Tag: music

January rambling: Lebensraum

Monroe Doctrine

We’ll get to Lebensraum in a bit.

Global temperatures in 2024 shattered records, soaring past 1.5°C as extreme weather devastated millions. 26 Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Events Killed at Least 3,700 People. 

Big Agriculture Is Leading Us Into the Bird Flu Abyss: The federal government’s deference to agriculture industry interests has put the US at risk of a public health crisis.

How The Polio Vaccine Destroyed Trust In Healthcare (a bit of a misleading title, but not entirely wrong)

Bernie Sanders’ Prescription to ‘Make America Healthy Again’: “Our real problem is not so much a healthcare crisis as it is a political and economic one.”

A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters

Veterans rights and discrimination: a guide

New VIP+ Special Report: Generative AI: Deepfakes & Digital Replicas

Aaron Brown, CNN Anchor During the Sept. 11 Attacks, Dies at 76

Ask Arthur 2024: Racism and change; Miscellany

The art of monotasking: “Being busy” doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing what matters. Focusing your attention on only one task at a time is the secret to performing tasks correctly.

The Best Reviewed Broadway Shows of 2024

A book on Albany’s railroad history? Yes, please…

Embiggen – defined earlier than the Simpsons

“Explain a Movie Plot Badly” — A Fun Party Game

What era?

A real  meditation on American greatness

When people would talk about MAGA, liberals wanted to know which era was the “great” one they wanted to go back to. Many thought they were talking about the 1950s before integration. Or the 1920s before the Great Depression and FDR regulations. Maybe they meant the 1880s and 90s during the Gilded Age.

I would have picked any of those. But I did not have on my bingo card the 1820s. We’re going back to the Monroe Doctrine era. The Daily Signal, a right-wing online publication, favorably suggested the same. The piece by Jarrett Stepman ends: “If Trump does revive some form of the Monroe Doctrine, it could represent a much-needed return to tradition and to a stronger foundation for U.S. security in an increasingly dangerous world.”

Suddenly, the January 7 press conference made sense. djt said he’d be  renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

“The once and future president also doubled down on his aims to acquire Greenland, retake control of the Panama Canal, and put pressure on Canada to change its trade relations with the United States” which he voiced before Christmas.

Here’s former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien on Fox News:

It’s strategically very important to the Arctic which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.

Or MAYBE we’re going to become 1930s Germany. Lebensraum is “the policy of Nazi Germany that involved expanding German territories to the east to provide land and material resources for the German people while driving out Jewish and Slavic people.”

The Corporate Giants Bankrolling the Inauguration: PAY to play.

The President Can Self-Pardon, but It Would Be an Impeachable Offense (CATO Institute, Dec 2020) 

MUSIC

Bemba Colorá-Sheila E. ft. Gloria Estefan on Jimmy Kimmel; I see Rebecca Jade!

Coronation Procession by Ruth Gipps

You Get What You Give – New Radicals

Love In Action  – Utopia

Rocket 88 – Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats

Coverville 1516 and 1517: The 2024 Coverville Countdown

Down By The Riverside – Elvis Presley · Carl Perkins · Jerry Lee Lewis · Johnny Cash. I bought this CD after I saw the Million Dollar Quartet musical

The theme from the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon show – Midtown

Tomorrow – Julie Benko and Cantor Azi Schwartz

Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 21: The final notes – all of the US pop #1s

Peter Yarrow Dies at 86. Leaving On A Jet Plane – Peter, Paul, and Mary 

Sam Moore, who died at age 89, was more than a Soul Man – he was one of the 20th century’s great live performers. When Something Is Wrong With My Baby – Sam And Dave.

Beatles For Sale begat ’65 and VI

Capitol knew how to churn out the product

Many of us who grew up with the American versions of the Beatles albums were confounded when we discovered that the United Kingdom albums were different. For instance, Beatles For Sale on Parlophone generated the majority of songs for two Capitol albums in the United States, Beatles ’65 and Beatles VI.

“Beatles For Sale was released on 4th December 1964 – just 21 weeks after A Hard Day’s Night. It was The Beatles’ fourth album release in less than two years.” Some fans and critics consider it the band’s least successful collection. It contains six covers, probably because the band was busy with touring and moviemaking; this was the last time the band relied on so many outside songs for their albums. Here are the links.

