Have you found what you're looking for?

Ambient U2 at sunrise as the fog clears on the frosty first morning of Standard Time:

ADDED: I don't know how casual or ritualistic these ablutions were, but let this photo stand for the proposition that the weather was frosty:

Whole Foods is watching me.

Yesterday, as I was browsing amongst the fruits and vegetables, a voice came over the loudspeaker saying we should check our shopping carts for the sunglasses somebody had, apparently, lost. I heard it, thought about it, but assumed I knew what was in my shopping cart and continued on my way.

Over by the cheeses, as I was standing about 15 feet from my cart, I thought I heard someone call my name, "Ann... Ann..." I glance over and see no one I know and assume, as I've assumed since I was a first grader, that when the syllable that happens to be my name is heard, it's probably not an effort to get my attention.

I've got 11 TikToks for you tonight, and it's quite possible you will love them all.

1. Detailed calligraphic artwork.

2. Gifting the Italian husband with Italian snack foods. 

3. How to style your hair. (For men with hair.)

4. "Going for a hoon in the Austrian Alps." (I had to look up "hoon.")

5. Now that's a wetsuit.

6. Crossing a difficult footbridge with a goat. 

7. "She's a rat girl, and you just fell in love."

8. A funny use of "Jump Around" (with a red scarf and a freckly horse).

9. "Are there dating sites out there for people that just don't...."

10. "... a new attitude towards life...."

11. The kid that just wanted to hear the same three U2 songs over and over in the car.

"I’ve had conversations with Bono back in the day... He said that when U2 makes a record, it’s like they’ve got a racehorse..."

"... and they don’t just want the horse in the race, they want to win the race. I said we race the horse and then we let the horse run free. I wasn’t trying to be clever. That was the truth. He was frustrated with me. But the dream was to be in a group that toured and recorded, and we were OK with things being scaled down if that allowed the dream to survive."

Said Eddie Vedder, quoted in "Eddie Vedder Is Still Learning to Live With Loss" (NYT).

"That is very bourgeois for such a dedicated leftist. Glad he got stuffed by his own side. I always laugh when liberals get caught in their own traps."

That's one of the comments on "'He's finished!' U2 guitarist The Edge's dreams of building $100million family compound on an untouched Malibu mountainside are shattered after he loses a 14-YEAR legal battle"   (at the The Daily Mail). He spent $9 million for the land and $10 million for the litigation.

The top-rated comment: "U2 the hypocritical band They put their money offshore to evade Ireland taxes. Fly separately in private jets, each have a limosine back stage, then the band walk out and tell fans global warming is bad and preach for 10 minutes. Glad this environment was protected from another U2 hypocrite."

The rejected plan was to build 5 houses, which he called "Leaves in the Wind" to convey the message that these things — bigger than 12,000 square feet each — would barely be noticed. Later, the houses were scaled back to the 9,000-square-foot range.

The quote "He's finished!" comes from a Sierra Club lawyer.

"One of the more overlooked Turtle records and probably my favorite...."

That's Flo & Eddie (in 1975), who were in The Turtles in 1969 when "You Showed Me" was a hit. The song was written in 1964 by Gene Clark and Jim (Roger) McGuinn, before they were Byrds. I've embedded a live version because there's real film (and I thought you might be horrified by the Jim Morrison imitation that happens at the beginning). But here's the studio version, the 1969 hit that's so beautiful. Here's The Byrds' version. I love The Byrds, but The Turtles are better on this one. The Byrds version is annoyingly fast, but that's the original idea, and the slowed down version only happened because The Turtles learned the song from a guy who had to play slowly because his harmonium was malfunctioning. It's not as though they didn't know it was meant to be fast. It was better slow.

I learned that reading Wikipedia, which says it was sampled on "The Playboy Mansion" (U2) in 1997 and in 1989 on "Transmitting Live From Mars " (De La Soul). The Turtles sued De La Soul for using the music without permission. Here's the "trip hop" version by The Lightning Seeds from 1996 (very similar to The Turtles). Here's Lutricia McNeal in 2002. Kanye West used it in 2010 in his song "Gorgeous." And here's Salt 'n' Pepa in 1990:

"And thats why i post infrequently. Unless it is about Van Morrison."

