Month: August 2011

E is for Ecology

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), written and performed by Marvin Gaye, came out 40 years ago, but sounds like it could have been written 40 minutes ago.

Seriously, I have no energy to ‘debate’ the fact that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it. “The glaciers are melting and are a contributor to sea-level rise,” and “many communities won’t be able to adapt to rapid climate change.” The radical flooding in some parts of the planet and droughts in others are just a couple of reflections of the phenomenon.

The deniers, dangerously to my mind, downplay and distort the evidence of climate change, demand policies that allow industries to continue polluting, and attempt to undercut existing pollution standards.

This site provides over 25 easy steps we can take to not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also reduce air pollution, increase energy independence and save money.

We CAN reduce our ecological footprint.

 

Meanwhile, here’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), written and performed by Marvin Gaye. It came out 40 years ago, but check out the lyrics; it sounds like it could have been written 40 minutes ago. Here’s a cover version by The Strokes, Eddie Vedder & Josh Homme.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Summer Song: Summer in the City

Summer in the City entered the Billboard charts on the 16th of July 1966, and spent 11 weeks there, including three consectutive weeks at #1, starting on 13th of August.

When I joined the Capitol Record Club in 1965, book and record clubs had this thing called the negative option. That is, you would get the selected book or record UNLESS you sent in the response card in time. I was really bad at the negative option; I almost NEVER got the card in on time.

Which is how I ended up receiving the album Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful on Kama Sutra Records; loved that yellow label. Turns out, I was very fond of the early Spoonful. And when the subsequent single Summer in the City came out in 1966 (b/w Butchie’s Tune from the Daydream album), I had to buy it, probably from the Philadelphia Sales discount department store in Binghamton, NY, which was only two blocks from my elementary/junior high school, one of the very few singles I ever purchased; I was, even early on, an LP guy.

Summer in the City entered the Billboard charts on the 16th of July 1966, and spent 11 weeks there, including three consecutive weeks at #1, starting on the 13th of August.

It is one of the few songs I ever learned to play on the piano, albeit very badly.

Summer in the City
a grainy ‘live’ version

David Crosby is 70…

…and somehow, I think the person most surprised by that fact may be David Crosby.

When he got kicked out of the Byrds in the late 1960s, he joined up with Stephen Stills, formerly of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash, who had left the Hollies, to form what was generally considered to be the first “supergroup.” If I could remember the name of the group, I’d tell you. At least one of their first two albums, the latter with Neil Young, also formerly of Springfield, was in every dorm room at college. I saw CSN at some point in the 1980s at Albany’s Palace Theater.

Crosby was known for his left-leaning politics, and his excessive use of drugs and alcohol, which resulted in numerous arrests, multiple rehabs, and a liver transplant.

My sister Leslie gave me this album about a decade ago called CPR: Live at the Wiltern. Usually, she gives me religious material, but this was a 2-CD set, with the first album jazzy/noodly. The second album featured songs I knew: Long Time Gone, Deja Vu, Eight Miles High, Ohio, and Almost Cut My Hair. Turns out CPR stands for Crosby, Jeff Pevar, and keyboardist/vocalist James Raymond, who is the son Crosby never knew he had until years later.

My favorite David Crosby performances, though, were on the first season of The John Larroquette Show (1993-1994), where Crosby played Chester, sponsor to Larroquette’s John Hemingway, “a recovering alcoholic who becomes the manager of a big city bus station”. Crosby appeared in about a half dozen episodes of this “comedy noir”, then they got rid of the character Chester when the show lightened up in subsequent seasons; wish I could find those episodes online somewhere.

Here’s the title song from the CSNY album Déjà Vu.

Rear View Mirror QUESTIONS

What new technologies have you embraced? For which do you decide, “I prefer the old-fashioned way?”

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote an essay called Clinging to the rearview mirror. He quotes Marshall McLuhan:

Most people…still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.

Ebert notes, among other things:

He doesn’t like video games, 3D movies, or reading books on the Kindle.
When he owned LPs, he “possessed something tangible. When I download an album from iTunes, I can listen to it, but I possess nothing I can touch.”
*”When I enter a theater and see a movie, I experience it differently than when I watch a video.”

These new things aren’t worse, or better; they are just different.

I too am an analog man. While I bought CDs, eventually, my first love is the LP.
I haven’t really played video games since the 1980s.
I HATE 3D movies and think they are a scam.
Video is definitely secondary to seeing a film in a theater.
I have a cellphone, but I don’t give out the number, because I don’t want to be available 24/7. I use it to call work or home when I’ll be late when I’m out of town, and for emergencies.

What new technologies have you embraced? For which do you decide, “I prefer the old-fashioned way?”?

Let’s talk about me

So what two characteristics do you think are most like me?

Of course, everything in this blog, one way or another, is about me.

But I admit to being utterly fascinated by tests that supposedly explain me. For instance, at my last work conference, the speaker gave us a test to see what our individual communication styles are. The choices were:

Driver (dominant, bottom line, panther)
Expressive (influencing, needs interaction, peacock)
Amiable (steady, wants nice & fair, dolphin)
Analytical (careful, detailed, owl)

So what two characteristics do you think are most like me?
Take your cursor over the info below and block it to read. I’ll also put these in the answers 24 hours from now.

I picked expressive and analytical.

The test picked amiable (48 points), expressive (39); analytical got 10 points, and driver got 1..

Discuss.

OH, and if you want the code for whiting out the text, let me know that too.

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