Best vs. Favorite

As I recently went through my 6,578th phase of listening to Smashing Pumpkins music (thank you, Gish and Siamese Dream re-issues), an interesting tug of war came to mind-trying to distinguish between my favorite of something, and what I objectively think is the best.  Of course, with anything in the arts, it is hard to decide the “best” of something.  How I experience a song, movie, tv show, book, etc is colored so much by my own personal experiences, and what I am going through at that very moment.  I’ll stick with music since that is my favorite art form. A certain song, while not among my favorites, could be etched in my brain forever because it is linked to an unforgettable moment in my life.  Or an unforgettable song  could be heard during a rather dull moment of life, but it is still meaningful to me.

So indulge me while I attempt to work all this out while I write. I suppose what I mean by “the best” is which one of the artists that I listen to do I consider to be the most technically profficient at their craft. This doesn’t mean who can play the guitar the fastest (like this guy), but rather, who is the most talented at creating a song, whether it is 2-3 minutes or 6-7 minutes.  Of course, the field is limited to artists that I like. I would guess this is why I dislike so many music reviews. It is obvious after reading the first paragraph of some reviews that the writer not only dislikes the artist, but is gleeful while deconstructing and destroying each part of the album.  When I read a review, I want to hear from the perspective of someone that actually likes the band.  That way I can know what a true fan believes, instead of someone who is trying to impress me with how clever they can be (while largely ignoring the actual music in favor of other less important things about the artist). 

 If you are indifferent to an artist, then maybe it is easier to give an objective viewpoint.  However, the problem is that your opinion is not tethered to any kind of emotion that you feel for the art.  And isn’t art by definition supposed to be emotional? (maybe another topic up for debate).  So perhaps the best of either inherently flawed options is to try and be objective about something that you already feel fairly positive about. 

The Best Songs I Heard in 2011

The Decemberists-January Hymn

A perfect acoustic song that mixes nostalgia, regret, and promise in 3 minutes.  Collin Meloy had to know he had one of his most inspired songs ever when he came up with this one.

Glasvegas-Flowers and Football Tops

Great yearning vocals, Phil Spector drums, and apparently a sound that pays homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain (makes me want to hear more from that band).

 

Foo Fighters-White Limo

So great to hear this blast of aggression from the Foo Fighters.  Reminds me of “Wattershed” off their first album.

 

My Morning Jacket-The Day is Coming

Sonically, this is a mix of soulfulness, shuffling drums, yearning strings, and optimism.  Also gotta love the falsetto and background vocals.

 

Astrud Gilberto, Joao Gilberto, Stan Getz-The Girl from Ipanema

I’m sure I heard this song before last year, but it never really registered with me. I don’t even remember why it did this past year-maybe it was in a commercial or tv show I saw.  But I love the smooth, laid back bossanova style.  Made me instantly realize the Foo Fighters were coping this style with their song “Virginia Moon”, which I also love.

Best Albums I Heard in 2011

Here is the official Random Ramblings list of best albums I heard in 2011.  Notice that these albums didn’t necessarily come out in 2011-that’s just when I heard them.  Hope you enjoy.

The Decemberists-The King is Dead

A great, simple, and straight-forward album after the theatrical concept album The Hazards of Love.  Really this band seems to do no wrong. Whether writing about a fairy queen or just a simple song about winter, their talent shines through.

Key songs: Calamity Song, January Hymn, June Hymn

Glasvegas-self-titled

Thank you, My Chemical Romance, for recommending this album on your Celebrity Playlist Podcast.  Shimmering guitars, rudimentary drums, and a thick Scottish accent combine to make this a great album.

Key songs: Flowers and Football tops, Geraldine, It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry

Foo Fighters-Wasting Light

After the lackluster album Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace, the Foo Fighters come back with another great album.  Tight, focused, and not as hit or miss as their last few albums.

Key songs: White Limo, Bridge Burning, Rope

My Morning Jacket-Circuital

Evil Urges, their last album, didn’t grab me like It Still Moves or Z.  But this album doesn’t reach as far and is better for it.  A nice return to form for the band.

