Tag: birthday

George Harrison would have been 70

Here are a dozen Harrison songs. Only the Top 2 are for sure on the list. It seems to change a lot, depending on what I’ve been listening to most recently.

When John Lennon died in 1980, I was devastated. When George Harrison died in November 2001, I was melancholy, but I knew he was sick, so I wasn’t surprised. But as time passed, I realized I missed him more and more. Incidentally, All Things Must Pass was my high school prom theme.

I felt sorry for George in the Beatles. He’d write songs and they wouldn’t make the album, because those two other songwriters in the group dominated. That explained why the All Things Must Pass album had three LPs, including an instrumental experiment.

Unique among the Beatles, George’s first greatest hits album included Beatles songs, even though there were arguably enough of his solo works to make their inclusion unnecessary; this was an insult to the artist by his soon-to-be-former record label, in my view.

Here are a dozen Harrison songs. Only the Top 2 are for sure on the list. It seems to change a lot, depending on what I’ve been listening to most recently. I have all the Harrison solo studio albums, excluding some compilations.

Links to songs.

12. Blow Away (from George Harrison – GH) – Always liked the guitar line.
11. Love Comes to Everyone (GH) – guitar intro by Eric Clapton is quite nice.
10. Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth) (Living in the Material World- LITMW) – In one of the later verses, I like how the chorus is sung off the beat. And more than occasionally, I relate to its message.
9. All Those Years Ago (Somewhere in England -SIE) – Harrison’s tribute to John Lennon, featuring Ringo Starr on drums, as well as Wings members Paul and Linda McCartney and Denny Laine on backing vocals
8. Let It Down (All Things Must Pass -ATMP) – Lovely song. Can’t find the album version, unfortunately, but this is nice, too.
7. Devil’s Radio (Cloud Nine – CN) – Like the somewhat nasal quality of the vocal.
6. Living in the Material World (LITMW) – Story of the Beatles, in part. And when he sings, “We got Ritchie on a tour,” and Ringo plays a little drum solo, it always cracks me up.
5. What Is Life (ATMP). On the extended CD of ATMP, there’s an instrumental version of this song that I like nearly as much.
4. Got My Mind Set on You (CN) – I think I like this as much for the surprise element at the time. George hadn’t had an album in five years, let alone a hit single. This muscular Rudy Clark cover seemed to come out of left field.
3. Not Guilty (GH) – At the time, some people thought this was in response to the My Sweet Lord/He’s So Fine lawsuit. (No, but This Song, from Thirty-Three and 1/3 was.) Not Guilty was actually recorded with The Beatles in 1968 for The White Album; like many of his songs, it was not included. However, you can find a louder version on the Beatles’ Anthology 3.
2. Wah Wah (ATMP) – Love the volume, the guitar line, the choir of vocalists, pretty much everything.
1. When We Was Fab (CN) – This telling of the Beatles’ story, though, is the best of the songs in that specific genre.

A couple of Traveling Wilburys songs in the mix.
The last time I wrote about George, which was the 10th anniversary of his death.

Friend Uthaclena is 60

I’ll just wish my OLD friend a happy birthday.

We met the first day of college. He was an odd sort who tended to hang off the edge of his desk like Snoopy on his doghouse roof. He was even more socially inept than I was at the time, which is saying a lot. He turned me onto comic books at a point that I thought I had outgrown them, at a point when this was not particularly cool.

We fought against wars together, as recently as 2003.

I was in one of his weddings and he was in one of mine.

He’s actually a lot better now socially, thanks in no small part to a stint as a bartender. Most of his work, though, has been in social services. I follow his comments on Facebook but find them incredibly cryptic; one example: “Here we go…”

I usually see him at an annual event that’s been going on, in one form or other for decades, and for which he has been a primary moving force. He wasn’t there this year, though, and I got suckered into doing his part, as though I knew what I was doing.

A couple of years ago, around my birthday, I was in a particular funk about something or other. My wife had conspired with him, his wife, and his daughter to come to visit our house, which brightened my mood considerably. One of the few times I’ve been able to take off on a weekend afternoon was last spring, with him.

He’s currently dealing with some work issues that sound too familiar to me, as both my wife and one of my sisters have experienced it: you have a workload, then management increases it by 70%. They complain that you can’t meet the new goals. But you just can’t, unless you work about 20 unpaid overtime hours per week. Good luck with the forces of evil.

Rather than blathering on, I’ll just wish my OLD friend a happy birthday. Glad we got to talk, effendi.

