Every once in a while, in communities of which I consider myself a part, I come across something that makes me wonder whether I was ever a part of the community in the first place. This post over at Boing Boing directed me to a debate over at io9.com, on whether or not “Young Adult” sci-fi was . . . well, I’m not sure what the debate is over. As best I can tell, one side thinks that YA sci-fi is a good introduction to the larger sci-fi genre, and the other thinks that it is threatening to all but hollow sci-fi out from the inside and collapse it. Now, I’m sure anyone involved in that argument who reads my summary would be appalled. They’d probably say that I’m oversimplying the sides, misunderstanding the participants, and lack appreciation for the ultimate importance of the problem. And to an extent, they’d be right. But mostly I’d just say that I don’t really care, and that I enjoyed Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 6th grade and Scott Westerfeld’s So Yesterday just a couple of years ago. Good sci-fi is good sci-fi to me, and it’s something I’ve enjoyed all of my reading life. Thus these epic arguments over what appears to be a lot of nothing just seem a little silly. Sure, it matters quite a bit to those engaged in the argument, but in the bigger scheme? Not so much, I think. It’s easier to see that when you’re not all that involved with the community.
What’s my point? Well, it’s not just the sci-fi lit community that can waste a lot of energy navel gazing. It’s a point that I think a number of us who spend a lot of time talking and acting on and worrying about political races would do well to remember, too. We tease meaning out of every movement, angle, and word. And while each of those movements, angles, and words may actually have been intended to impart some meaning, the vast majority of the people out there will miss it. And even if you point it out? They won’t care. Obama to Hawaii? Don’t care. McCain’s cross in the dirt? Don’t care. Former-Abramhoff-business-partner-and-failed-candidate-Ralph-Reed-was-going-to-attend-a fundraiser-for-former-Abramhoff-investigating-committee-chair-McCain? Don’t care. We can spend our time spinning over the details. And perhaps that’s even useful, from time to time. But we’d do well to remember that it’s the big picture that matters to most. If it even matters to them at all. Try not to lose sight of that.
The more the official line is examined, the more it falls apart. That “weaponized” nature of the anthrax used? Well, not so much:
Among the new details Monday was that, contrary to statements made over the years by other government officials, the mailed anthrax had not been coated with additives to “weaponize” it, or make it more deadly.
In other words, the public had been repeatedly lied to for years. But don’t worry, this was just the work of one crazy man.
Whatever I care about the Olympics, I care about Olympic swimming even less. Add on top of that my reflexive dismissing of anyone who’s been hyped by the media, and I’m pretty sure that I’d never have written about Michael Phelps, here. But it’s been on in the background tonight, and they just cut to the Baltimore Ravens (NFL team) stadium, where it looked like most of the people in attendance had stayed *after* a preseason game to watch a native son aim for a record eighth gold. And as he did it, thousands and thousands of Baltimoreans cheered.
(This weekend’s effort comes courtesy of Peej, the same fine talent that brought you the Cover Girl edition last month.)
So what do you do when you are a just barely teen living in a country where access to new music is limited by the availability of such music (even on the black market), the ability to get to the place where you can finally make the acquisitions, and having to deal with a lack of blank tapes so you can’t make copies what you have and do exchanges with your friends to expand your library–leaving you desperate for new sounds?
You get bored and start to look around your family’s basements to see what you can find… and come across a treasure trove of LPs from the ‘wild’ youth of your aunts and uncles. LPs from the mid 60s to the mid to late 70s. LPs that you find as fascinating as the albums by Pet Shop Boys or a-ha or that all female group everyone is raving about (which you keep telling them translates to an article of jewelery, by the way), because it’s not the time yet to scoff at the music from that era and besides, you never cared much for anyone else’s opinion, anyway.
My cousin and I must’ve found 40 or 50 plus LPs and a good smattering of 45s (not counting the classical ones; but we’ll leave those aside for now). I might be tempted to think that I became enchanted with the music because anything new [to me] would have sounded good, back then, but that’s not it. The music was really good; the lyrics were better. For me, and my even more desperate need to get my hands on ANYthing written in English (I almost cried when I came across my parents’ volumes of the 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana in one of those basements), finding all these lines that read like poetry by themselves was like so much icing on the cake.
I still have the first mixed tape we made from those LPs, which was incidentally the first mixed tape I ever made. And I still think it’s one of the best. Every single song on tape was chosen lovingly and put in order with such careful thought–I guess we lived our own High Fidelity moments right there in that basement.
***
It’s hard to say why I like these four the best of all the songs we put on that tape. A couple of years later after making ‘the tape’, I read Carson McCuller’s ‘A Heart is Lonely Hunter’ and I felt such an affinity with the young girl in the book, Mick, who loves music but doesn’t know how to describe why she does out loud. Except that Carson McCuller’s does so beautifully, especially when she describes Mick’s hearing Beethoven’s Third for the first…if I remember correctly in one part she describes the opening as “…God strutting from side to side…”
Well, these weren’t exactly heralds from heaven above and certainly no Beethoven’s Third…but you know, I think, for me, they were just as powerful as that symphony was to Mick.
(It always amazes me that McCullers was only 23 when she wrote that book.)
