Tag: Billy Joel

Rob Portman and Michelle Shocked

I don’t own any Michelle Shocked music, save for one great song on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained.

I’m feeling a bit less churlish than I did initially about the pronouncement by US Senator Rob Portman that he NOW supports marriage equality because his son has come out as gay, even though, previously, Portman usually got zero ratings from civil rights groups on the issue in the past. I know that SamuraiFrog was right:

“I’m seeing a lot of people who are having this very liberal reaction of ‘Well, why couldn’t he have empathy for everyone’s child?’ Well, you know, because humans are like that. They’re self-interested… Sure, it would be nice if conservatives thought about everyone else’s kids, too, but they don’t. That’s as obvious as it is frustrating.

“What I’m saying is, [the kvetching] takes away from the small victory of changing one legislator’s mind about gay people when you say that this victory isn’t big enough… a lot of times it’s just small victories that add up.

“Yes, it sucks that gay civil rights are still being discussed as though they’re privileges and not rights and fundamental to everyone’s equality. But I’m seeing too many people who should know better implying that this doesn’t matter, and I think it does. It’s one more mind changed.”

This brings me to the alt-folk-rock singer Michelle Shocked’s anti-gay screed in San Francisco, a surprising tirade against marriage equality and homosexuality generally. Arthur@AmeriNZ, who, BTW has been documenting the marriage equality fight in New Zealand and in the US in recent weeks, wonders where does that leave her former fans, of which he was one?

(UPDATE: Here’s a bit of the actual audio of Michelle Shocked, March 17 at Yoshi’s in San Francisco.)

There have been a number of these folk, who one might have once admired but end up having feet of clay. For me, Mel Gibson was one. Fortunately, he started making movies I didn’t want to see (Passion of the Christ, e.g.) around the same time he went on his rants. I took Florence + the Machine off my Amazon wish list after a couple of racist videos.

I don’t own any Michelle Shocked music, save for one great song on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained, which I’m sure I linked to in this blog; I’m surely not going to go back and remove it. But, like Arthur, I’d be as disinclined to spend another cent on her, as many comic books fans felt about the homophobic Orson Scott Card writing the Superman comic book, which, I believe, has been dashed.

BTW, I LOVE the paint job across from the Westboro Baptist Church.

Know what IS ticking me off? The damn reports after the two high schoolers in Steubenville, OH were found guilty on Sunday of raping a 16-year-old girl. Media apologists for the rapists, who were the quarterback and star receiver for the football team, were not limited to this CNN exchange. It is as though raping someone were like your house falling into a sinkhole, some random act of nature the young men were victimized by. You know, boys will be boys. Moreover, two teenage girls were charged for allegedly threatening the rape victim. I watched on the news when the victim’s lawyer said the victim feared going back to school “on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday.”

Someone I read recently (can’t remember who) suggested that we have a culture of rape. My US Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand wrote: “According to the Defense Department’s own estimates, there were approximately 19,000 instances of sexual assaults in the military in 2011 alone. Worse still, only 2,439 of those victimized felt they could come forward to report their assault, and only 240 of those cases went to trial.”

In the no-surprise category: Richard Nixon’s ‘Treason’, elements of which I heard about years ago.

While he’s busy harassing [ex-wife Maureen] McPhilmy for asserting the holiness of her second marriage, [Bill] O’Reilly is trying to deny the existence of his first: He is… seeking an annulment of his 15-year marriage, which produced two children. Null and void. Invalid in the eyes of God. Never happened. This hurts my head.
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I’d just better watch Billy Joel singing, accompanied on piano by a student. Some of the snark warriors are making the rounds, but I just like this.

N is for Nostalgia

Strange, but I found even then that people have a greater recollection of things that I allegedly said and did than I do.

At some level, I’m not a very nostalgic guy. As Billy Joel put it in Keeping the Faith, and I quote, The good old days weren’t always good. It seems as though, in the US, there are dreams of the 1950s being the “good old days”, represented by TV shows such as Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best, with dad out working all day, with mom home raising the kids and wearing pearls when her husband came home for dinner. It was never MY experience.

