November 2004 Archives

Never give a wiseacre an opening like that. I should know this by now. Anyway, the diagnosis is "bursitis," which I think is right up there with "gout" and "dropsy" as old man's diseases I'm not going to get. Yikes. But at least it's not arthritis, which I didn't want to hear and which apparently I don't have. I somehow really messed up the attachments around my knee. Hey, ski season is ON, people! I need this fixed now!

The taping project continues. In anticipation of frequent, long drives across the border this winter, getting some of my old Bob & Ray tapes onto CD. There is just nothing funnier than Bob & Ray.

Saw "The Incredibles" on Sunday. So good! Just an excellent movie, very funny, lots of action, great spoof of superhero cliches but just great on its own. And a cartoon Holly Hunter is kinda hot.

Well, in fact, I can' think of one right now. "Knee wall," though that doesn't make any sense in this context. "I have enormous kneeds"? Anyway.

For those who may have noticed that I haven't been blathering on about my bike rides lately, it's because I've been hiding the fact that I've been laid up for about three weeks now with a terrifically painful knee. I can only figure it came from raking and bagging -- the best job on the leaves we've done in about 12 years, 80 bags of maple-y joy sent to the curb, and if you were to look at our little yard, you wouldn't know we'd lifted a finger, because there are still leaves out there. In fact, the wind is blowing dozens of them into my yard right now. Curse you, wind! So, anyway, I somehow wrenched a tendon that I don't normally wrench, and the pain was really bad for a couple of weeks. I finally got the nerve to try stretching it early last week, and that worked quite nicely at taking the pain down from about an 8 (waking up in the night screaming like a girl) to a 1 (ouch! don't do that!), and I could once again lift my leg, which had been too painful to contemplate. But the extreme pain kept me off the bike, like a good boy who wants to ski soon, until Thanksgiving morning. The weather was too iffy to ride to my Mom's, so I just rode around the neighborhood, out to a couple of cemeteries and back home. (It was wet, and my bike is now crusted with crud, which I should clean off today.) And that didn't bother it at all, so I figured I was well on my way to recovery.

Then yesterday I finished sticking all those labels on all those CDs, and decided it was time to put them in their proper places in my CD albums (I gave up jewel boxes years ago, kids -- there just ain't enough room once your CDs number in the hundreds). Then the project got huge, as I decided to reorganize ALL the CD albums, mix the homemade CDs in the with commercial CDs, rethink how the spoken word and comedy stuff was arranged, and before too long I had hundreds of CDs and booklets out on the floor, and I sat down there, cross-legged, for hours sorting through it all. (I had a couple of alphabetical setbacks along the way.) And, surprise, surprise! When I got up, there was pain, and plenty of it. Idiot. Stretching helped, but it still hurts more today than it did all week. So today, I get to finish this project like an old lady, at the kitchen table.

It's actually still warm enough to ride (it's been in the 50s for a couple of weeks, we've been blessed), but it's windy and gray and I really want to be able to go skiing next weekend, so more rest for the knee is in order. Think I'll take the kids to "The Incredibles" this afternoon, and wrap up the laziest Thanksgiving weekend in memory.

Yes, it was a delightful day. A friend joined us for the day as her children were elsewhere, we watched the parade, made cranberry sauce (I fall firmly within the anti-can camp), applesauce, and then watched the endlessly hilarious "Scrooged" -- possibly Michael O'Donoghue's finest work, and that's saying something -- then went over to my Mom's for a very nice dinner. Even got to meet my sister's new boyfriend, whose existence I only know of thirdhand, but we're not tight, so that's how it is. Either he's a nice guy, or I'm just realizing how much I didn't like her ex, or both. But that's not what this entry is about . . . .