Beatles ’65 also came out in December ’64, just before Christmas. All are by Lennon/McCartney except when otherwise indicated. If they’re from Beatles for Sale, they’ll be indicated as B4S. Here are the tracks.

Side 1

No Reply – B4S

I’m A Loser – B4S

Baby’s In Black—B4S. Is there a greater string of downer songs in the catalog than these?

Rock and Roll Music (Chuck Berry) – B4S

I’ll Follow The Sun – B4S, written by Paul c. 1958

Mr. Moonlight (Roy Lee Johnson) – B4S. One of the least popular Beatles tracks.

Side 2

Honey Don’t (Carl Perkins) – B4S. The Ringo vocal.

I’ll Be Back – the last song on the UK A Hard Day’s Night album

She’s A Woman – the B-side of the single. Unlike UK albums, which thought of LPs and 45s as separate entities, music producers in the US feared fans wouldn’t buy the album without the single.

I’ll Feel Fine – the A-side of the single.

Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby  (Perkins) –  B4S. George loved Carl Perkins.

An interlude

The next Capitol Record was The Early Beatles (March 1965), which included 11 of the 14 songs on the UK’s Please Me album (March 1963). I Saw Her Standing There showed up on the Capitol album Meet The Beatles! (January 1964). The other two songs, Misery and There’s a Place, never appeared on a Capitol/Apple album until the US version of Rarities in March 1980.

Those 14 songs, 12 at a time, also appeared in one of the iterations of VeeJay’s Introducing…the Beatles, just before and after Meet The Beatles!

The sixth Capitol album, excluding The Beatles Story

Beatles VI was released in June 1965, the first Beatles album I ever purchased. Here are the tracks.

Side 1

Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey (Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller/Richard Penniman) – B4S. Note that the latter song was not listed on the album cover.

Eight Days a Week – B4S

You Like Me Too Much – the Harrison track was from Side 2 of the upcoming UK Help! album

Bad Boy (Larry Williams) – The group recorded material especially for the North American market. This song’s first UK release was on A Collection of Beatles Oldies in 1966 and later appeared on the UK Rarities album in 1978.

I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party – B4S

Words of Love (Buddy Holly) – B4S

Side 2

What You’re Doing -B4S

Yes It Is –  the B-side to the single Ticket To Ride

Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Williams) – recorded material especially for the North American market. But it showed up on the upcoming UK Help album.

Tell Me What You See – from the upcoming UK Help album

Every Little Thing -B4S

The Story of The Beatles Cartoons & Why They Will Never Be Shown Again

The #1 hits of 1905

remember me to Herald Square

Here are the #1 hits of 1905. Since there was no Billboard or comparable charts, how is that possible? Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954 gives due credit to Jim Walsh. He is “the world’s leading authority on the pioneer recording age.” His columns in Hobbies magazine ran “a remarkable 40 years.”

The Whitburn book also notes:  We compiled charts for those years by incorporating various surveys and sources, notably the Talking Machine World periodical, offered monthly listings of all popular records released starting in 1905 and frequently provided information on the hottest current hits, although not in charge chart form.”

“In the early decades of the 20th century, a song’s popularity was measured by its sales of sheet music and recordings… nearly every department store in five & dime, in addition to music shops, sold sheet music to the day’s top hits. Annual sheet music sales were approaching 30 million by decade’s end. A driving force behind these sails was the ubiquity of pianos in middle and upper-class American homes.”

The songs

The Preacher and the Bear – Arthur Collins (Edison), 11 weeks at #1, gold record. It is listed as a comedy record. It is… of its time.

Yankee Doodle Boy – Billy Murray (Columbia), eight weeks at #1. You’ll recognize part of this. He was The Biggest Star of the Phonograph Era.

In The Shade of the Old Apple Tree – Irving Gillette (Edison),  seven weeks at #1

In My Merry Oldsmobile – Billy Murray (Victor), seven weeks at #1. These were still the early days of the automobile industry in the United States.  I’ve heard this song!

Give My Regards to Broadway – Billy Murray (Columbia),  five weeks at #1. I had forgotten how old Broadway was until my daughter and I went to the Museum Of Broadway earlier this year.

