What I've Been Listening To Lately

The Long Road to Freedom, an elaborately produced box set of recordings originally produced under the direction of Harry Belafonte, back in the 1960's. He had a vision for creating a collection of what he called "African-matrixed" music that basically traced the history of black people in America through the various musical traditions they developed over the centuries. The picture gives a nice overview of what you get in the set - five CDs, a DVD describing the history of the project (the original tapes languished in a warehouse for decades, all but forgotten, not getting public release until 2002) , a nicely illustrated book full of historical background, and a thick sturdy box to hold it all. Very lovingly produced but the power of the music and the story it captures deserves the royal treatment. You get it all here: African chants, spirituals, chain gang shouts, street vendor calls and yells, creole, children's game singalongs, blues, folk tunes, minstrelsy, gospel choirs, tales of hard times and heroic struggles, all recorded in exquisitely high quality stereo. These are not rustic field recordings or early samples, but instead, faithful and meticulous recreations of the original but now long-absent voices, inspired by Belafonte's wide-ranging and discerning perspective to capture as much of the variety of a people's musical tradition as his project possibly could. It's largely a vocal-music showcase, which is not typically a style that I get into, but the freshness and power of the performances, and the entertainment value of the project as a whole, has made an impression on me.

Children of Nuggets - I got this from my kids for Father's Day. It's a pretty cool and very entertaining box-set of obscurities from 80 or 90 different bands who followed in the garage rock and power pop traditions established in the 1960's, and chronicled on two other, earlier "Nuggets" anthologies. I've had those other collections for several years now, and still enjoy putting them on to listen to as "albums" even in this current iPod random shuffle era I now live in. The new set is not as familiar to me - a lot of the songs on these four discs are completely new to me but I'm having fun discovering new stuff. Some of it is a bit "affected" in the bands attempts to sound so far out and psychedelic, but I won't complain because I can understand their admiration for the great music of the late 60's and their profound regret over coming of age in the 80's, an era when plasticity in all its worst applications seemed to have completely dominated the music biz. Most of these songs were recorded in that post-punk era and I kind of wonder, if my old band the Church Police had managed to survive longer than it did, if we would have wound up doing something like what is found in this wonderful and amusing package.

Itinerary recap

This past weekend was one of the busiest I've had in awhile. Thus, little time and less energy for blogging. But here's my attempt to construct a timeline of what kept me moving (and by the way I did enjoy all this activity - I'm not complaining!)

Let's start on Friday. That morning (and the night before) I spent preparing for the "International Food Fair," an annual cross-cultural event where our various homes and departments choose a culture and make food, display crafts and artifacts relative to that part of the world. The event is sponsored by Wedgwood's Diversity Committee (of which I'm an active member.) The Staff Development Department chose the Caribbean as our culture, so I got into doing some cooking. I found a website with some recipes from that region and spent most of the event frying up banana fritters. The beef-and-rice stir fry I made, which they call "Caribbean Cook-up," was very well received - people came back for second helpings, which I took as a compliment since the gym was full of food, probably 12-15 different booths each offering free eats.

The cooking and clean-up occupied the bulk of my day at work. That night, Julie and I went to go see "Nancy Drew" which was an entertaining and worthwhile picture that I will describe more adequately in a separate post when I have more time.

On Saturday, our whole family went to Chicago to listen in person as Garrison Keillor and crew put on a live "Prairie Home Companion" show at the Ravinia Music Festival. We had a fun time there, and along the way we also visited a Japanese mall. I think I will have more to say about that day in a separate post as well.

On Sunday I drove down to Cincinnati, where I was scheduled to participate in a day-long training on the Lectora software that I'll be using to create e-learning modules at Wedgwood. I spent the afternoon with my friends Julie and Jon Bogart and their children. Julie and I are email friends and a few occasions where I've had the chance to travel to Cinci have allowed us to get to know each other more in person. We watched Tiger Woods come up short in the U.S. Open (the golf tournament, not the tennis competition, in case you are confused.) Then Jon grilled up some chicken and hot dogs, we had a nice dinner and that led to a long free-flowing conversation time for Julie and I. It was great and cool and most enjoyable.