Wrote D in the comments to the post about Stephen Colbert's lame effort to back out of his "cock holster" remark. D says:

I visit this blog everyday for the reasons espoused by many others already re: how the hostess find/pulls alot of interesting takes on the day's news articles. You can then find interesting tangents / new knowledge / stuff added by the many many commentators. Many with varied skills and knowledge bases whatever their political leans. Today, one of the posts has to do with a crazy scottish surfer. Comments then pulled towards using drones in search and rescue to reduce costs. And latest on towing insurance etc Ok that isnt everyones cup of tea, but that post will (i estimate) get 1/8 of this post And this post is about some guy and another guy who get paid lots o money to act in front of cameras, and they are riffing off what one guy said, a few nights ago, to show he's edgy. They are not capable of running search amd rescue operations. If people stop paying attention - including the # of comments on a top blog - hmm maybe the edgy guy becomes less important in the grand scheme of things. Might not get gigs in front of congress The posts today - the congress vote, the surfer, the army photographer, and the immigration post esp. - those posts deserve more comments than this fluff. IMHO. And thats why i post infrequently. Unless it is about Van Morrison.

Have I blogged about Van Morrison?! I guess I have. There was the time, back in December 2008, when I took some photographs in the snowy, foggy cemetery...



...  and the car radio just happened to be playing Van Morrison rendition of the old song "That's Life." (And the time I referred back to that old post.) And I've talked about the recording "Gloria" a few times:

1.  Way back in March 2004, before the posts had titles:

"How U2 became the most hated band in America."

U2's Songs of Innocence "was released as part of Apple’s keynote event, dished out to iTunes subscribers for free."

The album reportedly cost Apple $100 million, a figure the company is likely to eat. Rather than generating the kind of hype Apple is accustomed to, Songs of Innocence generated a huge Twitter backlash, with the company posting a guide on how to remove the album from your library on its support page. Most damningly, Wired’s Vijith Assar called the “devious giveaway” no better than “spam.”

Actually, he said it was "Even Worse Than Spam."

"Artist found burned to death on top of his masterpiece."

"Artist Jorge Selaron may have taken his own life by setting himself on fire on the very steps of his masterpiece, a brilliantly colored public staircase that became a symbol of Rio de Janeiro..."

The stairs, his life's work, were declared city patrimony in 2005, when Selaron was made an honorary carioca, as Rio residents are called. The steps have been featured in Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful" and U2's "Walk On" music videos, as well as part of the video that Brazil made for their 2016 Olympic bid.

Here's the Snoop Dogg video. Here's the U2.

"Poetry, not special effects, is the engine that drives lyric theater, and 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' is as unpoetic as you can get."

"[The] book is flabby and witless. The score, by U2's Bono and The Edge, sounds like a double album of B-sides ("Don't think about tomorrow / We've only got today"). Not only are the songs forgettable, but they never succeed in generating any dramatic momentum—all they do is get louder."

Says Terry Teachout, observing that "no stage show, even a multimillion-dollar extravaganza, can offer anything remotely as believable-looking as the digitally generated magic that moviegoers have been taking for granted for the past couple of decades."

Why see a stage show, when there are movies? The makers of stage shows need to have an answer to that. And it really should be a better answer than: this combination of glitz and familiar names will trick the rubes into handing over their money.

I'm nostalgic for Muzak.

You could ignore it. It was designed to fade into the background, and we used to scoff at it for precisely that reason. Now, I have to listen to the urgent yearnings of pop singers oozing from tinny ceiling speakers wherever I go. Even stuff that should be good — I've heard U2's "With Or Without You" twice in 2 days — sounds cheesy and insincere when piped into a restaurant or lobby. What are these decontextualized problems the singers are going on about? What does this person's troubled relationship have to do with my scrambled eggs?

Why is The Beatles' "Revolver" the Vatican's idea of the best record album of all time?

Because of the priest and the church in "Eleanor Rigby"? No. Looking at what else they came up with...

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon, Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, whose “illuminating simplicity and musical thrust” they hail. Also: U2’s Achtung Baby, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan fame’s The Nightfly, Carlos Santana’s Supernatural, Paul Simon’s Graceland and David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name.

... I'm guessing they're just Baby Boomers like me.

There's no Bob Dylan though. He's okay himself, but he "harshly tested the ears and patience of listeners with their inferior imitations, thinking that their tortured meanderings might interest somebody." Ha ha. Religious opinions.

Grotesque faces are highly favored by the very rich.

Click here to see the paintings that brought the highest prices.

A 1967 portrait ["Study for Head of George Dyer,"] by Francis Bacon fetched $27.4 million at Sotheby's here on Tuesday night...

... "Untitled (Pecho/Oreja)," a 1982-83 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat... acquired by members of the band U2 in 1989... sold for $10.1 million....