Interestingly, I when I moved to States and started to collect the LPs myself and learn more about the various artists, I realized there was a sort of six degrees of separation going on with all the the songs we’d put on that first mix tape (although that’s ultimately true of most of the music of that time, especially British bands), including the four I liked so much. See the end of this epistle*, if you are so inclined to find out…
***
1- First up, is what I thought sounded like the best love song of all time (and I still do). It wasn’t until a few years ago that I found out that it truly was a love song, or rather a love letter from Keith Reid to his then girlfriend. If all you know of Procol Harum is A Whiter Shade of Pale, then listen up:
Quite Rightly So (Procol Harum; Shine On Brightly)
2- I think it was the surprise of the lyrics so late into the song, and the memorableness (is that a word?!) of them, despite the brevity, that really caught my ear. Of course, the anticipatory guitar runs aren’t half bad either.
3- This is the one I can’t find anywhere. I think there is a cover of it on Youtube, but this is one of the very VERY few songs which I simply don’t want to listen to as a cover. I can’t see how I could not fallen for this song: a mutinous, hormonal youngster experiencing all the usual angst of impending teenhood and EXTREME puppy love while being stifled and controlled emotionally outside of my home at every turn? Please. This one was made for me to listen to over and over, and try to sing to myself all the times I was SO misunderstood and SO miserable and it hurt TOO much to breathe and god did he just look MY way?!
(Turn it up a bit; it’s a bit low on volume)
The Gardenof Jane Delawney (Trees; The Garden of Jane Delawney)
4- Finally, this was right in line with what my dad calls my marxist-socialist-hippie inclinations, even at that age. (My dad said he thanks god every day I was born too late to be part of the Mojahedin–specifically the Peykar offshoot– movement in Iran when we lived there. Because he thinks their professed goals and ideals would’ve been exactly the type of thing to suck an idealistic teenage me in.)
Streets of London (Ralph McTell; Spiral Staircase)
* So here is the six degrees of separation, sort of:Â Ralph McTell’s song is in part inspired musically and lyrically by a song of Al Stewart’s…Al Stewart worked with Trevor Lucas on some of the more interesting guitar arrangements for his third album, Zero She Flies…Trevor Lucas was married to Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention and the two heavily influenced the work of Trees, including Bias Boshell’s songs for the band’s first album, The Garden of Jane Delawney….Brian Boshell later became a guest keyboardist for The Moody Blues, whose successful single, ‘Nights in White Satin’ was one of the main reasons Procol Harum were backed by their music label to release ‘A White Shade of Pale’ . . .
It just boggles that you can still find more than a couple of people who can do things like this with a straight face:
A gaggle of do-gooders came to my door the other day to solicit support for their efforts to block the Shooting Creek Brewery, a brew pub not far from our home.
Conversation went something like this:
Hi, did you know there is an effort to start a brew pub that will brew and serve beer?
Isn’t that what they do at brew pubs?
Yes, but we don’t think brew pubs belong in Floyd County.
Why not?
Because drinking is a sin.
It is? Didn’t Christ serve wine to his disciples?
That’s not the point. We don’t need a brew pub in Floyd County.
Again, I ask: Why not?
Because it will corrupt our children.
I suspect the children of Floyd County, VA will have bigger problems than beer if folks like this get their way.
For many reasons, few of which I’ve explained here, I once thought that Hillary Clinton was the best person to carry the Democratic flag in 2008. But as much as I was comfortable in that decision, I maintained doubts about her candidacy. And more than a few of those doubts were related to the company she kept:
The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots†said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.
“Save it for 2050. … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back
“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.â€
Fuck you, Mark Penn. Fuck you from me and every other American that isn’t interested in your hateful and narrow little heartland view of a county that doesn’t look like you. Fuck you and your willingness to attack the very things (say, “fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back”) that makes this country great in service of a petty political victory.
Objectively, the Olympics are a scam. It’s a conspiracy between global corporations interested in advertising, local governments looking for an excuse to shovel public money to favored private contractors, and the Skekis (also known as the International Olympic Committee) who suck the lifeblood out of young men and women. If this were the last Olympics ever, it would probably be a net good for the world.
But it won’t be. So make of it what you will. Living in the center of the ’96 Olympics was among the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. The people, the energy, the – forgive me, Francis – post-history feeling to all of it (it was 1996, after all). Not even some wingnut with a bomb could ruin it for us. After the experience of those couple of weeks, I will always be up for hanging out in an Olympic city.
It’s more than a party, though. It’s – despite NBC’s best efforts to ensure I never care about someone’s triumphantly-overcoming-tragedy again – the story of thousands of people who have busted their ass for most of their lives to be there. It’s the amazing people it produces, like Otto Peltzer (follow and read that). It’s people.
And finally, it’s among the very few events where we can truly say that “the world is watching.” And that, my friends, leads to profound and important actions like this:
The Olympics can still be shaped by individuals. All of the people in these (amazing) Opening Ceremonies pictures? They are individuals, like you and me, who worked incredibly hard to be there. Don’t cede the good of the Olympics to spite the bad.
~
If you want to watch the Olympics online, and live in the United States, NBCOlympics.com is probably the place for you. I say “probably”, because 1) while it will show most events live, it will delay online access for any event it plans to broadcast until *after* its been broadcast, and 2) there’s some ridiculous deal by which access is only available to those US viewers living in areas served by NBC’s “partners”. They check this by asking for a zipcode (I have a friend who lives in 22203, and it works perfectly).
If you’re getting screwed by the inability of the IOC and world broadcasters to find a way to make the Olympics accesible to you, you might be interested in this article on the “alternative” means of watching the events.