The next morning I drove into downtown Cincinnati, right up on the river, just across the street from Paul Brown Stadium where the Bengals play (when their team parole officer allows them to take off the ankle bracelets so as to not slow down their receivers when they run their pass routes.) I spent the day in the offices of the Trivantis Corporation where I took that aforementioned Lectora training. It was very helpful, full of ideas and explanations and hands-on practice with the program that I think will give me a good boost in creating my own titles.

Then I drove home all the way from Cincinnati to Grand Rapids. It was a good time to listen to lots of music on my iPod. I recently bought a device that allows me to play the iPod through my car stereo on the FM receiver. That really helps a long drive become so much more enjoyable. Though the mp3 format doesn't pack quite as much punch as a CD. I find that I really have to crank up the volume when I'm running the iPod, and be sure to turn it back down before I switch over to radio - otherwise, it hurts!

Then Tuesday morning I slept in since I got home pretty late, and spent most of the workday just catching up and getting back into my routine. The afternoon was spent at a picnic for the Advancement Department (for which I work eight hours a week) so that was a nice, laid-back way to wind things up after a few days of so much running around.

Now it's Wednesday and this looks like it will be an ordinary, unremarkable day. So off to work I go.

Music Rant

So here we are, summer of 2007 and I'm waiting for the classic hits to take their place in the pantheon of pop. Several months ago I wrote about the magic that seems to have taken place in years ending in sevens, though I admitted that this trend has been in decline since the peak year of 1967. Here are comparative lists of the big hits from the first halves of the 7th years of the past several decades:

1967
I'm A Believer - The Monkees
Ruby Tuesday - The Rolling Stones
Penny Lane - The Beatles
Happy Together - The Turtles
Something Stupid - Frank and Nancy Sinatra
Groovin' - The Young Rascals
Respect - Aretha Franklin

Not to mention a few "minor" hits from the Supremes ("Love is Here and Now Your Gone" and "The Happening.") Beatles, Stones, Sinatra, Aretha and Diana, all atop the charts between January and June 1967. 'Nuff said!

1977
Tonight's the Night - Rod Stewart
I Wish - Stevie Wonder
Blinded By the Light - Manfred Mann (but written by Bruce Springsteen)
Evergreen - Barbra Streisand
Dancing Queen - Abba
Hotel California - The Eagles
Sir Duke - Stevie Wonder
Dreams - Fleetwood Mac
Got to Give It Up - Marvin Gaye

I admit, this list steers dangerously close to MOR but even if it's not the most rockin' set of tunes you ever heard, there's no doubting the heft,significance and sheer talent of the performers listed above. And seething underneath it all was punk rock and Eurodisco innovators like Kraftwerk who were laying the foundations for musical breakthroughs that would sustain us culturally for the next couple of decades at least.

1987
OK I admit, my argument is beginning to get strained here but let's see what I can do to salvage my case...

Walk Like an Egyptian - The Bangles
Jacob's Ladder - Huey Lewis and the News
I Knew You Were Waiting For Me - Aretha Franklin and George Michael
Open Your Heart - Madonna
With or Without You - U2

Well, that's about all I can put forth as far as "lasting talent" is concerned. There was some truly cheesy music put out that spring (Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, Lean on Me by Club Nouveau, Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship) and then there were a few good songs released by ephemeral performers (Shake You Down by Gregory Abbott, Died In Your Arms by Cutting Crew, Always by Atlantic Starr.) Let me just remind you that U2 was in their prime (one of their primes, I'll even say) and Whitney Houston was several years away from disgracing herself. Then again, we have to take Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam into account... I'll just leave it at that and move on to 1997.