I'm not knocking these paintings, by the way, just noting that both depict grotesque faces and finding it interesting that people with lots of money enjoy ugliness. I'm always jealous of successful painters — and I painted many grotesque faces in my failed-artist days. Reading articles like this one, I have to fight back the delusion that those millions should be mine.

"Following links is like putting on 3-D glasses."

That's a line from Sarah Boxer's big review of a lot of books about blogs in the February 14 issue of The New York Review of Books.

Oh, we saw "U2 3D" — the IMAX 3D U2 concert film last night. I'm trying to write a post about it, but I got distracted by this book review. I'm more interested in books about blogs than a humongous in-your-face concert film, but I'll just say the technology had one of us seeing double — the technology is not perfect — and me longing for the lush beauty and composition of traditional film. Also I don't really see the point of getting that close to Bono's face. His eyes are all but invisible behind those wraparound glasses — the wraparound 3D glasses curved inward in back and gave me a headache right behind my left ear — and his face is not expressive. He's a great rock and roll frontman because of his whole-body expression, which projects to the whole arena. So get back, get back, and see the whole arena, which did look very deep and real in 3D. Technology... Did you know the kids at concerts these days wave cell phone and camera digital screens around instead of cigarette lighters?

But back to Boxer's review. She's got a book of her own about blogs — an anthology of blog "masterworks" — but she's skeptical about blog books:

Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line.

What's the point of writing or reading a book about blogs? Write a blog or read blogs. What are books doing here?

Boxer has a nice, compressed history of the development of blogging:

When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs—though certainly not all of them—weren't so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds, many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change. The links that had once mattered were the ones you offered on your blog, the so-called outbound links pointing to other sites. Now the links that mattered most—and still do—are those on other blogs pointing toward your blog, the so-called inbound links. Those are the ones that blog-trackers like Technorati count. They are the measure of fame.

Now that fame and links are one and the same, there are bloggers out there who will do practically anything— start rumors, tell lies, pick fights, create fake personas, and post embarrassing videos—to get noticed and linked to. They are, in the parlance of the blogosphere, "link whores." And those who succeed are blog celebrities, or "blogebrities."

She also has this list of words she found on blogs:

anyhoo, bitchitude, fan-fucking-tabulous, hole-esque, nastified, alternapop, coffin-snatching, YouTube-ization, touzing, Daddio, manky, nutters, therapised, Boo-Ya Nation, dildopreneur, dudely, flava, haz-mat, nut sac, sexbot, underwearian, fugly, vomit-y, consciousness-jumped, tear-assed, fetbryo, grapetastically, mommyblogdaciousness, Nero-crazy, Engrish, pidginized, votenfreude, angsty, malgovernment, bejesus, JumboTron, man-dresses, babe-aliciousness, droit de senny.

The squarest old man I've ever known said "anyhoo" a lot. We laughed at him behind his back... in the 1970s.

Boxer has a feeling for what makes blogging bloggy:

Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog.

Yes, blogging must be free. Don't give those bloggers a job. But do send them money! Help them be independent. Place ads and hit the PayPal button.

Let the "fleeting expletives" fly -- says Second Circuit.

The NYT reports:

The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit — Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC — it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.

Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was “doubtful” that the agency would be able to “adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks.”

It all started with Bono:

Beginning with the F.C.C.’s indecency finding in a case against NBC for a vulgarity uttered by the U2 singer Bono during the Golden Globes awards ceremony in 2003, President Bush’s Republican and Democratic appointees to the commission have imposed a tougher policy by punishing any station that broadcast a fleeting expletive....

Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Yeah, stick it to Bush and Cheney.

I love the way the NYT seems enthused about this new liberation in media but still can't print "Go f*ck yourself." (Me neither, but I'm only using the asterisk out of fear of what filters might do to me.)

“We find that the F.C.C.’s new policy regarding ‘fleeting expletives’ fails to provide a reasoned analysis justifying its departure from the agency’s established practice,” said the panel.

So this is not a First Amendment decision, though the majority does say “We question whether the F.C.C.’s indecency test can survive First Amendment scrutiny.” The court is finding fault with the process of developing the new policy. In dissent, Judge Pierre Leval stressed the "the deference courts must give to the reasoning of a duly authorized administrative agency": "The commission’s position is not irrational; it is not arbitrary and capricious.”

