So begins the song Spotify chooses for me after it comes to the end of the album I'd chosen and as I am emerging from the overgrown forest path and looking back to see the sun has finally emerged above the smoke on the lake.
That's a little too on the nose, Spotify. If you're really following me that doggedly you ought to act more nonchalant.
The album that was my choice — the soundtrack for my sunrise walk/run — was "New Morning." I'd picked it because as I drove up there was a "rabbit runnin’ down across the road" — as Bob sings in the title song. Yes, Bob, like Chuck Schumer, drops his G's.I got back home and assembled my coffee-and-peanut-butter breakfast and then got a late start blogging because I became quite involved testing whether Grok would replicate my hypothesis about the progression of songs on the "New Morning" album. Seriously, I'm not going to bother you, the blog reader, with the details of my hypothesis about the alternating 5 themes. I'll just say I was surprised that Grok found "One More Weekend" to be "possibly... sinister." Oh, really?! We — Grok and I — got fixated on the first line "Slippin' and slidin' like a weasel on the run." Grok:
Vulture asks "But, well, was Keith Moon’s kit explosion considered too much?" I think the answer is yes.
Roger Daltrey is 81 years old.
UPDATE: "Zak Starkey reinstated as The Who’s drummer, days after departure" (The Guardian). A quote from Pete Townshend: "Roger and I would like Zak to tighten up his latest evolved drumming style to accommodate our non-orchestral line up and he has readily agreed. I take responsibility for some of the confusion."
Do they let you take your old knee home with you after a replacement? I'm picturing Pete Townshend's knee in a glass case at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame labeled with some riff on "hope I die before I get old." It would be like those relics of saints you might see in an old cathedral. I'm not Catholic, but I've wondered about the inconsistency with the visualization of Judgment Day of bodies rising up out of graves — as depicted in the "Last Judgment" mural in the Sistine Chapel.
Isn't this why some people don't want to donate their organs — they think they might need them in the afterlife? Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if failing to check the organ-donor box on your driver's license turned out to be the shortcoming that barred you from heaven?
"I think the people who banned it were intelligent people. They were just being protective. I don’t think it was because they felt it would create a revolution. It wasn’t about politics. There were no musicians or artists speaking about politics. There was nobody suggesting who you vote for. It was considered to be passé to even have a political stance then."
"... a trumpet, camera lenses, an upright piano, paints, a metronome, a clay maquette, a wooden anatomical reference model, vinyl albums, a framed photo, and most disturbingly (because they suggest destructive violence against children's toys, and against the child in all of us) a ceramic Angry Birds figure and a stack of rubber emoji balls" (from rogerebert.com):
"The average life expectancy is 83 and with a bit of luck I’ll make that, but we need someone else to drive things. I’m not leaving [Teenage Cancer Trust] — I’ve been a patron since I first met the charity’s founders.... more than 30 years ago — and that will continue, but I’ll be working in the back room, talking to government, rattling cages."
I've loved The Who since before they released their first album in the United States, but there's always somebody hearing about them for the first time:
"When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with 'The Magic Flute.'... That’s why I find it more profitable to think about 'Tommy' not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala. That person would of course be [Pete] Townshend, who... recently told The Times that 'Tommy' is probably 'a memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.'... [H]is abuse, he said, was at the hands of his 'awful' grandmother, not his 'neglectful and careless' parents.... 'Sickness will surely take the mind/Where minds can’t usually go'.... [Townshend's] avatar... finds that 'freedom lies in normality.' This is the opposite of rock’s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem 'Listening to You' is not a crowd of admirers but his mother. [The new Broadway] production does not traffic in such subtleties.... You will be overwhelmed.... [W]hen everything’s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special."
Green makes his points really well. I'm just going to pick one nit — with the headline. In pinball, you don't "go full tilt." "Tilt" ends the game. The "tilt" in "go full tilt" is the tilting in jousting. You're on a horse, aiming a lance, riding quickly toward another horseman with a lance. That's the concrete thing in the dying metaphor. You may remember Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie. And I concede that there was a pinball video game in the 90s called Full Tilt! Pinball. That's got nothing to do with Tommy, which is not about video games.
But then the show, as Green tells it, is out of whack and, in overdoing everything, misses the chance to tell a story consistent with Townshend's recent revelations.
"'They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!' she said. 'And it smelled!' She recalled that [Ken] Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. 'That’s fine with me!' she added brightly.
Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. 'Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,' he said. 'Let’s just do it again!'
For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. 'My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,' he said."
Q: “Are you planning on traveling to East Palestine?”