1997
Un-break My Heart - Toni Braxton
Wannabe - Spice Girls
Can't Nobody Hold Me Down - Puff Daddy feat. Ma$e
Hypnotize - Notorious B.I.G. (peaked just after Biggie was shot to death)
MMMBop - Hanson
I'll Be Missing You - Puff Daddy, Faith Evans, 112

OK, I'm under some stress here. That's the complete list of #1 hits from '97 through the end of June. I now discern that the slide has been gathering momentum for a couple of decades now. I suppose that Puff Daddy a.k.a. Puffy a.k.a. P Diddy a.k.a. Diddy (now) or Sean Combs as I generally think of him (when I do) may rank as a figure of lasting importance but it will never be about the music. The other names on this list are either non-entities or novelty acts (though I will say I like Toni Braxton's voice, I just wish she hadn't gotten so desperately sleazy as her career progressed - she had the makings of a great, classy torch singer but the industry doesn't sufficiently reward that style anymore I guess.)

Though there was some good music released that year, it didn't make it to the pop charts, I'm sad to admit.

2007
Here's where we are at now, folks. Tell me if you think any of these performers will have comparable staying power to the Hall of Famers we heard from in 1967 or even '77:

Irreplaceable - Beyonce (maybe?)
Say It Right - Nelly Furtado
What Goes Around Comes Around - Justin Timberlake
This is Why I'm Hot - MIMS
Glamorous - Fergie feat. Ludacris
Don't Matter - Akon
Give It to Me - Nelly Furtado feat. Justin Timberlake
Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne
Makes Me Wonder - Maroon 5
Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin') - T-Pain feat. Yung Joc
Umbrella - Rihanna feat. Jay-Z (I actually like this song, once Jay-Z shuts up, the best of all others that have topped the charts this year.)

I will say one thing in favor of this list though, that no song sits on top for too long the way that, say, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men did back in the 90's (way out of proportion to both their talent and the worthiness of their songs.)

OK, that's what I have to say, you can comment on this if you think you got something to say to me about it.

Technical Difficulties

Haven't blogged much lately... been preoccupied with the simple living of life, I suppose. Not that it's been all that simple. I've been dealing with a fair number of problems on the mechanical side of existence:

Car shopping and decision-making - All three of my sons have been working through automotive issues. Brandon has a truck engine that over-heated and broke down on the freeway a couple Saturdays ago as he was driving it to my brother-in-laws to have it repaired. He's purchased a rebuilt engine now and it will be installed later this week. Curt has been driving my old Intrepid down to the last miserable spasms of life left in it - you can hear that car coming from a block away, it has so many distinctive rattles and sputters, and none of us think it's worth putting the money in to repair it. But he just bought a pretty sharp little Mazda on Friday, and got his insurance and title this morning, so he's set. Derek bought that '99 Cutlass I featured here a couple weeks ago but we've discovered a transmission issue that will be looked at tomorrow, so we'll see what that's all about. At least my Taurus and our minivan are working dependably, otherwise we'd really be in a pickle. (My daughter doesn't have her own car...)

Our main refrigerator conked out on us last Wednesday. I noticed that the milk was warm on Tuesday morning but figured someone had left it out for awhile and just returned it to the fridge before I got it out again. On Wednesday, I twisted the lid and it kind of popped off - not a normal, or good, event. I peeked into the jug and noticed what looked like white oatmeal sloshing around the bottom. Yuk! At least we have a second fridge in the basement, but that one is old and beat-up, even though it keeps stuff adequately cold. So on Saturday morning we went out and bought a new one. Got frustrated to discover that they don't make refrigerators the same width (31 1/2") as our old one anymore unless we buy a side-by-side model, which we don't like. Now the standard is either 29 5/8" or 32 1/2" (which would be too wide for the nook we have to move it into.) So we'll have to deal with gaps between fridge and counter. I imagine that keys and all sorts of other stuff will be tumbling down those gaps soon enough. The new unit will arrive tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon.

