Jesus is coming! Look busy!
I love the Batgirl and how Summer brought back the Harley Quinn I miss.
My neighbor Niko painting some “happy trees” at the Apple Gym.
I finally did a good costume for the first time in years. Why the doll? Somara didn’t want to be Tennille.
In case you need reference to my costume.
Photo from http://www.glidemagazine.com/121974/steve-martin-steep-canyon-rangers-long-center-austin-tx-72914-show-reviewphotos/
To kick off November’s digging out, here’s the concert I attended on my birthday celebrate turning 46. One of my favorite comedians as a child performing banjo-driven music because he can without worrying about paying his mortgage. Steve’s quite good too. I own all three studio albums which contain awesome contributions from Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton and Rodney Crowell. He also elevated my awareness of the Steep Canyon Rangers who are permanently on my radar.
Being a Steve Martin concert, there were numerous jokes: accidentally reading a song from the setlist on his iPad as a “Candy Crush Level #12,” what a big movie star he is, how every band needs a drummer if they want to score pot, thanking everyone for catching the last show at this year’s SXSW, etc. I’m glad Steve still has it despite making crap movies.
The coolest surprise was Paul Simon joining Edie (his wife) on stage to do a couple tunes, a Loretta Lynn/George Jones duet and “Waltz Across Texas.” Joking aside, Steve is a generous performer, letting the Rangers do their thing.
Although they didn’t cover “King Tut,” they did play a new song not on any album but the current live one, “Pretty Little One.” Steve’s introduction was the best. “You know, when I see bands I love and they announce how they want to play a new song, I say, please don’t, stick with your hits.”
Should you get a chance to see Steve Martin with or without the Steep Canyon Rangers, I highly recommend it. He’s worth every penny.
Car Talk was one of the weirdest shows on NPR. Personally, I thought it was incredibly stupid when I first caught wind of it as I was gradually becoming a stronger fan of public radio in the Nineties. The program shared the same idiocy as numerous advice shows preceding it and it was a category my broadcasting professor Dr. Grams ridiculed.
I used to joke with a friend who worked at the NPR affiliate based in Illinois State during their pledge drives, “How much do I need to donate to get Car Talk dropped?”
The Sixty Minutes piece featuring Tom and his younger brother Ray made me do a 180 when I learned the brothers were real car mechanics and MIT graduates. With my apprehension addressed, I stopped dreading their show. I didn’t go out of the way to listen but at least I wasn’t in a hurry to change the station, especially if they were near the “Stump the Chump” segment. The brothers’ success rate was pretty impressive for a call-in program.
Thanks Tom and even though Cars is one of my least favorite Pixar flicks, I’m grateful they create a part for you and Ray.
Our cats would agree, especially when it comes to wearing costumes.
We’re off to the home stretch of 2014 because in America, the Holiday Season gets kicked off with Halloween followed by Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Interspersed in between are the other so-called good movies. The Summer sucked, I’m hoping the Winter run will be better and I think it is on deck: The Hobbit 3, Hero 6, Dumb and Dumber To, hmm, all numbered titles?
I’m also hoping I will get the chance to catch up on all the stories I’ve let sit and fester, namely concerts, brushes with greatness, movies and book reviews. I actually read about a half dozen this year!
This month’s header is a remembrance of two Novembers separated by a decade yet they had a common thread.
Despite the Iranian hostage crisis kicking off a earlier, Pink Floyd released its long-awaited successor to Dark Side of the Moon, a more personal, pseudo-biographical double album. The Wall doesn’t have much to do with politics or the Cold War, to me it’s about an internal struggle over familial issues, a failing relationship and the wall the “narrator” has put around himself. It’s the last attempt at a mainstream Rock Opera until Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime. I scored the most recent re-master in the last couple years; after turning off the radio, it’s nice to get acquainted with what became Pink Floyd’s last truly good album. There are a few pretentious, heavy-handed numbers yet the singles have aged well, namely “Comfortably Number,” “Young Lust,” and “Run Like Hell.” I remembered how much my inept six-grade teacher Ms. Tolan hated “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” or the we-don’t-need-no-education song.
