February 2012 - Page 4 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Two songs for Valentine’s Day

It’s Love by the Rascals, back when they were still Young, features the flute by Hubert Laws. It’s the B-side of the single A Girl Like You, and is the last song on the Groovin’ album from 1967.

I know you romantics might have a difficult time believing this, but not everyone LOVES Valentine’s Day. The idea of romantic love is anathema to them. And I know, ’cause I’ve been there.

For you who hate the day, LISTEN to a song by Beck. This is the 1990s singer, not the 1960s guitarist. Oh, what’s the title? It starts with A, ends with HOLE, and has seven letters. I first came across it when it was covered by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers for the soundtrack to the movie She’s The One. Petty’s version borrows heavily from the original. I love the juxtaposition of the pleasant harmonized melody with the depressing text:
She dangles carrots, makes you feel embarrassed
To be the fool you know you are
She’ll do anything
She’ll do anything
She’ll do anything to make you feel like an…

On the other side of the mood fence, LISTEN to It’s Love by the Rascals, back when they were still Young, featuring flute by Hubert Laws. It’s the B-side of the single A Girl Like You and is the last song on the Groovin’ album from 1967.

I actually bought the CD version of this album specifically for this song. I had it on vinyl – still do, actually – but the fancy new stereo record player that I bought in the late 1980s would automatically eject the side before the song was over. There was very little room between those outro grooves and the record label in the center on Side 2 of the album, and I could get only 3/4s of the way through It’s Love. Maddening. BTW, my OLD record player, which I had to junk, never gave me such problems.

Here’s another video of It’s Love, this one with the trippy lyrics:
“Oh, what a wild sensation
Multiple revelations”
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I was always partial to the Whitney Houston song How Will I Know. You’ll find it at this link, along with two dozen more of her songs. Dead at 48. Yikes.

E is for Equality

Booker noted: “I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states.”

The news that made the recent headlines in terms of marriage equality in the United States was that a federal appeals court ruled Proposition 8, the California plebiscite overturning gay marriage, violated the Constitution, setting up an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, or possibly not. Meanwhile, the Washington state legislature passed a bill legalizing gay marriage; here is part of the debate. Also, New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch has vowed to veto efforts to repeal that state’s same-sex marriage law.

Discussing specifically the California judicial ruling, writer Mark Evanier noted: “I still wish this thing could be settled by a vote of the people rather than to reopen silly arguments about ‘judicial activism.'” And in an ideal world, I would tend to agree with him.

But I was struck by something that Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, a Democrat, said. He broke with Governor Chris Christie, a Republican with whom he has previously been aligned. Booker opposed Christie’s call for a gay marriage referendum, and his threat to veto a gay marriage bill because, as Christie put it, “I need to be governed by the will of the people.”

In response, Booker noted: “I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960s, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states.” He submitted that leaders are elected to make difficult decisions, not submit to a public referendum. “Equal protection under the law – for race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation – should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day. Marriage equality is not a choice. It is a legal right. I hope our leaders in Trenton will affirm and defend it.” You can watch Booker here.

I was fascinated by a lengthy article in Salon: The making of gay marriage’s top foe: How Maggie Gallagher’s college pregnancy made her a single mom, and a traditional marriage zealot. “The organization she founded in 2007, the National Organization for Marriage, helped organize the successful effort in 2008 to pass Proposition 8 in California…

“Gallagher’s opposition to gay marriage seems to have very little to do with gay people, indeed with people at all. What really excites her is a depersonalized idea of Marriage: its essence, its purity, its supposedly immutable definition…For Gallagher, gay people are the enemy only insofar as their desire to marry is yet another attack on Marriage…”

Except that marriage had already been on the decline, at least in the United States, long before the first gay nuptials. I suspect it’s a function of children with divorced parents being less likely to tie the knot. It’s almost ironic that gay couples, for whom marriage had long been out of the question, are now a growth segment in the matrimonial business.
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A brief history of the Gay Rights Movement.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a legal challenge to the (so-called) Defense of Marriage Act.
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ABC Wednesday – Round 10

To Award, or Not To Award; That is the question.

I’ve totally changed my sense of my personal history and time, especially since I began blogging.

I recently read this great article by Patio Patch (Laura from London, UK) about how to be an awards-free blog without seeming ungracious. She noted: “As an ingenue exploring the blogosphere I was surprised to see prominently placed ‘award free blog’ buttons. At the time I considered these to be rude presumptions of a confetti of accolades but hindsight has shown that this is a politely circumspect way of side-stepping the issue.”

I hadn’t, in fact, gotten any awards in a while, so I was thinking that, in my existence, it had become a moot point.

So naturally, at that point, I get an award from Dustbury, one Charles G. Hill, who, as the person who nominated him put it,”might cover social media, automobile tires, basketball, My Little Pony, print magazines, transportation in Oklahoma, women’s shoes, and Zooey Deschanel — all with enviable literary skill and brio.” I came across him initially because he knows more about Warner Brothers Loss Leader LPs than any sane person should.

The rules:
In a post on your blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award. (Now this has become increasingly difficult, if only because of the aforementioned no awards policy. But I have a workaround.)
In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award. (Check)
In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog. (Thank you, CG.)
In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself. (See below)
In the same post, include this set of rules. (Check)
Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs. (Or tweeting.) (Well, we’ll get to that.)

The seven random things aren’t all that difficult for me; they are usually strands of blogposts I could never finish.

1. I’ve totally changed my sense of my personal history and time, especially since I began blogging. I used to believe that I would go from one chapter to another in life. But now I see it as one long continuum, with things from my past often playing more significant roles in my present than I ever would have guessed.