BIDEN: “At this moment not. I was, I did a whole video, I mean, uh, you know, the uh, what the Hell? On Zoom. All I can hear every time I think of Zoom is that song of my generation, 'Who's Zoomin' Who?'” pic.twitter.com/tFo4zHhEkk
"Who's Zoomin' Who" came out in 1985, so it's a bit funny for Biden to say it's a song of "my generation." Even "My Generation" — which came out 20 years before "Who's Zoomin' Who" — was not a song of Biden's generation!
"... lurking far below.
One Japanese public figure of sorts, a cheeky mascot named Chiitan, went so far as to essentially say, 'C’est moi.' 'An iron ball about 1.5 meters in size, found in Shizuoka,' the mascot’s handlers wrote on Twitter. 'It could be me.'"
On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove... the prototype haptic glove uses principles from soft robotics and employs pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are essentially tiny motors that can create the sensation of pressure and, hence, touch. The idea here is that if Meta could fit thousands of these actuators onto a haptic glove and combine those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses, which project digital images onto the real world, the wearer could reach out and feel virtual objects. With gloves like these, you might one day shake the hand of someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the squeeze.
Okay, everyone just thought about sex. We're not going to all this trouble to shake hands (or are you one of those sick freaks who get pleasure from crushing a hand offered to you for an innocent shake?).
Here's a vision of Metaverse, felt with a glove:
My go-to rock music reference was The Who, but I must acknowledge the obvious 2 runners-up:
What kind of word is that? I'll withhold my reason for asking about it for now. Don't want to spoil any current puzzles, but I thought that was too obscure.
A little googling lets me see that its current usage mostly has to do with bridal costumery. Maybe something between a headband and a headdress that somehow doesn't seem like a tiara?
But it made me think of "headcase" and "thinkpiece."
One of the definitions of "headpiece" in the OED — and there are 8 — is "The head or brain considered as the seat of mental activity; intellect, brains, sense. colloquial in later use."
It's in the 1740 novel "Pamela": "You have an excellent Head-piece for your Years." And I like this dialog from "Jazz" (2003 J. Murray): "She has brains, I swear, nearly as big as my own"/"Some headpiece that must be. I wonder what you two great minds choose to talk about?"
Ha ha. I like it. I'm going to try to remember to use "headpiece" like that. You can also use "headpiece" to mean "A clever or intellectual person." Example: "Of all the head-pieces that were there, he was thought to give the strongest reasons" (1657 T. Burton Diary).
By the way, "headcase" is in the OED. Defintion: "A person whose behaviour is violent and unpredictable, or markedly eccentric; (often hyperbolically) such a person characterized as mentally ill or unstable." The first observed us is in the 1965 movie "Flight of Phoenix": "They ain't gonna let no head-case run a drilling operation." I love the trailer:
And, remember, “Tommy” ends with a prayer. A secular prayer to the universe celebrating the spirit of life, the value of suffering, the transformation of suffering into joy. And it’s a death, a hopeful transformation. I wish I were in Tommy’s shoes, in a joyful moment of waking up one day and disappearing into dust. I’m not quite there, and I don’t know whether I will get there. I’ve been waiting, and I’m pushing 75....
A hopeful transformation is what I wish for at the end of my life. I would be comfortable with wherever it was. Whether it would be turning to dust or falling into the hands of astral angels or finding myself at the gates of heaven and being turned away.
The last song in "Tommy" — what Townshend is calling a "secular prayer" — is "See Me, Feel Me." Lyrics here. I don't know that I ever thought of that song as Tommy's death. I've seen the movie "Tommy" and I don't remember how the ending was visualized. It's interesting to hear Townshend talking about it like that now.
It's fascinating to think of being comfortable with finding yourself "at the gates of heaven and being turned away." Perhaps just to know that there is a heaven even if it's not for you.
"Then I saw Pete come up — I’m not sure whether he hit Abbie Hoffman with the guitar, I think he pretended to hit him. Pete yelled, 'Do it again and I’ll kill you.' He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar. And Pete was never tried for murder, so I gather he didn’t actually do it. It was a kind of a stunt move.... Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home."
There's no film footage of Abbie Hoffman barging onto the stage with The Who (who were famously terrible at Woodstock, playing at 5 in the morning), and the NYT tells us Hoffman said "that the focus shouldn’t be on music, but on the MC5 manager John Sinclair, who was in prison on a minor marijuana charge." But there is a sound recording, and it's possible to give a verbatim quote. I'll transcribe for you: "I think it's a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison." That's as far as Hoffman gets, before Pete Townshend does whatever he does, and the big crowd cheers.
