Outkast - Hey Ya! (Official HD Video)

This video is really a high water mark for both video and music. I've been to whole cities that didn't have this much life in them. Twenty years ago I had a one hour per week radio show in mountainous, small town, northern Thailand. It was called English by Songs. Most of my song list was chosen for a certain combination of musical quality, clarity of the English, and a story that was easy to follow. I played Ray Charles' Unchain my Heart; I played Lulu's To Sir With Love. One week I told my listeners that I had a special treat for them. I just said, this is what great American music sounds like...I told them not to worry if they couldn't follow the story, just see what it feels like. And I played this. I had that show for about a year, and it was funny. At first, people didn't admit that they listened. After about six months, people started to admit that "at first, I didn't like the music that you played. But now, I like it." This is Asia, don't forget. Most of the locals had to be taught how to swing.

Peter Laughner - Cinderella Backstreet

Ohio, and in particular Cleveland, was like an explosive star-nursery in the 1970s. This generation digested the music of the 60s, and out came a rush of originality and talent that glowed and vibrated in new ways. Peter, certainly, Rocket from the Tomb, Devo, Pere Ubu. Stretch the web a bit and you get Destroy All Monsters. Any local aficionado could expand my little list. Maybe it was something in the water. It was flammable, after all.

Fun fact: all through the 1970s, Ohio was the country's biggest market for Krautrock import LPs. Plus the few German bands that had American releases. Think Kraftwork in, I believe, 1974. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Been A While

 Alert the media! Blogger found alive!

An apology would be polite, but I'm not inclined to offer one. The nature of time itself takes on different aspects as one moves through the stages of life. It's one of those things that overtake us without reference to our desires. 

I came across a fragment of a poem used as the heading of a chapter in a nice book that I'm in the middle of. It hit me as illuminating a bizarre epiphany-like experience that I had last year. My two sons, both good men by all accounts, are now officially in middle age, which means that the experiences of their lives are beginning to take on new aspects for them as well. My oldest contacts me by the Line app or e-mail about one time per year; my youngster, much less frequently. I had always been proud of them, and I had a firm belief that I had been an okay father. It seems that even that estimation may have been overly optimistic.  

I know that poetry is avoided by more clever bloggers, being the boring literary equivalent of someone talking about their dreams. But here's the fragment: 

Poem title: A German Requiem, by James Fenton, an Englishman

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.

It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses. 

It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. 

It is not your memories which haunt you. 

(It continues...) 

It is not what you have written down. 

It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. 

This was quite a kick in the chest for me. What I realized last year, thanks to my son's concise prompting, was that I was living in a dream world. I was nothing like the middling and kind of okay dad and husband that I had considered myself to have been. 

I had forced myself to remember only what I had built, ignoring what I had knocked down. I was concentrating on the houses, when I would have done better to pay more attention to the spaces in between the houses. 

I was considering only my memories, even though I am quite familiar with my survival technique of enforcing a strict policy of forgetting many of the things that had happened to me and, I'm afraid, many of the things that I had done. 

Porco dio, how I hate being old. No surprise though. I also hated being a boy, being an adolescent, being a young man, being a grown up, being middle aged, and everything in between. I was a baby that failed to thrive, but lacked the dignity to die.