Well…not sure if I’m getting tired of my playlists in the mp3 player, but I’ve been reminded lately of how good playing entire albums can be…so that’s what I’ve been doing on the bike lately and one thing that came out of that is the clear evolution of the band Genesis from “Trick of the Tale” to “We Can’t Dance” that I had not really noticed before…ToT really is more related to their earlier work but WCD is more just a Phil Collins album that Rutherford and Banks play on…but that’s not to say it’s not a good one but the topics are more personal than on ToT and it has lots of ballads on it that are clearly Phil’s work…and love songs and I don’t remember any of those in their earlier work…I just think their earlier stuff was more prog rock than the pop it turned into on WCD…about the same as comparing Pink Floyd’s early works like “Atom Heart Mother” or “Meddle” to “Dark Side of the Moon” or “Wish You Were Here”…they also show a clear evolution from the really experimental stuff they were doing to start their careers…but they avoided going all the way to pop and I am thankful for that….just a few thoughts that came to me on the bike today…and it’s kind of filler since I haven’t come up with a topic in politics yet…but I will keep trying…
Category Archives: Misc
Queen Elizabeth has died…
Well…not sure if this has anything to do with anything but Queen Elizabeth died today at the age of 96…now you know I’m a huge anglophile and love the British people and culture and the queen was a huge part of that…and she has been the only sovereign that I have known since she was crowned the year I was born and has always been there…and her line went all the way back to William the Conqueror and 1066….so an era ends and a new one of King Charles begins….RIP…
People on the street…
Well…as I ride around here every day, I start to notice some people who are almost as invisible as I am and I wonder what their stories are…over the past month or so, there was a been a woman living in her car at the municipal boat ramp on Muskegon Lake…she has an old, mid 90′s Monte Carlo that she parks next to the porta john and I do wonder how she got to that point in her life…and what it must be like to just survive instead of live and have a roof over your head…I know there are others who use the trails as their home but all of them are men and I wonder if it’s a choice or if circumstances have conspired to leave them no choice….one other guy that I’ve noticed for the past few weeks parks his car at the ramp and sits there for hours just reading…he’s there when I go out at 7 and when I come back for the second time around 10…so I wonder what his home situation is like if he spends 3-4 hours every day sweating in a hot car and that is the better choice? It reminds me of a line in a Neil Young song: “people on the street need a place to go” and I guess they do….especially in winter…what then?
Some good tv….
Well…after watching the last episode of Picard last night and then to the new Star Trek throwback show…the thought came to me that they both are some pretty good tv. This season’s Picard was much better than the first year and I wonder if this episode titled “Farewell” was the last one for the series? It sure seemed that they were wrapping it up and leaving no loose ends and the way they wrote the ending of Q and Picard finally allowing himself to be happy makes me think this is where it will end…after all, Patrick Stewart is looking pretty old and a bit doddering on the screen and I would want to remember him as the Picard of TNG instead. Okay, just read that there is one more season coming so that will be cool…the new show with Anson Mount as Chris Pike was just something new and a throwback to TOS but with cooler sets and a lot of the same characters…and it was fun to watch so I have hope that it will even get better as the series goes on…and we needed a new Trek series since Discovery and Picard are done for the year…not sure what I’m going to watch tonight but I will need to find something after the Derby…
Can’t think of a political one so how about some music?
Well….as the title says, I can’t think of a political one that grabs me enough to cut through how overwhelmed I feel about the happenings in the world…just too much going on right now and I don’t have the energy to sort through it…so, let’s talk about music for a bit…when I was on the indoor bike yesterday, it dawned on me that the music that was in my ears was all nearly 50 years old…the Allman Brothers live at the Filmore east, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Cars, CSNY’s 4 way street, the Beatles and on and on…and I wonder if any of you are the same way? I’ve talked about this before that I have stopped listening to new music and I wonder why that would be? I know I may be one of those snobs that think that the best music was done when I was young…but, can you argue with “In memory of Elizibeth Reed” live from the Allman’s in 1970? Or “Southern Man” from 4 way street? Or the story from “Doctor Wu” that takes you from happiness to despair and back again in a 6 minute song? I admit that as I age the emotional aspects of songs have more meaning to me…or maybe I’ve become more perceptive to them as I spend more and more time alone? Who knows? I’m sure I’m bringing some of my own interpretations to the meanings and that fits with what is going on with me right now…to a point, but a lot of it relates to what I’ve been though in this life from the time my older brother played Elvis, Buddy Holley, and Roy Orbison that I guess I absorbed without knowing it at the time. Don’t get me started on Steely Dan or Pink Floyd…especially Dark Side where the run of “Time” and “Great Gig in the Sky” always takes my breath away and talks to me as I get older…and with SD, I see myself in the characters and worlds they create…about the losers and the underachievers and the people who just can’t help themselves like in “Black Cow” where the protagonist has poured everything into helping his friend or lover “talk it out til daylight” but then realizes that it’s over and sends her away…or from “Your Gold Teeth” where a woman comes back into a man’s life that she burned at least once before but he knows what’s coming and the dismissive line “you don’t have to dance for me, I’ve seen you dance before” describes that fact…I guess what I’m saying in this long one is that music has always been important to me and I wonder if anyone else has the intimate connection that I have or if it’s unhealthy? I know that even if it is, that won’t change how I feel….