Here's what Hoffman wrote about it in his autobiography:
The nation's best and toughest reporters have his number and want nothing more than to take his measure and knock him down.... The love bubble surrounding O'Rourke is leaking. To his would-be Democratic rivals, he's no longer the scrappy, truth-telling, unifying underdog. He is now an upstart who threatens what they have spent years coveting. He is coming after what they think they deserve and he hasn't earned. And right now, there are smart operatives with deep media contacts from several campaigns who are talking smack to anyone who will listen.
Imagine this: A 46-year-old former congresswoman and mother of three, who just lost a Senate bid to one of the most despised incumbents, sets off on a road trip adventure to clear her head. She instagrams part of her trip to the dentist. She gives a two-hour interview to The Washington Post where she shows no real knowledge of policy. Like a first-year college student, she pontificates on whether the Constitution is still a thing that matters after all these many years. And then she writes a stream of consciousness diary entry, where she is all in her sad and confused feelings, over ... something...
And Jack Kerouac-style, he roams around, jobless (does he not need a job?) to find himself and figure out if he wants to lead the free world. This is a luxury no woman or even minority in politics could ever have. But O'Rourke, tall, handsome, white and male, has this latitude, to be and do anything. His privilege even allows him to turn a loss to the most despised candidate of the cycle into a launching pad for a White House run. Stacey Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer, couldn't do this.....
I watched this video before absorbing the message that it's not an ad by Beto himself but by "Draft Beto, a group of Democratic activists urging former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) to run for president." My reaction? I love the song ("Baba O'Riley"), but I doubt if the group got The Who's permission to use it, and it comes across as very "white male," so maybe it's subversively trying to wreck his chances. See #2, above.
1. Why are you calling this "The Lily"? It's so white.
2. What's with "elevates"? Are you suggesting that you are making stories about women more uplifting or that it's a way of giving affirmative action to stories about women? They're not really such important stories, and they'd be lost on the regular WaPo front page, so you've got to give them a separate place where they can have some stature. Put them on a pedestal.
3. "Stories from... Lily" — it sounds so babyish! Like a little girl chattering about what's important to her. Let women tell their stories. (That's a refrain of the #MeToo movement, by the way.) Let women talk. Over there, where it's not annoying the regular readers.
5. Yeah, I'm old. I see "Stories from The Lily" and think of "Pictures of Lily" — a 1967 recording. But that means I'm old enough to have read the newspaper when it had a section that was frankly and openly called "the women's pages." "Give me the women's section," the wife might say as the man took the front section with all the hard news. Give the wife the easy non-news. I'd be saying, back then, "Give me the comics." It's all mixed together now.
Just a song on my mind after Meade used the word "instigator."
According to the OED — which, have I ever told you?, is unlinkable — the word goes back to 1598:
1598 J. Florio Worlde of Wordes Instigatore, an egger on, a prouoker, a pricker forward, an instigater.
A pricker forward. I love that!
I feel as though I've blogged about that song before, but I can't find where.
Here's an alternative video, showing the band playing. Here are the lyrics. It's one of the great "revolution" songs of a half century ago. Like the more famous Beatles song "Revolution," it wears its confusion about revolution openly:
Hand out the holy spirits
We got to remake all our life
Hand out the arms and ammo
We're going to blast our way through here
Because the moment will arrive, and you know its right
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
In 1969, Pete Townshend, The Who's guitarist, was the catalyst behind the formation of the band. The concept was to create a band to perform songs written by drummer and singer Speedy Keen, who had written "Armenia City in the Sky", the first track on The Who Sell Out. Townshend recruited jazz pianist Andy 'Thunderclap' Newman (a friend from art college), and 15-year-old Glaswegian guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who subsequently played lead guitar in Paul McCartney's Wings from 1974 to 1977 and died of a heroin overdose in 1979 aged just 26. Keen played the drums and sang the lead [and wrote the song].
"Something in the Air" would have been called "Revolution" if The Beatles hadn't made its use confusing. But there is another song called "Something in the Air," one of David Bowie's lesser known efforts (but 2 movies, "American Psycho" and "Memento").
Now, I'm guessing that what you're wondering is what was "Armenia City in the Sky." So here you are:
"If you're troubled and you can't relax... If the rumors floating in your head all turn to facts...."
The lineup on the last day: Ravi Shankar, The Blues Project, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Group With No Name, Buffalo Springfield (with David Crosby), The Who, Grateful Dead, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Scott McKenzie, The Mamas & the Papas.
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