Key songs: Circuital, The Day is Coming, Wonderful (The Way I Feel)

My Wasted Talent

As the year draws to a close, it is easy to reflect on what you have accomplished, and what you have fallen short of doing.  And here at the end of 2011, I realize I have squandered a major opportunity.  Youth and ignorance can explain away a certain amount of inaction, but after that it is just plain laziness.

So there is no other explanation for it: I have wasted my talent as an air drummer.

I would say my talent first emerged when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. It was the first album that made me want to pick up my invisible drumsticks and start pounding.  I practiced on my own, until I could play along with every song.  Pretty soon I was confident enough in my abilities so that I could air drum in front of others.  My talent was growing by leaps and bounds.  With each new band I got into (Smashing Pumpkins were an excellent band to air drum to), I honed my skills, air drumming for no other reason than the pure joy and satisfaction I got from it.

I know that if I had kept up my effort, and perhaps even taken lessons, I really could have done something.  But I got lazy. Instead of joining an air band, I mostly played in my bedroom, with the door shut. Occasionally I’d play in the car, at a red light.  But then I went to college, and my practicing became sporadic.  Post-college my air drumset continued to gather dust, and my skills didn’t progress.  I forgot what it was that made me start air drumming all those years ago.

Now as I sit on the precipice of 2012, I wish I could tell my past self to not quit something that I start. I would tell myself that all the hours playing and practicing will pay off, and who knows how far I can take it. I could have been the next this guy. But that is the past. All I can do now is to make sure my children don’t make the same mistake I did. If they start playing air guitar, drums, triangle, or even air xylophone, I will make sure they practice and do not give up. They will thank me later for it.

Please feel free to share this cautionary tale with others.  Happy New Year.

Lyrics 101: The Christmas Song

It’s the feel good “Dead-dad-comes-back-as-a-snowman” holiday classic!

First, let me acknowledge what you all know and have been celebrating: this is the 100th post for Random Ramblings!   Get out your ticker tape, your party hats, and kick out the jams, cause we’ve made it to this historic milestone. First, I would like to thank all 6 of you faithful readers-we couldn’t have done it without you. Actually, we could have, since technically you don’t have to have any readers to post something online.  But still, thank you. Your support is appreciated. For those of you that don’t post any comments but read (ok, there’s a few more than 6 of you), don’t worry: your secret is safe with us. We will continue to pump out post after post (and pump out we mean we’ll try to at least stay on our current blistering pace of a post per month or two).

For this momentous occasion, we’d like to analyze the lyrics to a Christmas standard: The Christmas Song, by Nat King Cole. Now, we know that potentially tearing apart the lyrics of a song by a man who is no longer with us is a little unsavory.  Kind of like if his daughter had recorded an album of his classics by dueting with his voice, right?

So forgive us but we must take a closer look at these lyrics, because they contain some truly creepy lines. Take, for instance, the line “Jack Frost nipping at your nose”.  Some might take this as Jack Frost being the winter weather, causing your nose to be cold. However, if you are like me, you know this refers to the Michael Keaton movie “Jack Frost”, where a dead dad comes back as a snowman, to haunt watch his family. This is not to be confused with the less scary horror movie of the same name, with an awesome hologram cover.  I wish I could have heard the pitch that studio execs got for the movie.  ”So it’s a PG movie where the dad dies in a car wreck, then comes back to life as a snowman so he can teach his son all the stuff he didn’t when he was still alive.  By the way, can you pass me that crack pipe?”.  At least it was a financial success. It was made for $85 million and made $34, so that’s only $51 million that it lost. I can’t think of any better way to spend that money, because maybe now kids that have been through a similar situation will feel like they are understood.

But I digress.

Remembering Buffy and Mack

These two animals are the only reason you can read (the duck was no help at all)

The other day I was just going about my business when suddenly a random bit of information from my past was remembered. This happens often, as I am a treasure trove of useless trivia (what Elton John’s real name is, what celebrity Joe Montana noticed in the stands before winning Super Bowl XXIII, what number I’m thinking of right now, etc).  I suddenly remembered Buffy and Mack, two characters in a series of books that I read in kindergarten or 1st grade.  Now why exactly did I remember them? Could it be that I was spending time with my pet panda and rabbit? Could be, if I do in fact have those animals as pets (I’d rather not say).  The point is that they popped in my head, almost 20 years after I read about them.