And I had a lazy day mostly to myself yesterday, did some puttering and started to get out from behind a stack of CDs that desperately needed labels, which I'm still working on. Sorted out the ski equipment, got the Halloween lights back up in the loft, that sort of thing. Then we went to Proctor's in Schenectady to see "Spider-man 2," completely forgetting that last night was their big Christmas parade. Miraculously, we got a semi-legal spot in the Proctor's parking lot. There is NO better place to see a movie than Proctor's (though I do like the Sony theatres near Lincoln Center), although last night was apparently TB Sufferers Discount Night, to judge by the unbelievable amount of hacking going on over on the other side of the theater. Also, when people only pay $2 to see a movie, they are even more likely to think they're free to talk, but again, for once we were lucky and not in the midst of the constant conversation. The movie rocked, by the way. Sets up nicely for the third movie, too, and I can't wait to see under what pretense they get Kirsten Dunst's dress soaked in that one. But that's not what this post is about . . . .

This post is about the Internet letting me down. In this day and age, I assume that pretty much anything I want to know or see can be found on the Internet. So when I go into a deep label-production mode for all the CDs I've been ripping from my old LPs, I expect that I can conjure up an image of the original album cover in just about no time at all. If you've tried to scan an old LP, you know this is a good thing, because my scanner isn't big enough to do an LP cover, getting the lighting right on a photo is a pain, and in the end I'm just putting a thumbnail on the label for easy recognition. And one of the albums I've been sitting on for a while is the National Lampoon classic "Goodbye Pop," which I spent an entire stoned summer listening to, late at night, at high volumes, usually singing along, on the front porch of 602-1/2 University Avenue in the 'Cuse. It was a summer I should regret a lot more than I do. Oddly, the album is just as good straight as it was stoned, and I finally got around to putting it on a CD some months ago. So I wanted to throw a label on it today, and can you believe it? I cannot find ONE image of the "Goodbye Pop" LP cover. I can barely even find any mentions of the album. It has a listing at MP3.com as "unavailable." This is the album that brought together ingenious work by Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and especially Christopher Guest -- the classic "Kung Fu Christmas," the brilliance of Guest's sleazy record promoter Ron Fields ("He's a manager, the man who discovered Cirkle") -- and yet the Internet has barely taken note. And worse than that, I've gotta scan the album cover. (Pictures of Bob & Ray, I had no problem finding, by the way.)

What am I thankful for? Well, I'm thankful that rant is over, for one thing . . . .

Well, what do you think?

Girls hiking Originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Here it is nearly Thanksgiving, and I completely forgot to celebrate Rocktober! Damn!

I am so going to get a satellite radio. (I haven't listened to regular radio on a regular basis since about, oh, say, 1992.) While I don't generally like splitting the hairs of music into iron-walled subgenres, there's at least a chance that I could turn on the radio and hear something that does not suck. If I study the magazines and the websites, if I read critics and weblogs, I am able to find music that I want to listen to. Why is this not possible by listening to the radio? Wouldn't you think radio would be a natural medium for listening to music? Why has radio been in a deep, everlasting suck since, say, 1978? (Give or take 6 years.)

Had an interesting lunch with Hannah last week, right after she had her braces put on (she's adorable with them, just the picture of a perfect American pre-teen). We were sitting in a bagel shop and having a leisurely lunch together. She's been curious lately about the lives of her parents Before Hannah, and had been asking about girlfriends who were not her mom, whether a friend of ours had been my girlfriend, that sort of thing. Somehow we got onto the topic of boys and shesaid that boys like girls with big breasts. I had to say that while a lot of boys did, lots of boys liked girls with small breasts, and that in any event the important thing was to figure out whether a boy liked her for who she was rather than for what she looked like.

While all this was going on, a woman appeared in the line at the counter -- buxom, stunning and well-aware of it. Difficult to ignore. Worse, she was the kind who needed to know that people were looking at her, so she was doing a little dance in line, looking all around the shop, playing with her sunglasses, spinning around so she could be seen from all sides, and casting flirtatious glances at anyone who was looking her way. And of course I couldn't take my eyes off her. (Being an old man, I'll take my flirtatious glances wherever I can get them.) So there I was, trying to explain to my daughter, almost certain to be blessed with her mother's svelte, model's build, that she needs to understand that sometimes boys will be attracted to her body more than her mind, while I'm being completely distracted by a meaningless flirtation from a stranger with, as Mudhead put it, a balcony you could do Shakespeare from. (This is one of the downsides of being male -- the two brains feel no need to coordinate their desires.)