We experienced a couple of power outages in our neighborhood this past weekend. Saturday's was fairly brief, about a half-hour or so, but Sunday's took up most of the afternoon and early evening. We haven't really even hit air-conditioning season yet so I'm kind of troubled to think what might await us if our electric company is having these kinds of problems already. It kind of messed up my plans to catch up on blogs and emails yesterday. When the power came back on, I didn't feel like getting on the computer, in any case.

We built a new, modest little retaining wall for our flower-beds in front of the house on Saturday afternoon. Nothing too technical about digging out sod and laying down bricks, one would think, but we went through some conflict trying to figure out how to put some curvature into the lines. I had been under the impression that we were going to have a straight-line wall that would just curve at the corner of the house but Julie wanted to put a little wave effect. Since the bricks we bought are keystone-shaped, they didn't lend themselves to undulating quite as naturally or easily as, ahem, the neighbors. But if I had known that was her intention, we would have bought different bricks! Well, the first attempt at the wavy line looked "fine" to me, but wasn't quite up to Julie's, shall we say, "perfectionistic"(?) standards. So we arrived at this standstill for a time where she contemplated starting all the way over and doing a straight-line after all, and I made my best pitch to cheerfully accept the wall "as is" rather than have to re-dig and re-level the trench from scratch. Fortunately, Derek arrived on the scene and applied his superior mathematical and scientific knowledge (which we believe will lead him to a profitable career in the field of engineering) to make some small adjustments in our layout that enhanced the lines a more elegant, less abrupt and overall flowing manner without negating entirely the manual labor that had been invested up until that point in the project. So we brought the wall construction to a satisfactory conclusion, and we all felt productive and relieved to put that project mostly behind us. (Still a few finishing touches before I'm ready to take pictures and say "completely done.")

Next episode: Installing rain gutters. Stay tuned.

End of an Era

After a run of over seven years, probably almost eight by now, the Blakeslee family is no longer in the newspaper delivery business. Back when Curt was in middle school, when Bill Clinton was still president, he decided that running the Grand Rapids Press up and down the blocks of our nearby neighborhoods would be a good way to make some money. So he answered one of the postcards we got in the mail, and pretty quickly got hooked up with a route. After a few months, his twin brother Brandon got sick of his one-day-a-week route dropping off a local free advertiser (the "Advance") and comparing his piddly little checks (<$20) to Curt's ~$175 that he was hauling in every 30 days. So he got in on the same deal and we were fortunate enough to get them on routes that connect with each other. Eventually Derek got in on the action and for a year or so we ran three press routes. Most of the time, the boys took care of the task themselves (the Press is an afternoon paper so they'd deliver after school,) but I was always the first one up on Sunday mornings hauling bundles from curbside back to home where Julie and the boys would assemble and bag the papers in our living room, I'd toss them into the van and we'd go out driving the route, getting all the papers porched by 8 a.m. or shortly thereafter.

Same deal for holidays too - always a morning delivery. The fact that we had to find a sub who's family would cover multiple routes worked as an inhibiting influence on our ability to get away for long family holidays. But the boys did a good job, earned lots of money and used that cash for computers, cars, clothes, travels (e.g. Derek's China trip last summer) and other stuff. So all in all it was a good thing.

But the twins opted out last year and now Derek is ready to get out of the racket as well. The Press is switching to a new system that would have made it less convenient for him to continue anyway. But I think we're all content to put this experience behind us. I have a lot of good memories of driving the boys around the neighborhood every morning over these past years, and I can recall a lot of recent history being experienced through those Sunday morning headlines - the turn of the millennium, the Bush-Gore election and recount fiasco, the aftermath of Sept. 11, the run-up to the Iraq War, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina... all that and a lot of other stuff. It's been good, but then... sleeping in on Sunday mornings will be good too! And bopping out of town for the weekend or whenever without the angst of figuring out how the routes will be covered - what a relief that will be!

It's like I'm entering a whole new world...

Church Police announcement

I just updated my Church Police blog with some exciting news.