The 1950s were a period of the cold war paranoia of “duck and cover”, and an unsettling racial climate; I’ve written before how the death of Emmett Till affected me deeply.

And it’s not just the 1950s. I went to my 10th high school reunion back in 1981 and I found it quite disturbing, so annoying, still fighting the same fights that should have been over a decade before. Or lots of conversations about “remember when so-and-so did such-and-such”; well, either the answer is yes, and so what, or no, and so what. It’s like the Springsteen song from Born in the USA, Glory Days:
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days.

Strange, but I found even then that people have a greater recollection of things that I allegedly said and did than I do.

Therefore I was quite interested in this story I saw on CBS Sunday Morning last year, Nostalgia: Power of the “Good Old Days”

But you might be surprised to learn that nostalgia – which is all about the past – has a notorious past of its own. For centuries it was considered a disease and a form of depression. Soldiers even feared it as homesickness and thought it could kill them.
I could almost believe that.

But it is not so, apparently. In fact:
Reliving good times can be a critical tool for surviving these bad times.

“If right now everything is terrible and bleak if you’re out of work and you can’t pay your mortgage and you’ve been evicted and you think, ‘there’s nowhere for me to turn,’ it is actually healthy to look to the past and to say, ‘What else have I survived before?'”
(l-r, Carol, Lois, Karen, Roger, Bill)

Now I DID agree to go to my 35th high school reunion a few years ago, but there was only one reason. There were a group of my oldest friends that were going to be there. When I say “oldest”, I mean that we all went to kindergarten together at Daniel Dickinson school in Binghamton, NY, and all graduated together from 12th grade at Binghamton Central High School. The thing about THESE friends is that we had known each other for SO long that we didn’t NEED to rehash old stuff, just needed to catch up on things.

We didn’t say, “Oh remember in second grade when we danced to the Minuet in G?” (I danced with Carol, Bill with Karen, Bernie with Lois.) Well, they do or they don’t and it doesn’t matter. “Do you remember going to Carol’s parents’ summer place in northern Pennsylvania?” Of course they do; no need to ask. There’s a certain shorthand you develop when you’ve known people a long time, even when you haven’t seen them in many years.

Still, I try to be a proponent of Carly Simon’s Anticipation, specifically the last line: “THESE are the good old days.”


ABC Wednesday – Round 7

I Admit I Like Billy Joel

Billy Joel tells the story about when the instrumentation all drops out, it was an accident, when he was playing with the knobs and feared he’d ruined the recording.


One of my colleagues, knowing my affection for music, was telling me about a Billy Joel song called We Didn’t Start the Fire, which you can hear here, after a short ad. I was never a huge fan of the song. But she explained to me that the historical references in the piece made her want to look up the background behind those events. So, I have rethought the song and deem it OK, especially after I came across this teacher’s guide to it.

Actually, I rather like Billy Joel, even though it was never really cool to like Billy Joel. The only time I saw him live in New Paltz in 1974 (I think). Buzzy Linhart opened for him. Joel and the entourage got lost getting to New Paltz and were over two hours late. Billy was practically glued to his piano bench. The song I love most from that period was Captain Jack.

Compact disc

Subsequently, I bought several BJ albums. In fact, when I FINALLY bought a CD player, I bought a half dozen CDs to play on it, one of which was this album:

I got rather fond of much of his music, which seemed to dominate MTV in the early years.
Some favorites:
Big Shot, which I always thought was self-referential
Allentown, with the industrial sounds
Pressure, with the specific reference to Channel 13, the PBS station in NYC. He tells the story about when the instrumentation all drops out, it was an accident, when he was playing with the knobs and feared he’d ruined the recording.
But probably my second favorite song, after Lullaby, is Big Man on Mulberry Street, probably because of that fantasy piece on the TV show Moonlighting, a program I loved early on *(and then not so much…)

There was a recent piece in Salon that called Billy Joel a Misunderstood American Master, and I think he is right.

I’ll end this with BJ’s rendition of New York State of Mind, a great version from right after 9/11/2001.

BJ turns 61 on Sunday.

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