Heresies

The Thompson Twins were actually very good.

Pinkberry is a sham. [Bring back Penguins.]

The Simpsons movie actually is a very compelling and nuanced argument against big government.

Michael Vick is being publicly vilified [to the extent that he is] for his failure to achieve greatness on the field as much as he is for being inhumane to animals.

Conversatives who criticize Prius owners for contributing to net waste lack the courage of their own convictions. It seems to me that the marketplace is deciding that it's a damn good car. Even if it isn't, whatever.

My criticism of Angels GM Stoney isn't that he doesn't make deals, it is that he doesn't create deals. Not only do you have to shake the tree, sometimes you have to plant it. Like everyone else, he's been focused on Mark Texeira, cool ... meanwhile the Astros just pried away Ty Wiggington from Tampa Bay [managed by former longtime Angel coach Joe Maddon]. Thanks for nothing, Stoney!

Die Sweet Baby Elm

I'm having two giant elm trees removed from my backyard tomorrow. I really like trees, and it grieves me to no end [1. because I like trees, and 2. because it is costing me a bunch of money] to do this. But do this I must for a whole host of reasons, mainly it is ruining the flatscape in my backyard, it continually makes my pool unusable and the leaves are EVERYWHERE. But mainly, these trees just get monstrously huge and my smallish backyard simply cannot accommodate one of these behemoths, let alone two. So soon I will have none.

The tree guy said that these elm trees get huge in under ten years, and that mine - the tallest trees on the block - are likely just babies.

I will genuinely miss the chattering badass squirrel who comes each morning to chew out my dog. What will that squirrel do now for entertainment?

[If you look closely in the photo, in the bottom left you can see my dog looking for something to bark at. The squirrel, naturally, is under deep cover.]

Colin Cowherd spent the better part of his show this morning talking about what a great book Harry Potter and the Cadre of Mindless Idiots is [whatever the title is for this installment] because the book sells. And then he spoke at length at how ridiculous and pretentious readers and writers who believe in literature are. His point: if it doesn't sell, it isn't swell.

I have to stop listening to his show. Here is why: not only does he advance arguments that are supported with idiotic statements [the former is an example of that], the show itself is more self-referential than Rickey Henderson. Most of the time, he talks about why he is talking about what he is talking about, and why he isn't talking about [something more interesting]. And it is usually the sort of situation where he will talk about something crass, and then rub your nose in it by saying that he isn't talking about something less crass because ... crass sells!

For example, he will talk about College Football in April [when absolutely nothing is going on in College Football] for ten minutes, then he'll spend five minutes talking about why he isn't talking about [your favorite topic, such as baseball]. Well, if you ain't gonna talk about it, then why are you talking about it? I know the answer to that one already. But it seems to be an awfully porous way to drum up controversy to me.

And he is another in a legion of sports talk hosts who will talk about celebs, the Academy Awards, politics, the weather, their grandmother, Carrot Top, whathaveyou, rather than sports most of the time.

Being self-referential [and self-mythologizing .. EIB anyone? Talent on loan from God, anyone?] is partly how Limbaugh got to be so huge. I'd have more respect for him, but it always seemed to me that Limbaugh had the most unconscious sycophants for listeners. Made the show unseemly to me. Like playing against the Washington Generals. I like some dissent, it's good for the soul. Limbaugh would always construct the dumbest straw man and then blow it up with a howitzer. Sort of reminded me of the Andy Kaufman routine where he would argue against himself, doing both voices ...

If I could make it through ten minutes of NPR without the self-congratulatory [We're smart! We care! We went to college!] tone of the whole damn thing ... don't get me started on all-time worst interviewer, Terry Gross.

I would like to have the real ungloved Michael Jackson back. Or Phil Hendrie. Or both. At this point, I'd settle for Jim Bohannon, Hudson & Landry, Loman & Barkley, Frank Dill [with or without Mike Cleary] or Bruce Williams ....

In Praise of Mid-Life Crises

At the relatively tender age of 44, I find myself once again without mooring. No relationship, sort of liking/hating where I live ... but no real oomph to my life. No crazy & passionate hobby, no real raison d'être.