I think it's interesting, though, that Hannah felt free to talk with me about that, and wonder how much longer before she becomes convinced her parents have nothing to bring to the table on these topics. My parents never ever discussed such things with me--I'm still waiting for my mother to have the sex talk with me.

My day:

1. Meet with foreign dignitaries (note: I'm not afraid of the Dutch! What are they going to do, make us pay separately?)
2. Attend major technological announcement with the big boss.
3. Close negotiations on multi-million dollar penalty from multi-national corporation for their multi-badness in the past.
4. Come home and be completely confounded by daughter's math homework. She was supposed to solve a 7x7 nested magic square (with a 5x5 and 3x3 nested inside), with only the top row and the bottom of the 3x3 given. We solved the 3x3. Beyond that, there were a lot of stochastic theories and Google was no help at all. (I declared "No Googling!" at 6:30. At 7:30, I was cursing the Internet's failure to provide me with even the hint of an answer.)

How was your day?

There's virtually no difference in my mind, unless I manage to get said shopping done before Thanksgiving, which was once a hallmark of my self-esteem but which, in recent years, has been more honored in the breach. (The levels of suck that apply to that sentence are beyond counting.) In any event, can someone tell me what the f I did to my knee? I'm thinking it was the raking, because biking never hurts my knee, and I'm barely functional this week. In fact, despite the fact that it was a gorgeously sunny day (though cold enough that yesterday's snow is still here-- around 30 degrees), I had to dismiss the idea of a bike ride for fear of crippling myself further. So instead I took Hannah out for an early-morning run to the mall, the only kind of mall-run I can tolerate. We were in, filled with consumer satisfaction, and out before most people had started circling for parking spaces. Excellent. She got a skirt she'd been wanting (oh, my god, floor-length denim on this adorable little 11-year-old, too cute), I got a new skiing fleece (not quite what I wanted, but also excellent), we bagged a couple of major Christmas presents to add to the already growing pile, and even snuck in some ice cream, all before second cuppa coffee time. Not bad. And my knee didn't seem to mind.

Tonight: the new Warren Miller movie, "Impact"! If you don't know what this means, it's a skiing thing. Warren Miller is the granddaddy of sports movies, and this is his 55th skiing film. Unbelievable. We have a couple of them on DVD, but there's nothing like the pre-season anticipation, the excitement of the crowd, and the big-ass movie screen at The Palace. (Jeez, how did we miss Olivia Newton-John last night? Damn you, spam filter!) (Yes, I AM joking, thank you very much.)

It's snowing like crazy here . . . this is a rare blog from work, and my usual view across the Hudson is nearly completely blotted out by the white stuff. (Some towns look good when obscured by a snowstorm . . . Rensselaer is definitely one of them.) Not that it will amount to anything, but Killington is open, Mount Snow is making snow, and I'm hoping to start wearing out my season pass with a couple of early December trips (it matters less what the conditions are when you're not paying $200 just to get on the mountain). Bring it on, baby!

(It's precisely this kind of thinking that makes me very unpopular around the office.)

Should mention that something I did last weekend -- perhaps the raking, followed by a moderate bike ride, completely wracked my knee, and today I can barely walk. Yesterday would have been great for a ride, but events conspired to prevent that from happening, which is probably a very good thing, considering how much pain I'm in today. But the snow is making me anxious to see this fixed and over with so I can be ready to shred.