The bigger, more earth-shattering anniversary is right on the heels of America’s pointless mid-term elections; the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. Get ready for Reagan flacks like the clueless Peggy “Riefenstahl” Noonan and Grover Norquist to bloviate about how the doddering old B-moive star singlehandedly achieved this impossible feat. Nevermind how many times he nearly brought nuclear war upon the planet. Nevermind the efforts of seven previous US presidents, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policies, Brezhnev’s stagnation, internal dissent through Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and the American taxpayers. They’ll probably include Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II though; one was just an English dictator and the other a useless figurehead turning a blind eye to other internal problems.
Contrary to the lies Republicans, Teabaggers, Randroids at Reason and the Conservative ilk in America, Liberals were never fans of the Berlin Wall and the forces behind it. The cursed thing was built to stop/slow the brain drain East Germany was experiencing in the Sixties. It wasn’t completely effective which should be an adequate warning to the morons demanding one between the US and Mexico. The virtual wall to keep West African travel out is another fear-mongering idiot cry by a cynical and/or ignorant opposition.
Even in 1989, I learned that the Soviet collapse was not a matter of “if” but a “when.” During my first senior semester, I was finally enrolled in the upper-division Philosophy course I wanted to take…Marx and Marxism. From day one, Dr. Smith told everyone how the class would focus on Karl Marx the philosopher and his era. No coverage on his legacy, aka his distantly removed disciples Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, etc. I figured I had an advantage here because I tended to have good grades in History. Anyway, Dr. Smith was well aware of the news happening outside academia and he said the events weren’t too surprising to him, he stated the Warsaw Pact nations had been (financially) broke around the mid-Seventies. They needed an injection of capital. Probably what Gorbachev was pursuing through the new policy of “openness.”
Personally I found the wall-smashing in Berlin worrisome. The Soviets had been “invited” before when Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland stepped out of line. Then more dominoes began to fall in other nations. Some transitioned peacefully like Germany, Romania didn’t go well. How patient were these millions of Eastern Europeans going to be? The West’s prosperity wasn’t an overnight success. It was pretty common for a formerly oppressed group to eventually turn against itself when it doesn’t get the desired result. The Soviets were brutal yet they were predictable and they had a better handle on where their nuclear arsenal was kept.
I’m glad it worked out for the former satellites. Russia and the ex-republics are a mixed bag. This whole mess in Ukraine demonstrates how we continue to pay for the mistrust ratcheted up by St. Reagan.
I just have a weakness for “talking” cats a la Babe.
Despite the annoying yet infectious ©Rap music accompanying this (then again, so is small pox and I don’t want it), someone with too much time on their hands figured out how many people kissed it in the only good Star Wars trilogy. They should’ve thrown in the number of Wilhem Screams were used too.
As I recently experienced, you still can learn from mistakes and failure, or at least we used to in America. The ignoramuses who continue to poo poo space travel/exploration will try to exploit this forgetting how often our attempts in the Fifties and Sixties had difficulty. Numerous technologies had serious hiccups until we got it right. Hell, we continue to piss away billions on the Osprey hybrid plane-helicopter that hasn’t worked reliably enough to be deployed. This exercise in futility has been happening since the Seventies.
It just comes to mind because recently I heard a co-worker shoot off his ignorant mouth about how much money NASA spends. I explained to him, it’s a pittance. For every dollar you give to the Feds, half of a penny goes to NASA.
Anyhow, the other burning question I have with Antares, why did they launch from Virginia? Florida is the best spot to maximize the Earth’s rotation into assisting the rocket into making a decent orbital altitude.
This friend I haven’t really talked much about since I barely hear from him. I do miss him and it’s not due to the debt of gratitude I owe him over many things. It’s also not us meeting over 25 years ago at Marquette. It’s all the good times we did have.
Overall Doc is a good person. The women in my life tend to keep their distance because they find him too bossy. Maybe he’s the person who got me to calm down and transform into the “empathic” type I’ve gradually evolved into. Don’t laugh, I still have my off, grumpy, jerk days like everyone else. I’m just no longer the “my way or the highway” jackass I feel like I had been in my youth.
I checked out whatever was going on his Facebook page. Nothing for over three years. Plus it reminded me that his son with Masami is over three nowadays. I wish I received the advanced memo so I could’ve begged him not to name the little guy Nicholas. Numerous kids in my life have this name, it gets confusing!
Well, I hope he has a nice day and things in Knoxville are going successfully. Maybe I’ll hear from him soon to wish him happy birthday via audio.