What a birthday party!

There was a girl who turned eight years old who was at that New York City demonstration, which means she turns 18 today

I mentioned last year that I was in New York City on February 15, 2003, with about 100,000 of my closest friends, protesting against the upcoming war in Iraq. (There were many other protests across the country, and indeed, across the world; the photo is from the Austin, TX rally on that date.) It seemed obvious then, and no less obvious now, that there was no justification for the United States military incursion.

Some folks have asked me why rehash the war.”It’s over; let’s move on.” For one thing, we should note the many casualties of the engagement. For another, if we fail to understand the rationale for the war, the flawed notion of getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, then we as a nation will be hard-pressed to deal rationally with the next potential conflict. Should we go to war in Syria? Or Mali, where the French, put upon in the United States for failing to support the Iraq war have been fighting some iteration of Al-Queda? Heck, it was still an issue in a recent confirmation hearing.

Trailer for We Are Many, about those 2003 rallies.

Enough of this. What I really wanted to say is that there was a girl who turned eight years old who was at that New York City demonstration, which means she turns 18 today. I’ve known her almost all her life. I suppose this birthday will be a little more subdued than the one she had a decade ago.

I’m sorry I missed her, and her parents, at the MidWinter’s celebration earlier this month.

Friend Fred Hembeck is 60

Happy birthday, Fred Hembeck.

This past August, my wife, my daughter, and I got to visit Fred Hembeck and his wife Lynn Moss down in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. This had been an annual event for three or four years, but it had been four years since we last came by. I’m quite sure of that because their daughter Julie was about to go to college the last time we visited, and now she’s graduated. She was also present.

Anyone who has been following Fred’s Facebook page will know, right before Father’s Day 2012, Julie’s left leg was run over by a Mack truck! She went through a variety of treatments, including several different casts and at least three surgeries.

To add insult to injury, quite literally, from Fred: “Because the witnesses who stopped to help Julie drove by just as she was in the middle of the street fleeing the truck, they didn’t see her moments earlier trying to cross in the legal crosswalk, so SHE’S been issued a ticket!” They have had to spring for a lawyer to fight this, and her college town is about five hours away each way, so some unwanted travel as well.

Always glad to see Fred and Lynn at the biannual comic book shows in Albany. I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen it yet, that Fred’s story in Mars Attacks the Holidays is one of the highlights. AND I did not hear that from Fred or Lynn or Julie!

Fred turns 60 about five weeks before I do, so his job is to test the waters to see how it is in the land of the sexagenarians. Happy birthday, effendi.

WWMD: What Would Martin Do?

If Martin Luther King were still alive, he would be concerned about the inequity of income that has developed regardless of race, especially over the past thirty years.


“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back – but they are gone. It is up to us. It is up to you.” – Marian Wright Edelman
I saw this quote on Facebook a couple days after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. The quote made me think about what would MLK, Jr. be doing and saying about current events. I have read and/or listened to many of Martin’s writings and speeches, so I could (I hope) reasonably extrapolate his views.

Of course, it’s difficult to ascertain what his impact on society and the culture would be had he survived. Maybe progress in some areas would have happened sooner; maybe he would have been rendered largely irrelevant. That’s the thing about those who die, especially those who die relatively young; they are frozen in time.

Maybe, instead of him dying in 1968, I should imagine that he was traveling to another planet and finally made it back, this century.

The overriding issue for Martin Luther King was always justice. He would fret over the continuing divide of wealth between white Americans and those who are black and Hispanic. At the end of his life, MLK was increasingly aware of class distinctions. He would be equally concerned about the inequity of income that has developed regardless of race, especially over the past thirty years; he would be challenging the 1% for sure. He would be a proponent of equal pay for women.

Obviously, heinous acts of brutality are distressing to him. But he would also address the culture of violence that leads to such unthinkable acts. He would surely talk about the awful tumult that takes place every day in the United States that DOESN’T make the headlines.

He would oppose the death penalty. Not only did he not believe in “an eye for an eye,” but he would despair of the imbalance of people of color incarcerated and on death row across the country, disproportionate to the number of crimes committed.

MLK came to oppose the Vietnam war by 1967. Surely, he would have opposed the Iraq war as unjustified, even before it actually started in 2003. The current wars, particularly the use of drones, would break his heart.

Martin would undoubtedly be pleased, and possibly surprised, that an African-American had been elected President, but would suggest that we have not yet reached “the promised land.”

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