TV reviews…
Well…you know, when you get invested in a show for most of it and then when the show runners try to get “edgy” they screw it all up…and that’s how I feel about the prequel to “Yellowstone” called “1883″….and there are going to be spoilers in this one so if you haven’t finished or seen it yet, probably better to stop reading right now. Up until the last episode, it was a pretty good if violent show but I’m not sure if it was really a true depiction of what life was like on the plains as people moved west…I mean, no boredom or anything like that but just death, death, and more death…much like if Mad Max had taken place on the plains of the US instead of Australia…and at the end, when the entire final episode was a dragged out death of what I saw as the main character…a young woman coming of age on the trail, the investment of the viewer was betrayed by the need of the show runners to continue the shock value that permeated the show…and then when the trail boss played by Sam Elliot kills himself sitting on the beach of the Pacific Ocean after the wagon train falls apart, it was just gratuitous and didn’t need to happen…I know the character had a tough life losing his wife and daughter to disease and then the death of the young woman who had become his ersatz daughter hit him hard, too…but, do we need that much reality? I know that the late 1800′s were pretty whitewashed as we were taught as kids but I wanted to be entertained not slapped in the face and that is just what the ending did. I’m not sure what Taylor Sheridan was thinking when he wrote the show that way, but making your audience work that hard to enjoy some escapism is just too much….and it turned me off “Yellowstone” to be honest…
“If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break…”
Well…yeah, I always wanted to use that line in a title…but, there are no levees out here in Muskegon so I guess the rain that is going on today could be: “if it keeps on raining, the snow is going to melt” since most of the snow out here should be gone after today…I know, much less drama to say the snow is melting versus the levees failing in 1927 along the Mississippi that flooded 26,000 square miles of the Mississippi delta, killed hundreds of people, and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate. My whole reason for talking about this is that John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin put together one of those world inclusive songs that included people from around the world playing it in real time over the internet…and I saw it yesterday on one of the news services I read…and I learned that the song was written in 1929 by Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie and when Zeppelin changed it for Zep 4, they credited the original writers as they did whenever they recorded a song done by one of black blues artists….it’s very seldom that anything can keep my attention for 6+ minutes on the internet but this video did…very cool….
One cool commercial…
Well…there are times when the new commercials during the SB are more exciting than the game itself…I’m not sure if that was true this year but there was one that was pretty cool…in an ad for the new electric Chevy Silverado, they re-created the opening credits to “The Sopranos” with the same song…one of my favorites of all time and they even had the two actors who played Meadow and AJ in it…with Jamie Lynn Sigler doing the Tony Soprano part in the drive into the city….and then having them embracing at the end even answered one question about the ending of “The Sopranos” where the screen just went black and you didn’t know what happened to the family…as a fan, I thought it was pretty cool…
Watched a movie last night…
Well…you would think with being a big sports fan, I would have watched the SB last night especially with Stafford trying to do something he would never have gotten the chance to do if he was still with the Lions…..but I got bored and I am not into hip hop so I skipped the half time show and the second half and watched a movie instead…it was a small little thriller called KIMI about how the big tech companies and their digital assistants like SIRI and Alexa are always listening to everything that is going on in your house if you activate them and there was agoraphobia and murder included… parts of it reminded me of the Coppola movie “The Conversation” which had a similar theme…pretty predictable stuff but it kept me occupied for an hour and a half and that was cool…I did watch The King’s Man the other night, too, and that was a serviceable movie that kept me interested and again got me through a night that would have been boring otherwise…there’s not much else out there that interests me so I guess I won’t be watching anything else soon….
You just gotta love Neil Young…
Well…with what has happened over the past couple of days, you just gotta love Neil Young…not sure if you have heard of this in the news but some idiot low level comedian, Joe Rogan, was given a huge contract with the music service Spotify for his podcast where he spouts right wing talking points all day and has been one of the biggest anti vax assholes out there…almost every one of his shows has these quack doctors on it pushing Ivermectin and all of the other bullshit “cures” for covid along with every lie about the vaccines…and yesterday, Neil Young had had enough…and told spotify that it was Rogan or him…they couldn’t have both on their service and told them he would pull his music if they let Rogan keep spewing his lies…so of course, the right wing assholes who own Spotify chose to keep Rogan since they paid him 100 million dollars for his podcast and they probably believe the crap he spouts….so, Neil, being a person who keeps his word, pulled his entire catalog from Spotify and moved it to Apple music along with many other artists including Barry Manilow if you can believe it…and so many people have been trying to cancel their Spotify subscriptions that the site went down…or that’s what Spotify says…I’ll bet they shut the cancel function down to keep people from being able to cancel their subscriptions, hoping that the whole thing will blow over without too much damage….one thing I can’t understand is why they stay with Rogan…since they allowed him to be a right wing asshole on their service, their stock price has taken a beating with losing almost 25% of it’s value…and if they think this is going to blow over, they just need to look at Twitter where every third post there is in support of Neil and of cancelling their subscriptions…so, keep it up Spotify…ride Rogan right down the tubes to your end…can’t wait to see it…geez…