Which is okay. As Dostoevsky said, the true hero is the master of the grey everyday. That's me!

So right now, I'm taking my time trying to put together my next move. And I think time should be taken. One shouldn't rush in to things when one is 44. What one should do is contemplate the choices made by others who have been down this troubled dirty little road.

When Sinatra was in his mid-life crisis, he married the 21 year-old Rosemary Woodhouse, and started recording youth culture music. The "running off with the young girl" thing I get. I understand that entirely. But the "youth culture" music decision? Now, that's madness!

So, let's examine it a bit.

While publicly decrying the puerile aspects of rock and roll ["Rock 'n' Roll is phony and false, and sung, written and played for the most part by cretinous goons"], after a decade of uneasy détente, Sinatra embraced the softest versions of the medium by the late 1960s. One of the odder [and certainly relegated to footnote status in his magnificent oeuvre] things he did was record an album called "Watertown." It was released 38 years ago this week, the same summer of the moon landing, of Woodstock, of the Manson family murders.

The album - a concept album ... a rock-opera lite, as it were - was composed by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes. By 1969, Gaudio was a highly successful songwriter and a member of the Four Seasons, whose career at that point was waning. Jake Holmes was a relative newcomer, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter in the mold of Tim Hardin or Tom Rush [Holmes went on to become a fantastically successful jingle writer, responsible for "Be All You Can Be", the US Army catchphrase that has entered into popular lexicon. Oh yeah, and though he is uncredited to this day, he in fact wrote "Dazed and Confused" the song by the most popular English hippie garage band in the world.]

The Watertown suite of songs, set to folk-rock-lite, tells the story of a middle-aged man whose wife, a more ambitious sort, has left him and their two sons. That Sinatra, a man who knew loss, reinvention, and more importantly the price that reinvention extracts, chose to record this concept album is to both really curious and fascinating [What were the sessions like? "Frank, why don't we try more of a Bob Lind thing on that last section?" Yikes!].

So my object lesson from this is in crisis, perhaps you take some risks, you stretch, you try some new things ... without apology or over-analysis. Chairman-style.

This Is My Story, This Is My Song

Let's resolve this awful controversy for once and for all time. What is the worst pop song of all time?

I limit the discussion to "pop song" for two reasons. First, I don't want to debate whether or not some Klezmer punk ditty is so bad it is good, or visa versa. That discussion is more or less a discussion about the merits of the idea that gave birth to song, and not a discussion of the song itself. I mean, once you think of the idea of doing Bartók backwards on an electrified banjo, the point of how the song sounds gets overwhelmed.

Second, there have been so many discussions of this subject that have nominated and elected great-but-flawed songs, where the deciding factor has been the flaw, no matter whether the flaw was inherent in the song or not. Such as ...

(1) Stairway to Heaven, Freebird, Layla. This type of song is typically some sort of overwrought and iconic rock epic that has been played to death, pretty much since the day the song was released. Which in the case of Skynyrd - a wonderful, wonderful band - is not meant to be taken literally. People mistake being annoyed by repetition for true woefulness. The songs themselves are really not that bad.

(2) MacArthur Park. Now why this song gets put on worst-of-all-time lists, I just don't get. It's the immature work of a genius. Sure, Jimmy Webb overreached here. By about a mile. But the melody is great, the lyrics are weird, but no weirder than most of the crap from 1968 - 1970 [I just checked in to see what condition my condition was in?] And the performance by Richard Harris? Let's chalk that up to the William Shatner, David Hemmings, David McCallum, Bill Cosby school of "Hey, I'm an actor - let's see if I can do other things, too!" In the case of Harris, he performed at least as well as the others. But not nearly as well as David Soul.

(3) Honey, Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast, Tie A Yellow Ribbon, You're Having My Baby. These songs are treacly and are therefore justly hated. I understand why these maudlin, sappy, crappy little turds are hated. But ... don't we hate ourselves when we feel these emotions? These songs just remind us of our weaknesses, they serve it back at us just like a Björn Borg backhand. And we take it in our shorts. We're weak, we write weak songs, we secretly like them and then we hate ourselves. Get over it people, it's not the song -- it's us.