Update: Writing about all these famous Italians is such an educational experience for me and I’m pretty stoked to share my findings with you all. Please post requests if you have any. I was going to enlist José’s assistance on the famous opera composers but we ran out of time after the game. Plus his awesome beer made me tired. I did receive a cool thank you last week from Dr. Terenzi too. Now, on to writing about more Italians who prove there’s more to us than the usual stereotypes.
Shi Yan Fan is the first Westerner to become an ordained Shaolin monk. I think ordained is a Western term that is the closest to our understanding in this Buddhist faction’s operation. Much like how Christian terminology is used to explain Islam which is pretty inaccurate.
Either way, this gentleman is the real Caine of Kung Fu, one of the best Western TV shows because it turned the waning genre on its side so his story intrigued me. There’s a good piece from the LA Weekly here.
I’ll give a quick summary via all the other pieces I researched, should you not feel like reading the link.
He was born Franco Testini in Brindisi, Italy. Franco’s father had been a boxer and hoped the boy would follow. Legend has it, he found an illustrated book on Kung Fu moves. The techniques intrigued him and he incorporated them into his own fighting style. Due to his family being poor, Franco often got into fights with other children to earn money. When he got older, a cousin introduced him to a Korean monk training US soldiers at a nearby military base. He continued to be an apt pupil. As he grew into a young adult, he earned numerous martial arts titles.
Eventually Franco grew angry over what he saw was the futility of fighting for money and/or worthless prestige. He left it all behind to join a monastery in South Korea. After a short hiatus to see his dying father, he moved to LA after the 1994 earthquake to practice Shaolin medicine and Buddhism.
A decade passed resulting in Franco building a small following of students, fans, etc. By then he chose to pay his respects to Shi Yongxin at the temple in China. The abbot was so impressed by Franco’s dedication that the old master renamed Franco Shi Yan Fan, Chinese for “Powerful Sky,” and granted permission to open a Shaolin temple in LA. Three years later, the Chinese government invited Shi Yan Fan back to participate in a ritual various regimes kept banned for three centuries, the Jieba. Again, it appears to be the equivalent of Christian ordaining to this Buddhist faction and Franco/Shi Yan Fan became the first Westerner to ever complete the ritual. Shi Yongxin chose Shi Yan Fan to demonstrate how Buddhism isn’t a matter of race, it’s conviction.
Today Shi Yan Fan continues to oversee the Shaolin Temple in LA. Its location on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks was intentional. Ventura is Italian for adventure which is how he sees his life.
These are well-deserved tickets to be issued around my adopted home, especially wherever the Technorati gather (Hipsters usually ride bikes if I have my stereotypes right). I love the Website but it has been rather quiet for the last three years. Maybe I can help ’em out. I issued one on an SUV near Alamo a couple weeks ago. A lazy elderly woman got away from my local credit union as she entered her Mercedes Benz station wagon…which was straddled across two spots. What an asshole. I’m wondering where were her Abbott for Governor, Patrick for Lt. Governor and Bush for whatever stepping stone JEB’s inept hooligan son is running for.
As for me? I may not be great at driving or parking but I am a conscientious parker.
Certainly better than that boring movie Monster House. I can’t recall if I finished watching it or did I fall asleep.
This bassist/singer was a key part of my Classic Rock education via KLOL from 1982-4. Until I had moved to Houston, I never heard of Cream. Eric Clapton certainly, through his solo stuff in the Seventies. I never knew Slowhand was a mere member in an act a hundred times better. Please, the guy’s career is built on covers and schlock. “Tears in Heaven” is sincere but it gives me diabetes.
Jack was really the voice in Cream. What went wrong happened when they came to America and label wanted to make Clapton the frontman. That was the gist in the Classic Albums episode covering Disraeli Gears.
Anyway, I want to remember the cool things I remember, namely Jack’s vocals on “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” and “The White Room.” His tune “Swlbr” made me chuckle the first time I heard it too. The title is misleading, it’s the song with the lyrics “but the rainbow has a beard.”
Farewell Jack. Thanks for proving not all Hippie Psychedelic Rock didn’t all suck despite Cream ushering in the era of arena-based shows.
To celebrate this milestone, we’re going sit where the couch in the newly owned section!