Flipping through the channels with eldest daughter in the room. VH1 Classic is playing '80s music. On comes some '80s funk/pop band, I think it was Cameo. The singer is wearing a bright red leather codpiece. Now, how do you explain the codpiece phenomenon to the children of today? More importantly, why should you have to? Thankfully, she didn't ask. But now all week I've had a line from "Hot Sauce," George Clinton by way of Thomas Dolby, stuck in my head: "The brother in the codpiece / I've seen him on the TV / I think he likes his ladies / All sweet and sugary."

For some reason grocery shopping is much better when the Indigo Girls' version of "Tangled Up In Blue" is blasting through my ears. Also, Joan Baez doing "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." I was listening to that and some other Dylan covers when something very odd happened: a song actually sung by Dylan appeared on my playlist. Unexpected.

Moving into this decade, finished re-reading Richard Russo's "Empire Falls." Even better the second time through. I think it's his best. There's something familiar, because aren't "Mohawk," "Risk Pool" and "Nobody's Fool" virtually the same book? Yes, and no. This one took many of the elements of the earlier books, reworked them, added an interesting reason why the main character is stuck where he is, and then scared the hell out of any of us who are parents. Really good book, being made into a movie, in post-production. I knew Paul Newman had signed to play Max Roby (a natural, even if he did a similar role in "Nobody's Fool"), but I'm a little surprised to see Ed Harris for Miles -- I would think the role would call for someone vastly less intense. We'll see what he can do. Aidan Quinn as David sounds like brilliant casting. I've never felt like there's been enough Aidan Quinn in my movies.

Wake up, realize it's 9 o'clock, which means I've slept 11 hours. Which instantly puts the phrase "Worked eleven hours, bought the girl some flowers" into my head. The dangerous after-effects of an intense fascination with Squeeze nigh onto 20 years ago. (And just last week Jools Holland was taking me on a musical tour of the Lebanon on my telly. No shite!)

So, here's the thing that's most disappointing to me. It's not that one side or the other wins this race or that race, control of a legislature, or anything like that. There's going to be a normal ebb and flow for that sort of thing, which we need. (Granted, it IS hard to believe that the same country that elected Bill Clinton twice could also elect George W. Bush twice.) It's that the level of discourse, political and otherwise, has become so polarized, so vicious, so filled with hate and intolerance on both sides that it seems that anyone who could conduct himself as a gentleman, who could allow that maybe the other side's point of view isn't insane, who could express even the slightest of doubts would be eaten alive in half a news-cycle and spit out the other side ("Goodbye, Governor Dean!").

It's hard to know the truth of this because it coincides with my coming-of-age, so to speak, but it seems that things really started to get polarized with the election of Ronald Reagan. Now, I wasn't any too thrilled with Jimmy Carter, though now I feel a bit of nostalgia for someone who would rather scold me and tell me to put on my sweater when I'm cold than tell me what kind of medical therapy I'm allowed to have based on his theological beliefs. We were rattling our sabres over Afghanistan, and as they started up draft registration, I felt betrayed by Carter -- betrayed that my Democratic government would start to mobilize the Selective Service in order to show "resolve" toward the Soviet Union. (Don't get me wrong -- if there had been a draft, that would have been an entirely different thing. This was a surrender of our rights in order to show that we COULD be called up, if it became necessary.) Reagan opposed conscription. It was that simple for a 20-year-old male at the second peak of the Cold War. (Unfortunately, I got the chance to feel betrayed a second time when Reagan maintained the draft registration system.)

But almost immediately upon Reagan's election, a particularly nasty partisanism came to a boil, and with rare exceptions, it's been there in national presidential politics ever since. I listened for eight years as my many more-liberal-than-me friends decried the evils of The Great Communicator (applied to Reagan, an insult; later applied to Clinton by the same people, praise), and while I had no great love for the draft registration betrayal and his utter slashing of my student aid, neither did I believe he was responsible for crabgrass, the hole in the ozone layer, or my chronic hangnails. As I watched leftist arguments devolve into the silly (I mean, you really do have to expect people might tune you out when you take on the Mercator Projection as a tool of imperialism), I became more and more disillusioned with the level of discourse. Again, this was going on from both sides. Bush 1 wasn't that bad a term in those ways -- he was more moderate and didn't seem to pander to the religious right as much as his predecessor (and successor). Then came Bill Clinton, and discourse was reduced to the baying of angry hounds. It hasn't gotten better since.