Where The Morning Glories Twine Around the Door – Byron Harlan (Columbia), 5 weeks at #1

Come Take A Trip In My Air-Ship – Billy Murray (Victor), four weeks at #1. Air-Ship, just two years after the Wright Brothers flew in Kitty Hawk

Dearie–  Corinne Morgan and Hayden Quartet (Victor), two weeks at #1

Random 2024 post

Lempicka

This is the random 2024 post. I randomly pick the blog post date for each month, and then, within that post, randomly select a sentence. I’m sure I purloined the idea from near twin Gordon.

A serious blogger like Kelly would review his output and highlight his favorite and/or best work from last year. This is a great idea, but it would involve actual labor.

January: “Even though it’s an online bank, there are plenty of ways to access your money by visiting any of the over 40,000+ ATMs in the Allpoint network.” At the end of December, I got a Visa credit card from Varo in the mail. It was sent to our home but addressed to someone we never heard of, and we’ve been here for over two decades. I later suspected that when I lost my wallet in the autumn of 2023, the person who found it (but did not return it) ordered a Varo card to be sent to my address and figured they could remove it from our mailbox. Ha! Our mailbox has a lock. 

February: “Still, I didn’t bother voting for her because 1) she’ll get in without my help, and 2) she has a five-octave voice, which she often uses unnecessarily to the music’s detriment.” Why I didn’t vote for Mariah Carey for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the fan ballot. 

March: “Bob Marley: One Love, Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green.” It was the last film I saw at the Spectrum 8 Theatre before it closed. Fortunately, it reopened a few months later under different management. 

April: “The Average Body Temperature Is Not 98.6 Degrees” Linkage. 

Politics

May: “Jay Bernhardt, the newly installed president at Emerson College, got an earful about the arrest of more than 100 protesters at the Massachusetts campus.” About the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

June:  “[Lauren] Blackman and [Nicholas] Ward met in a production of a Broadway musical called Lempicka, which had previously played in Williamstown, MA, where it went through several revisions, and La Jolla, CA.” A concert that was part of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s American Music Festival. 

July: “It [Project 2025] claims that “centralized government ‘subverts’ families by working to ‘replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones,’ utilizing the biblical language of natural versus the unnatural.” I mentioned Project 2025 at least a half dozen times. 

August: “’The authors’ thesis is that the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed.'” Linkage about Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America.

How am I?

September: “My wife has some dry eye issues, so she’s become an expert at eye drops.” My end-of-summer health report.  

October: “One in three tree species at risk of extinction: report.” A linkage post. 

November: “Merry Christmas Darling – Carpenters (1970) – Only vaguely familiar.” This is the first of my holiday music posts.

December: “The play Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare, which I think I had to read in college freshman English class, was a bloody piece that frankly bored me.” A Sunday Stealing about books. 

So it’s reasonably representative. There’s Sunday Stealing, which I completed over 40 times during the year. Ah, three musical posts, which I did at least once a week. I hit three linkage posts, which I do two dozen times a year. Also, I mentioned politics, movies, and a day in the life. 

The picture of my kid was also randomly selected from the pictures I used in 2024.

Stats
My stats are consistent month over month, except for December, which had twice as many visitors and thrice the number of views. Rebecca Jade and the Dave Koz Christmas Tour 2024 (Dec 12) pumped up the number of views I got. However, Random Christmas stuff (Dec 17) surprised me by boosting the number of visitors.
Posts & pages for 2024; the most popular

The 2024 Year’s End Quiz continued

tax the rich!

Last year, which is to say yesterday, I  started to do the 2024 Year’s End Quiz that Kelly always does. But my answers became Too Damn Long, so I split it up. 

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Oh, there’s a bunch of people trying to fight the good fight; I suppose there are a lot of local heroes. And there’s a person who has taken a great deal of interest in my genealogical process, which I greatly appreciate. 

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

There are SO many.

A wide swath of the American public seems to think that taxing rich people is a bad thing, even though they’re not rich themselves. I remember the discussion over the so-called death tax a few years ago, and people balked at it even though they’re extremely unlikely to be in that situation. The Ultra Millionaire Tax Act of 2024 (H.R. 7749) is far less likely to impact them. They won’t be making $50 million, which might be taxable. Income inequality has been rampant since Ronald Reagan’s time, and it has only worsened.