(4) [Grab bag of "I hate the genre or artist, so I hate the song"]. This includes rap, hip hop, Christian rock, John Denver, Jethro Tull, the Carpenters, Abba and so forth. I understand this, and I do not think all genres and artists are created equal, but seriously folks, there are a lot of people out there who love Rush. I'm not about to dismiss all of these people, no matter how much I detest the strangulated vocal warblings of Geddy Lee.

I could go on like this for hours ... but I would deprive you of what I believe to be the worst song of all time.

First, some clues.

• This song was by a band that was a one-hit wonder. Thank the good Lord, this band had no other hits [despite what their web site says.]


• This song has a marimba solo. That alone should seal the deal. To me, it sounds like a xylophone.


• The lead singer prefaces each chorus with a smarmy little "heh heh heh" style laugh. Creeeeeeeeeeeeepy.


• One of the members of this duo was the musical director for Liberace in the early 1970s. I wonder what the interview for that job consisted of ...


• One Amazon reviewer rightly describes the lyrics as being "porn friendly." True, true.


• Did this group's name serve as inspiration for a much-hated corporate behemoth? Debatable.

This odious, awful song is the musical equivalent of a Member's Only jacket coupled with knock-off Vaurnet cat-eyes. Try humming the melody to the song - you'll find that it doesn't have one. The lyrics? As vapid as they get. Andrea True approaches profundity compared to this idiotic song. You can't hum it, you can't dance to it, the lyrics are forgettable and the musicianship is worthy of any Holiday Inn lounge in 1975.

Here is the song. Here are the lyrics. You decide.

The Past Will Teach Us Nothing, Hopefully

I'm reading The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb right now. And it is a very readable book, and a great rebuttal to the vast horde of people who try to explain the cataclysmic, aberrant and unpredictable random events that unfortunately disrupt so much of our lives.

Without going into surgical detail here, suffice to say I highly recommend this book.

Husker Du

Some random thoughts .

Do you remember when Nick Cage was considered a really, really good actor? What the hell happened to his career? I say this because "National Treasure" is on cable and what a mess that movie is.

I have a longstanding disagreement with most of the rest of the world regarding Ella Fitzgerald. Personally, I think that the young Doris Day sang with more raw soul than Ella did. Brilliant technician, pure voice, but to me she sounded pretty vanilla. And don't get me started on the "little girl" voice that she sometimes employed.

I have to go back to Cincinnati, Ohio next week. And again the Reds are out of town. So can we meet, say, in Milwaukee instead? Unlikely.

I just picked up the first Warren Zevon effort, when he was in his teens, living in Los Angeles and going to Fairfax High. The folk-rock duo [by then a style on its last legs] of lyme & cybelle recorded for White Whale records, where the mother of a friend of his worked. Warren was lyme and to show you the extent of the young Z's pretension, they refused to capitalize their name a la ee cummings, and lyme né Warren dressed all in green. Brilliant! The "I Heart Huckabees" moment came when I read the CD liner notes. They were penned by the brilliant but stridently righteous Dawn Eden, my ex-girlfriend's younger sister. One can run but one cannot hide ... from Dawn Eden. She writes more liner notes than Rosie O'Donnell has feuds.

I know I'm gonna get some negative comments for my Ella remarks. So I might as well let it roll.

I think John Denver planted that experimental plane of his in the Monterey Bay intentionally. If you listen to his songs, his remarks, you really get the picture of someone who was both depressed and who never got over the fading of his star. And please, if you listen to his early records, it's very very depressing stuff. He had a great voice, but without Bill Danoff's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" [John wrote the bridge, not a bad bridge], John's recording career at RCA would have been over.

I've been listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield recently. And Elliott Smith. I find them to be very similar.

Last note, and hopefully this will appease my harshest critics, let's give some extra credit to Curtis Mayfield. Joni Mitchell gets all kinds of props from the perpetually self-congratulatory hippies for her creative guitar tunings, and Curtis - who was a superior player and writer - gets not nearly the same love for his amazing tunings and guitar work. Maybe that's why he was darker than blue, while she was merely blue.

And, on Canada Day 2007, I leave it at that.