For those of you not familiar with the adventures of Buffy and Mack, they were the stars in a series of books designed to help children improve their reading.  A typical story went something like this:

The sun was shining.  Buffy woke up. Mack woke up. Buffy and Mack woke up. Buffy was hungry. Mack was hungry. Buffy and Mack were hungry.  Buffy ate some cereal. Mack ate some cereal. Buffy and Mack ate some cereal.

As you can see, it was fascinating stuff.  Up there with the works of Hemingway.  Thankfully we’re talking a pretty lean book, instead of a 1,000 page volume of repetitive sentences.  But it was just right for a 5 or 6 year old kid. Looking back, it seems like that was some kind of starting point, and the infamous one line chapter in William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (“My mother is a fish”) that I read my junior year in high school was an end point.  Glad I didn’t know that was the finish line, or I may have just stuck with Buffy and Mack, which would have been a little odd at 17 years old.

I vaguely remember some other character named Mr. Fig who was in the same style of book, but for some reason I don’t recall his stories as much.  If you look here you’ll notice that he looks a little crazy-either he is actually surrounded by an owl and mouse wearing a hat and a rabbit playing a banjo, or Mr. Fig has been partaking of some illegal substances and needs some help (perhaps they’ll still let him wear his top hat and orange vest in the institution).

Later on in 7th grade I remember having to write a story in a typing class. Having already been instilled with sarcasm and satire by my father and Saturday Night Live, I decided to do a parody of Buffy and Mack.  How this story did not result in me being called in the counselor’s office I do not know, for I did a Buffy and Mack story that also involved Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th.  I’ll spare you the gory details, but I do remember Jason dying by being stabbed in the heart with a straw and having a Hi-C juicebox squeezed into it.  Needless to say, I don’t remember putting that story on my fridge when I got it back. And just what exactly did my teacher think while reading that? Come to think of it, she never looked me in the eye after that and I always got an A++ on every assignment after that. But I digress…

Thank you, simple sentence-loving Buffy and Mack (and crazy drug gobbling Mr. Fig) for helping me learn to read.  I enjoyed your books. My classmates enjoyed your books. My classmates and I enjoyed your books!

If Real Baseball were like R.B.I. Baseball

 

I find baseball boring unless it is the playoffs.  Same with the NBA.  I have to have that sense of urgency to really get into it.  However, the same does not apply to R.B.I. Baseball. I’ve been on a 2 week kick with this Nintendo classic, and while I’ve been playing, I’ve been noticing things that I wish could be applied to real baseball. I know I certainly would watch more real baseball if the same things happened in it. So here is what I came up with.

If real baseball were like R.B.I. Baseball…

*whichever direction the infield shifted, the outfield would be forced to shift that way as well. Same thing goes for the pitcher and short stop. So if you do not like the short stop, always run the opposite direction from the ball when he is about to make a play.

*whenever someone got out, they would sprint across the infield (and sometimes magically disappear before they reached the dugout). Hustle = magical powers

*if you were just in the vicinity of the ball when it was hit to you, it would somehow end up in your glove. More magic? Simply the law of “close enough” in action?

*whenever you hit a homerun, the crowd would, in unison, pulsate and flash in a epileptic seizure inducing frenzy, like some radioactive flash mob

*the PA would blast the same music for the entire game (changing only when there are people on base).  Somehow this would not cause you to be fired.

 

My Life’s Mixtape: Incubus

My listening habits have been a bit schizophrenic (they usually are). In the last few weeks, I’ve gone through a Smashing Pumpkins phase, a Beatles phase, a Red Hot Chili Peppers phase (the album “One Hot Minute” with Dave Navarro), which led me to a Jane’s Addiction phase.  And somehow out of all of that, where I’ve landed now is neck deep in Incubus.

Actually, the big motivator was that I had money in my iTunes account and they had a new cd come out.  Now, usually I am strictly a cd purchasing music fan.  I like to have something tangible in my hands to look at, instead of just having the downloaded music (unless it is a song or two-then I’ve perfectly fine just spending $1-$2 for what I want).  But their latest album “If Not Now, When?” is an iTunes LP, so it comes with all the liner notes in electronic form, so it’s pretty cool.

