me quite a bit of money on books at Borders over the years. Now it’ll be a nice, retro bookmark, or I’ll use it as a scraper for wood putty. I’ll never be able to buy books with it, though.

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Beatles Song of the Week: “Something”

I was born forty years ago today…on the second anniversary of the release of Abbey Road, the last studio album recorded by the Beatles, and the one that has (thus far) captured my imagination more than any other. Songs like George Harrison’s “Something” are why.

This ballad immediately follows the bluesy grind of “Come Together”, and immediately precedes the bizarre paean to violent murder “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. The whole album is a study in contrasts and moods, and yet it feels so organic and well-considered — I mean, what song, other than “Here Comes the Sun”, could possibly follow “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”?

But as for “Something”: this is clearly one of the more well-known Beatles songs, which means that it’s a song I never much liked until now. (I’m a Beatles late-bloomer, as I’ve noted before.) Listening to it now, with an ear that is more willing to go where the song wants to take me, I’m struck by several things.

First, the lyrics are constructed in such a way that a chorus is suggested, and yet, it never really seems to get expressed. The song begins with a drum lead-in followed by a guitar progression that turns out to be the key motif of the entire song, and then the lyrics begin:

Something in the way she moves Attracts me like no other lover, Something in the way she woos me. I don’t want to leave her now, You know I believe and how.

The way the song is structured, you expect Harrison to sing something more after “You know I believe and how”, and yet, he falls silent as the opening guitar lick plays again, leading to a resolved chord. This happens again in the second verse:

Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover. 
Something in her style that shows me.
I don’t want to leave her now,
You know I believe and how. 

Again Harrison’s voice fades away, and the guitar leads us toward an expected resolution…but instead, the song surprised with a modulation and a mid-section that changes the rhythm from the original dreamy slowness to a more insistent pattern, and lyrics that highlight the uncertainty at the heart of the song’s poetry:

You’re asking me will my love grow,
I don’t know, I don’t know.
You stick around now it may show,
I don’t know, I don’t know.

And then, just as quickly, the original rhythm returns, and after one of the most calming guitar solos ever recorded for a rock song, we get the final verse:

Something in the way she knows And all I have to do is think of her, Something in the things she shows me. I don’t want to leave her now, You know I believe and how.

These lyrics fascinate me. Harrison is talking to someone — he addressed them outright in that bridge section — and we’re left to wonder who. Is he talking to us? And note what he’s doing in this entire song: he’s describing his lover to a third party. That’s dangerous territory, of course, but fascinatingly, he is very vague about her. He can only describe those properties he loves about her as “something”, and “somewhere in her smile”. On the one hand, he “needs no other lover”, but on the other, he seems to be reassuring himself all along that this is true at all. He doesn’t “want to leave her now”…but is he leaving open a possibility that he may, in the future? We don’t know…and neither does he.

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Sentential Links #262

Linkage commences…NOW!!!

:: Sometimes it’s not good to look under the skirt of your favorite film. (Mr. Jones examines the increasingly infamous Han Solo vs. Greedo scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Interestingly the scene has been shifted yet again, this time so as to make the two fire simultaneously. My beef with changing the scene is that it destroys one of the movie’s best laughs, not because it somehow “emasculates Han Solo”, which would be the silliest of all Lucas-basher claims if not for “George Lucas raped my childhood”.)

:: By the time this horse and dog can work this farm I will be the one changed.

:: Here’s a concept. If you want to hit on a woman at the bar or at least make a good impression, try to do it while not spitting in a bottle. Just a thought. (That this needs to be codified in print does nothing to encourage my faith in humanity.)

:: But something interesting occurred to me as they were verbally patting each other on the back and kidding each other about President Obama’s Secretary of State, while of course being very complimentary of her: This is only the second time in American history that I can think of when a sitting President could count on the support and political friendship of a former President.

:: Bottom line: One Crazy Summer is one stupid movie. (The fact that Bobcat Goldthwait has above-the-title billing should have been a clue here, methinks.)

:: The floor nurse looks like she just killed a guy and is hiding the body in the same room as the photo is being taken in.

:: Well, because fun romps are where you see what people really think. What they think is funny, who they think is a good butt for a joke, which broad stereotypes they think are valid and which they think should be subverted, what they create when they think it’s just for fun, not for literature. (Interesting post about two books that I haven’t read in a while, but both of which I admired, from the standpoint of the treatment of their female characters. I confess that I don’t really key into concerns like this when I’m reading, which makes posts like these deeply instructive for me. Especially since, in my space-opera-in-progress, my three chief characters are all female.)

More next week!

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Slurm for Everyone!

Farnsworth Birthday Motivator

Yup…I’m 40 today.

That’s a nice round number, and 40 is one of those nice round numbers, the ones that supposedly mark a milestone of some sort, which are supposed to prompt some kind of introspection. But…you know what? I’m not feeling all that introspective about turning 40. I’m doing OK in most respects, although I’m showing my age in others. One thing, though — I have always refused to believe that my future path is set, and I still believe that the main factor standing between me and the things I want to do is me.

So maybe I’ll be upset when I turn 50. But for now, onward and upward!

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