I've had significant training in conflict resolution. My job puts me between people and what they want to do every day. I am often expected to broker compromise. I like doing that. It's a good way to serve the people. But in our political discourse, we've jettisoned compromise -- anything less than total domination is considered failure. The idea that both sides get a little is now almost incomprehensible, because that would mean that one side doesn't get everything! We have truly become a land of INtolerance, on both sides. We have supporters of both candidates screaming that anyone who supports the other side must actually have something wrong with them, and treating them as such.

And so for a while today I really just had to put my head down. Not because there's no change -- I didn't expect there would be -- but because the results on the national level will just reinforce the already dug-in positions of both sides. One will say: "A-ha! We've got a mandate! Our power is growing, and we must be on the right track! That means our opponents are on the wrong track, and must be stopped" And the other side will say, "Our opponents are on the wrong track, and must be stopped!" And there's no willingness to find any middle ground on anything.

So, here's my little wish for the next four years. I wish we could all accept that people who disagree with us are not necessarily evil, that they are not necessarily out to do us harm, that they may in fact have a legitimate point of view. And I wish we would then argue for our own points without vilifying the other side. If I want government to get out of my public library records and to leave the science to the scientists (which we used to call conservative values, by the way), I need to argue that point without labeling people who don't feel the same way as hopeless, dangerous troglodytes.

Because, really, the idea that I would be nostalgic for a presidential scolding is just too much to bear.

I can't fucking take it. This country has completely forgotten how to hold an election. It was this uncertainty that started the markets into a plunge four years ago.

I have a feeling that, as Jon Stewart said, those of us in the Northeast are just gonna huddle together and hide for the next few years.

It's Election Day, so in honor of the recently deceased Vaughn Meader, I'd like to remind you to get out and vote. Vote for the Kennedy of your choice, but vote!

So, let's see . . . continued polarization, destruction of our freedoms, push for a theocracy -- or a guy who can't seem to make a compelling case against any of that? I just want this all to be over, even though those of us not in a swing state haven't seen a single ad (and I'm okay with that). Tonight's probably going to be a long night. My thought (and perhaps fear) is that in fact it won't be close at all. But enough of that . . . .

Went to an interesting housewarming/Halloween party on Saturday. Friends had pulled up stakes from the middle of Scotia out to the Glenville hills, an area I hadn't been in in many many years. Saw a bunch of friends, had a good time, got to have some semi-meaningful conversations about music only slightly interrupted by cries of "Daddy!" Had an interesting conversation with a woman that I apparently went to high school with but whom I wouldn't have recognized in a million years (I think when I said that she probably thought I meant she had aged, which of course I didn't mean, but I remembered her as a very straight-haired redhead, which she was no longer). One of those people I knew and could say "hi" to, but I don't think we had many (or maybe any) classes together, and I can't remember a single time after 8th grade that we were in a room together. So odd that even at a relatively small school there can be these people you barely know. Turned out she had been a professional ballet dancer for a number of years, so I could talk a little bit about my ballerinas, who were there.

Halloween? Three million kids. Nearly ran out of candy. The kids came in waves, though, so I was able to watch a really enjoyably bad drive-in feature called "Tormented," about a jazz player on an island whose courtship of a woman is slightly disturbed by the ghost of the other woman, who proclaimed that if she couldn't have him no one would, just before she fell from the top of the lighthouse. The big scene is in the church, when an invisible presence blows in the doors and slowly moves up the aisle, making the flowers wilt and the candles dim, and then flips the pages in the preacher's hands from the wedding ceremony to "Burial of The Dead"! Great stuff.