The case involved findings that the networks had violated the indecency rules for comments by Cher and Nicole Richie on the Billboard Music Awards, the use of expletives by the character Andy Sipowicz on “NYPD Blue” and a comment on “The Early Show” by a contestant from CBS’s reality show “Survivor.”

So Bono opened the door and now every nitwit celebrity and reality show half-celebrity will be saying "f*ck" on the slightest provocation. The networks say it's up to you to decide what shows to watch, so... good luck figuring out what to let your kids watch.

"The 50 greatest conservative rock songs."

John J. Miller at the National Review has a list. I was surprised to see "Gloria" at number six, and I was starting to think over the lyrics and come up with a theory. Like to tell ya about my baby/You know she comes around/She about five feet four/A-from her head to the ground... Nothing was clicking. Is it the interest in correct spelling? G-L-O-R-I-A. Then I saw it was "Gloria" by U2, a completely different composition. Gloria...in te domine/Gloria...exultate/Oh Lord, if I had anything/Anything at all/I'd give it to you... Quite different. In Van Morrison's song, Gloria was giving it all to him.

Anyway, what does Miller count as conservative:

The lyrics must convey a conservative idea or sentiment, such as skepticism of government or support for traditional values.

Skepticism of government? Surely, that's grasping at a lot of stuff that wasn't meant as conservative. But what the hell? Conservatives can enjoy it. Most mentions of the government in rock songs are skeptical of it. Can you even think of any pro-government rock songs? I mean where it's not sarcasm or the voice of a character you're not supposed to believe.

Well, go read the list. I think in a lot of cases the song leaves room to argue whether the message is actually conservative. Rock song lyrics can be blunt and plain -- when they are about sex, like Van Morrison's "Gloria" -- but they're usually fuzzy and ambiguous when they get to political and social topics -- especially if they're any good. That makes the more of a Rorschach test.

Miller's quite keen on the notion that The Kinks are conservative. (I should say konservative.) I think what he likes to read as conservative is really an artist's aversion to politics -- you know, that thing artists do: standing at a distance, observing, alternating between bemusement and critiquing human character.

"Everyone around the world come on!"

Editor & Publisher found out Condoleezza Rice's musical top ten:

1. Mozart --Piano Concerto in D minor ...

2. Cream -- 'Sunshine of Your Love' ...

3. Aretha Franklin -- 'Respect'

4. Kool and the Gang -- 'Celebration' ...

5. Brahms -- Piano Concerto No 2

6 Brahms -- Piano Quintet in F minor

7. U2 -- Anything ...

8. Elton John -- 'Rocket Man' ...

9. Beethoven -- Symphony No 7 ...

10. Mussorgsky -- Boris Godunov

If you're a big Condi Rice fan and are thinking of putting that in your iPod and listening in that order... well, I think you're going to find it a little annoying.

I'm annoyed by the failure to identify an individual U2 song. If you can pick "Sunshine of Your Love" out of all the acid rock you "loved ... in college," you can pick one U2 song.

I note that "Rocket Man" is about being separated from your loved one for a "long, long time," while stranded in outer space, and "Sunshine of Your Love" is also about being separated from your loved one and "waiting so long" -- also set in an astronomical context ("I'll be with you when the stars start falling").

Finally, "Celebration" is an excellent Secretary of State song: "It's time to come together, it's up to you/What's your pleasure/Everyone around the world come on!" So's "Respect" for that matter: "I'm about to give you all of my money/And all I'm askin' in return, honey..."

"One Life, With Each Other, Sisters, Brothers."

Best line in a song, ever? It was voted so, in a VH1 survey, beating out "So You Go, And You Stand On Your Own, And You Leave On Your Own, And You Go Home, And You Cry, And You Want To Die." Well, it's a hell of a lot cheerier, and since optimistic, hopeful lines -- like "Look At The Stars, Look How They Shine For You" -- are all over the place on this list of 20, I think it's a very impressive showing for The Smiths.

Re "One":

U2 classic One is often played at weddings, but guitarist Edge has in the past said: “It’s not that kind of song”.

The three videos that the band made for the single – depicting everything from the band in drag, Bono singing at a restaurant table, and buffalos running across a plain – shed no light on the meaning of the song either.

I think people especially love song lyrics that they can't quite understand. A few evocative words, sung with passion and style, but just enough out of reach that you can pour your own meaning in -- we love that.

"The first job of a rock 'n' roll band is not to be dull."

Bono pretends to worry that U2 will kick him out of the band.

The Pretenders.

I see the new inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced, and it's nice to see the Pretenders make it, along with others, including the obvious choice, U2.