2. On two different occasions, I dated for a time a woman who was at least a decade older than I was. Indeed, for the majority of my dating life, I’ve gone out with women in their 40s. That includes my wife, who’s younger than I.

3. The only trophy I ever won was for racquetball. The racquet broke off the trophy, but I’m still keeping it, in the office I’m writing this, actually.

4. The ONLY time I’ve EVER done the chicken dance was in Galveston, TX in 1995. It was at a work conference

5. My Twitter name, Ersie, is based on a stuffed monkey I no longer own.

6. We have drawers of random electronic and computer junk I should probably throw out, but haven’t, because I have the bizarre notion I might need them, in most cases because I never knew what they really did in the first place.

7. I can probably name more New York Giants (football) and New York Yankees (baseball) players from the 1960s than the 21st century.

And now for my designees for the award. Ready? (Drum roll, please.)

YOU. That is, if you don’t mind getting awards, if you like giving awards to others, by all means, consider yourself so dubbed by me. And if you WANT me to specifically call on you, then let me know, and I will. But if you’re award-free, don’t let me ruin the streak.

Transformative Presidency?

Did the election of this President, with a mixed record, no matter your political viewpoint, matter merely because he was black?

I’m watching this television program called JEOPARDY! On the episode airing way back on February 25, 2009, which I almost certainly watched at least a week later, there was a category called THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, with all of the clues given by black historian Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The $200 clue: “In a recent essay, I cited the election of Barack Obama as one of the 4 ‘transformative moments’ in African-American history; this 1863 event was the first.” The question, of course, was “What is The Emancipation Proclamation?” (The other two moments, which Gates revealed in a video clip leading to a commercial break, were Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling in 1938 and the 1963 march on Washington that featured Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.)

Around the same time, I had come across a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center: Fueled by non-white immigration, the economy and the rise to power of a black president, the number of hate groups rose to 926, a record, in 2008.

Let me admit my resistance to Obama’s election as “transformative.”

Did the election of this President, with a mixed record, no matter your political viewpoint, matter merely because he was black? Surely a historical moment, but “transformative”?

Think of Jackie Robinson – whose entry into Major League Baseball, BTW, I would have put as one of Gates’ “transformative” moments, rather than Joe Louis. If he had failed as a player, would it have mattered as much that he was the first black player in a long while? I think he’d be a footnote in history. I still wonder if the added racial responsibility weighs on Obama, as surely it did on Robinson?

I’m reminded, oddly I suppose, of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, back when Miss America still mattered in the United States. Know that there was some controversy in some black circles because she was so light-skinned, not dissimilar to conversations about Obama’s mixed-race heritage. Then Ms. Williams was booted as Miss America; her great strength is that she did not allow that incident to define her, but at the time, I thought it was a blow to some black people who said: “We make the breakthrough, then THAT has to happen?”

Also, with the increased number of nut jobs out there, I can’t help but continue to worry for Obama’s well-being. Not the least of which is the White Nationalist CPAC panel warning that America’s greatest threat is its diversity.

So I’m still mulling over how “transformative” the 2008 election turned out to be, in terms of justice, social/economic/racial/environmental, but it is not apparent in many aspects.

I’ve long stated that “the first” is important, but it’s not until it’s no longer an issue at all that real progress is made. And if you read some of the right-wing stuff I do, you know we are not there yet.
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My friend Dan lays out, not in a racial context but just as in a political one, how Barack Obama has NOT had a transformative presidency in far too many ways. While he tends towards harsher language than I, I’d be hard-pressed to negate his overriding premise.

Roberta Flack is 75

More than almost any other song, this reminds me of love lost, and it still has the capacity of making me quite sad.

I’m fairly sure Roberta Flack’s turning 75; while some sources have her listed as being born in 1939, her Facebook page and Wikipedia have her born in 1937. It’s likely it was my sister Leslie who turned me on to Roberta’s music. She owned the second album, Chapter Two, which she played rather constantly. I almost felt bad that Roberta achieved a modicum of commercial success; we thought Roberta was our little secret, known by the cognoscenti.

I had the pleasure of seeing her perform at First Night in Albany about a dozen years ago. She has been living in the Dakota building in NYC for a number of years, a neighbor of Yoko Ono.

Here’s a bunch of her songs that I like. Unfortunately, I didn’t always find them on YouTube or elsewhere, so you might only hear a snippet; it will be labeled as such:

11. Why Don’t You Move In With Me – my favorite part, the introductory piano, you don’t hear in this SNIPPET from the first song on the Blue Lights in the Basement album.

10. You’ve Got a Friend – featuring the great, lamented Donny Hathaway. Her first pop hit (#29 in 1971).

9. Compared to What – from the jazzy first album, First Take.

8. Killing Me Softly with His Song – hit single (#1 for 5 weeks in 1973).

7. Where Is the Love – another hit (#5 in 1972) with Donny Hathaway

6. Business Goes On As Usual – a great song from Chapter Two about war and money; a SNIPPET.

5. First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – though released on First Take back in 1969, popularized because of its inclusion in the movie Play Misty for Me. #1 for 6 weeks in 1972.

4. Go Up Moses – a great variation on the old spiritual Go Down Moses from her third album, Quiet Fire. A SNIPPET.

3. To Love Somebody – a soulful cover of the Bee Gees’ song, from Quiet Fire. A SNIPPET; a favorite song of my late friend Donna.

2. Reverend Lee – the word about this song from Chapter Two is venerous.

1. Gone Away – more than almost any other song, this reminds me of love lost, and it still has the capacity of making me quite sad.