And then, there are the politicians.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) “authored a resolution that would ban trans women from women’s bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol” after saying how much of an ally she is to LGBTQ people.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), possibly the most incompetent Senator, said it’s ‘Not Our Job’ to vet djt’s Cabinet picks (psst: yes, it is)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) blames Democrats for weaponizing the weather.

Most of the Cabinet picks (Hegseth, RFK Jr, Gabbard, and especially Kash Patel)

Orange

Elon Musk and his tech bro buddies (rump jr, Vance)

Where did most of your money go?

The house, specifically a new back porch; the daughter’s education.

What did you get really excited about?

The mystery project

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

Sharply sadder, though better now than in the summer.

Thinner or fatter?

Definitely fatter. There is a distinct correlation between my emotional state and my food consumption.

Richer or poorer?

Poorer.

Science!

What do you wish you’d done more of?

I’d be in good shape if I could only get that cloning thing going.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Brooding.

How did you spend Christmas?

With my wife, daughter, and MIL.

Did you fall in love in 2024?

Absolutely.

How many one-night stands?

Lessee: (two cubed) minus (the square root of 64).

What was your favorite TV program?

CBS Sunday Morning, CBS Saturday Morning, Abbott Elementary, Elsbeth. 

I’ve discovered that I like watching NFL football in the last year or two that I hadn’t felt for decades. It’s always recorded. Every week, I learn something new. In a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the hated Dallas Cowboys, the score was tied near the end of the game. Cincinnati punted the ball, but Dallas blocked the kick. All the Cowboys needed to do was to let the ball go. They would have possession, and they were already in field goal territory. Instead, one of the Cowboys touched the ball but could not control it.  The Bengals regained possession and soon scored a touchdown to win the game. I loved it.

There’s a thin line…

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Hate is such a terrible word. If I did, and I’m not saying I do, it’d be Elon, who helped buy an election by spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on djt and his cronies. Then he dances around, threatening to slash Social Security. As a friend likes to say, “Chuck YOU, Farley!” (Sidebar: one minor reason I don’t prefer the term African-American is that recently, someone referred to Elon Musk as an African-American, and it hurt my head.)

What was the best book you read?

Prequel and The Undertow are in the same vein.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

Cage the Elephant, who Anthony Mason interviewed on CBS Mornings.

What did you want and get?

To get to sing, listen to music, go to plays.

What did you want and not get?

Democracy

What were your favorite films of this year?

Conclave, The Wild Robot, Sing Sing, Ghostlight, Thelma, Inside Out 2, Poor Things, and Anatomy of a Fall. But my favorite was American Fiction.

What did you do on your birthday?

It was a Thursday, so I went to choir and took out the trash. Beyond that, I have no idea.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024?

Comfortable.

Facts not in evidence

What kept you sane?

I think I went a little insane this year.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Bill McKibben

What political issue stirred you the most?

Global warming, abortion rights, book banning, racism, sexism, homophobia. Oh, and the possibility that good chunks of Project 2025, which I only mentioned a half dozen times, will be enacted, threatening democracy.

Who did you miss?

In the throes of my despair, it was my friend Norm, who died in 2016.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2024:

This is part of what Kelly wrote last year. I think it works.

The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.

If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:

I don’t take many selfies. The one above, taken at the Museum of Broadway in Manhattan (and I don’t mean Kansas) in January 2024, is the only one I can find. 

The musical portion of the post 

 

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I was leaning into the third segment of the Monster / Suicide / America medley on the Monster album. The first part is relevant but slightly clunky, but there’s something very basic about the end of Suicide. The third part is anthemic. Lyrics and the track.

‘Cause there’s a monster on the looseIt’s got our heads into the nooseAnd it just sits there watchin’
America, where are you nowDon’t you care about your sons and daughtersDon’t you know we need you nowWe can’t fight alone against the monster
Also

The other song that came to mind was American Idiot by Green Day. This is the 20th anniversary of that album. I’m fairly sure that ADD gave it to me at some point. It’s a great collection, and the title song seems very appropriate. Lyrics. “Starting off the album with a bang, ‘American Idiot’ is a scathing takedown of American culture in the years following 9/11.” The track.

Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Ramblin' with Roger
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