A quick history of me and Incubus: I didn’t think much of them at all when they first came out.  In fact, I couldn’t stand the song Pardon Me, which was their first big hit.  The verses, with their semi-rap, odd cadence sounded pretty lame to me (and to be honest, I still don’t listen to that song).  I did like the song Stellar, and used the burgeoning music service Napster to download it at the time. But after that I really didn’t think too much of them, even though songs like Drive and Wish You Were Here were hard to escape on the radio.  In 2004 I liked Talk Shows on Mute when it was released, but again, they were never a band I thought I would like a whole album by.

Europe Adventure

A passenger on my flight to London

I recently took my first trip ever to Europe.  It truly was the trip of a lifetime, as I was able to go to Rome and then London.  But it was not without some bizarre occurrences worth sharing.  The first was that after I boarded my plane to start my trip, I noticed a passenger that looked oddly familiar. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but then it hit me: he looked just like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.  I was a little alarmed until I realized he wasn’t dancing and listening to that creepy song, so that put me at ease.

When I got to London’s Heathrow, I had to ride a bus to Gatwick airport, for my flight to Rome.  Once I got there, I saw a guard with a gun that looked like it was straight out of Halo. Not sure if London is a prime locale for alien invasion, but they will be ready regardless.

When I finally started seeing the sights in Rome, it hit me that there is an epic struggle for control of the city.  This is not a battle of the locals vs. the tourists.  It is not even a battle of the Catholics vs. other denominations/beliefs.  And as far as I know, it is not a battle of Plants vs. Zombies (I have not played that game but heard it’s pretty good).  It is Fountains vs. Churches.  Every time you turn a corner, you see one of the two, usually in a big piazza and flanked by ruins of some type.  If I ever become a movie director, I will tell this story using big time Hollywood special effects, a la Predator vs. Alien.  The fountains will come to life and wield whatever object they may be holding. On second thought, that may not be very productive-I’m thinking in particular of a fountain that featured a man holding a fish.  So I’ll revisit that idea. The churches, on the other hand, will sprout legs and arms and a head, sort of like a holy rolling Transformer. They can wield the spire that comes out of the top of their structure as a weapon, or throw marble statue “bombs” at their rival fountain.  I can see audiences lining up to see this epic battle, to find out who gains control of the ancient city (and if a super robotic Pope saves the day).  Then we’ll have spin offs into video games, pop up books, and underroos (I actually had this pair when I was young-aren’t you jealous?).

Into the Deep End

This must be what you learn at lesson 76. We are on lesson 4. 

My daughter started swimming lessons a couple of days ago.  My wife and I thought this would be a good opportunity for our 15 month old to get used to the water.  We figured we might go to actual lessons, and help her to be more familiar with being in the water. So I set up the lessons over the phone, and asked if there was anything we needed to know. “Oh no, just make sure she is in her swimsuit, and that one of you is ready to get in the pool with her”, I was told by the seemingly helpful person on the other end of the line. So we put her in her swim diaper, and her one piece (have to be appropriate for all those boys that would be attending class as well), and headed out.

We arrived and sat on the benches with the other parents and children.  Eventually we were given a handout with the basic rules of the class, and told that infants had to wear both a swim diaper AND rubber underpants. WHAT!? Thanks a lot, anonymous person on the telephone.  We were informed that these pants were on sale at the front desk upstairs, for $2. So while other kids got into the pool (some without their rubber pants-don’t think I wasn’t checking), my wife frantically ran to the car to get money to purchase the magical rubber pants.  Meanwhile, all other parents and children are getting in the pool, while my daughter and I sit sadly on the side, watching them have fun.  My wife finally came back with the pants, and started putting them on our daughter, but the instructor chose that moment to start an introductory song with each child’s name.  So of course the group of 8 kids and their parents get to us when my daughter is topless and changing back into her swimsuit (if any of you infant boys are reading these, I can assure you I will be speaking to you if you didn’t avert your eyes from her nakedness).