OneRepublic

So I am a little behind but I just heard this song for the first time today. Like the song, love the string instrumental intro, hate the fact that I can't figure how to post a clickable link on this blog.

Well, if you are willing to copy and paste, you are in for a treat.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHm9MG9xw1o

I don't know where I'm going
But I sure know where I've been
Hanging on the promises
In songs of yesterday
An' I've made up my mind
I ain't wasting no more time
But, here I go again
Here I go again

Tho' I keep searching for an answer
I never seem to find what I'm looking for
Oh Lord, I pray
You give me strength to carry on
Cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

--- Whitesnake

The song opens with Big Synthesizer swelling up mighty like church hymns used to do, instantly tying it to the 1980s, when pants were parachute and hair and music was big.

But for me, every time that I hear that song, I am carried back to the dawn of my teenage years, bittersweet years in between the helplessness of childhood and the burden of being an adult.

And I think about my friend, L. How for some teenage reason we loved this song by Whitesnake and we would sing it at the top of our lungs as late at night we traversed the dark concrete wasteland of the old flightline between the two halves of the Air Force base where we lived.

We were silly and too young to care.

L. died far, far too young.

But I hear this song and I think of him. Always will.

Art Garfunkeled on my lunchbreak

"...I been Mick Jaggered, been silver daggered.
Andy Warhol, won't you please come home?
I been mothered, fathered, aunt and uncled,
Been Roy Halee'd and Art Garfunkeled
I just discovered somebody tapped my phone...”

-- A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission, written by Paul Simon.

I think it was Mae West who said, famously, “Men and women should not live together. They should be neighbors and visit once in a while.”

Perhaps this applies to other relationships as well.

Anyone alive in the 1960s or soon thereafter (my decade!) knows the duo of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

"Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Sounds of Silence" and "Cecilia" are all that you will hear of them today, played on the grocery store PA system. But their body of work was much greater than that. Poets and singers both, they wrote some beautiful, incredibly evocative music ("Old Friends," "America, To Emily, Wherever I May Find Her") as well as some weirdness that could only find a home in the 1960s, such as the song referenced above.

I have been a fan since I was a teenager.

But Simon and Garfunkel just couldn’t seem to stick it out together and they have been together and broken apart a half-dozen times.

On my lunchbreak today, for no apparent reason, on Wikipedia, I checked out Art Garfunkel, the lesser reknowned half of the duo – and I was astounded.

He’s much more than an angst-y aging hippie with a lingering weakness for cannabis.
Of Romanian Jewish heritage, Garfunkel earned a Master’s degree in math but also loves reading.

“His website contains a year-by-year listing of every book he has read since 1968. Currently the list contains more than 1,000 books,” wikipedia says.

“He has also undertaken several cross-continental walks in his lifetime, writing poetry along the way. In the early 1980's, he walked across Japan in a matter of weeks. From 1983 to 1997, Garfunkel walked across America, taking 40 excursions to complete the route from New York City to the Pacific coast of Washington. In May 1998, Garfunkel began an incremented walk across Europe.”

As noted, Garfunkel has been arrested twice for the possession of cannabis: in early 2004 and again in August 2005.

No frenzy here

Double disappointments yesterday:

I went by Barnes and Noble to search for Plutarch's "Moralia." I wanted a hefty, aesthetically-pleasing version, something with gravitas, not the fifty-year-old, paperback, excerpts-only version that I grabbed from some second-hand sale a decade ago. (I hate excerpt books -- let me choose what parts of a great work I want to read, don't decide for me!)

Of course they didn't have it. Never do. I have to special-order every book that I ever want to read.

Sigh.

On the way out, I saw a stack of CDs by some up-and-coming singer. She titles Herself "A Fine Frenzy." The CDs were complimentary. Since Interview Magazine, according to the CD liner, bills Her music as haunting, I was eager to listen to it.

No dice. Wouldn't play in my CD player. Defective disk. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.

9 to 5 hath its blessings

I've never had a 9 to 5 job. My required arrival times have been all over the clock. That has its benefits. I usually miss out on the hellish horror of 9 t0 5 congestion.

It must be so wonderful to lay around in bed until 7 or 8 in the morning, though, and to enjoy that mythical meal called breakfast.

And it appears that 9 to 5 ers, being something of a majority, and therefore an advertiser's bread-and-butter, get another treat: good music on the radio.

I usually have two musical choices for my commute: bring a CD or resign myself to pushing a lot of buttons on the radio before finding anything worth cranking up.

But I had to run an errand today circa 9 a.m. and that's when I discovered what I'm missing. In just ten minutes, not only was I treated to Ozzy's "Going off the Rails on a Crazy Train," but right after that, G N R's "November Rain."

Perhaps it was mere cooincidence, or a dj in tune with my vibe.

Whatever the case, I think I'm going to have a great Friday.

Soundtrack for the Road

It's Monday. Monday sucks. People who like Mondays have serious pyschological problems and should consult a qualified counselor.

But I did enjoy my drive in. Had some great music on the CD player.

Good road music can be gauged by its effect on your speed. And since I pushed 80 mph the whole way, seriously risking a speeding ticket, it should be obvious that my tunes rocked.

Usually Metallica does that for me. Lars and crew are the penultimate gods of metal. Do not listen to Ride The Lightning while passing through a speed trap.

But today I buzzed with another M: Mozart. As in, the Coronation Mass, at least the Gloria and Credo. I'll have to catch the rest of it on the way home.

The fever pitch, the excitement of the voices rising to a crescendo, reminded me of a long-ago music class revelation -- when my high school teacher showed us with a metronome how some classical pieces had a faster beat than what we kids thought were the rocking hot tunes of the day.

To my first college roommate -- a tragic genius who got tangled up in heroin and vanished, never to be found, a great loss to the world -- I owe my second musical revelation, that a person can -- and should -- live to enjoy both rock and great classical music.