Susanna Hoffs. Live. 1991. Wow.

I’ll be in my bunk.

‘Twas a long weekend for me thanks to the Columbus day holiday and my usual Fridays off. Didn’t accomplish much, unfortunately, as I got sidetracked about halfway through last week with something strongly resembling the flu or thereabouts, which I still haven’t totally shaken.

That said, I spent quite a lot of the last four and a half days installed on the couch resting, recouperating, and dozing through a parade of movies, most of which I remember.

The highlights? I watched the entire original Planet of the Apes five-film cycle, thanks to a good deal on the Blue-Ray set at Costco a couple of weeks back. I’ve seen them all multiple times, though this was the first time I saw them all in such quick succession. It’s interesting to watch the aspirations for storytelling to go up while the production budget goes down as you progress through the series. I’ve also always been intrigued by the fact that (despite the big reveal at the end of film one), you can start the series pretty much anywhere and are able to coherently watch the films in order.

I also finally caught “The Rocketeer,” a movie that’s always been praised but I’ve never seen. And yeah, I can see how it was pretty much Joe Johnston’s demo reel for “Captain America.” Also, Jennifer Connelly in a 30s LA period piece is pretty much amazing.

I watched the usual “I’m sick and I give up” double-feature of “Bring It On” and “Real Genius,” two huge comfort films for me that I never get completely tired of.

Finally, I did some digging through the Star Trek catalog (thanks to the whole of it being available on Netflix instant now), and saw, among other things, the TNG episode “Q Who” which is the first introduction to the Borg. I remember this episode totally blowing my mind as a teenager, with the whole “things will never be the same!” vibe it brought with it. Those cyborg guys in the big cube ships were seriously ominous in that episode. Even with their being so de-fanged later in the series, it brought a smile to my face to see them at their most fearsome and unstoppable.

And yeah, in moments of lucidity, I finished off a playthrough of “Fallout: New Vegas” – hitting the level cap is pretty much the signal to hurry up and finish things already instead of just digging around in the rubble, isn’t it?

A couple of visits to the Lone Star State this time around, representing my slightly less-awkward alt-country phase, a latter day disc from a new favorite, and an underappreciated aberration from a vast, critically praised catalog that I still quite like a lot. Enough explanation?

♦- Dixie Chicks – Taking The Long Way: This record generated a bit of controversy when it came out, and justifiably so – a big extended middle finger to the hidebound nature of Nashville regarding the expectations the industry has for performers’ public personae. Heck, the cover of this record is probably more appropriate than the tasteful glamor shot that graces the front of this disc. “Not Ready to Make Nice” was the big single, of course, and directly addresses the whole “shut up and sing” fracas, while still wrapped up in a stylish Rick Rubin (better known for his hip hop and metal work…and Johnny Cash) production ready for the radio, but much of the rest of the record is just as much about challenging the status quo. The title track goes directly against the standard country themes of home, roots, and family through the voice of family black sheep that feels driven to blaze her own trail, and “Lubbock of Leave It” is probably even more agressive than “Make Nice” in it’s upending of expecatations of the powers that be, all to the accompaniment of a blistering bluegrass breakdown. The Chicks really came into their own with this record, and is probably the best of their output, if you like this sort of thing.

♦ – The Derailers – Reverb Deluxe: This record comes from another neo-traditionalist Texas combo, this time from Austin instead of Lubbock, and the style is more honky tonk than Bluegrass, but I still enjoy it. I didn’t come to this record via an investigation of the roots of American music, per se, but rather the fact that I was in a really crappy band with the bass player in high school. Even so, my acquiring of the disc for that reason did lead to my greater appreciation of the roots of country music, coming around the same time I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash and alt-country acts like Wilco and Uncle Tupelo. The sound on this record comes from the junction between early rock-n-roll and country, before they were different things – songs both uptempo and winsome (“Lovers Lie”, “Just One More Time”), dressed up in Rhinestones and pompadours. Plus, a genius honky-tonk cover of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” with more than a little disco tossed in for flavor.

♦ – Patty Griffin – Flaming Red: Griffin followed up the sparse, haunting “Living With Ghosts” with a very different sophomore effort; this record is as full of pounding drums and buzzsaw guitars as the previous record was devoid of them. It’s a different feel, to be sure, and like Suzanne Vega before her, changing up the style didn’t do her any favors with the label or with audiences. This record didn’t sell as well as the first, and a third record, “Silver Bell,” in the same vein, was rejected by the label and never released. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of great stuff here, even if it doesn’t fit the template established by the success of LWG. The title track, with it’s distorted everything and racing tempo signals a departure from the formula right away, as does the shuffling tempo and risque subject matter of “Wiggly Fingers.” However, there’s a lot of thoughtful and folkie here as well, amidst all the fuzztone and electronics – “Goodbye” is a touching meditation on dealing wth grief, and “Tony” tackled the subject of the bullying of gay teenagers leading to suicide with sensitivity, grace, and realism long before Dan Savage started up his excellent It Gets Better Project. I’m sorry this record didn’t sell better, though things worked out well enough for Patty Griffin in the years following it, with several more sucessful records and a bunch of high profile songwriting credits for folks like Emmylou Harris (who did a strange cover of “One Big Love” from this record) and the Dixie Chicks.

♦ – The Replacements – Pleased to Meet Me: I’ve covered a couple of replacements discs in this series, so I can dispense with all the usual blather about missed discovery. This record, in fact, I only picked up a couple of weeks ago at Plan 9 in Carytown, leaving me only one disc short of the whole commercial catalog. This disc continues the bands evolution from a rough-edged punk band to a more straight ahead rock singer-songwriter outfit. It includes what might be the band’s most prominent “hit,” “Can’t Hardly Wait,” a song whose title spawned a sadly underrated teen comedy, and the track’s presence under that film’s closing credits (horn section and all) is actually what clued me into the band’s existence in the first place. Also on this disc is the excellent “Alex Chilton,” about the prolific singer/guitarist o The Box Tops and Big Star, whose work was a big influence on the ‘Mats, as well as lots of other early alternative bands such as R.E.M. Interestingly, Chilton himself plays guitar on “Can’t Hardly Wait.” Definitely worth a listen.

Woke up this morning to the news that Steve Jobs had passed. Wherever you stood on the Mac vs. PC spectrum, the fact that you’re standing on that spectrum at all is largely due to the work of a couple of Steves (this one and Woz) in a garage in Cupertino.

I haven’t used Apple products with any regularity in years (I like hacking the hardware too much – Apples aren’t built for me), but for a lot of people, they were exactly the right product – they “just worked,” and looked really stylish while doing it. But, again, I wouldn’t be regularly swapping out hard drives, SIMMS, and PCI cards in my boxes at all if the Steves hadn’t built one from scratch first. Seeing that first Apple, hand-built wooden case and all, in the Smithsonian was a huge thrill for me a few years ago.

Probably more than Anyone else, Jobs brought personal computers to the masses. Including me. The first computer I ever got my nerdy little hands on was an Apple ][ + back in the third grade. That beige box changed my world.

Lately, it seems there’s been an incursion into my life of two lesser-considered “f” words: “Forgive” and “Forget.” Not a huge incursion, but just enough of one to set a few of my subconscious brain processes working on a problem it didn’t really have a definition for, but was nonetheless obvious. Three and a half decades of life experience and more college credit hours than I feel like counting right now continue to tell me that trying to solve a problem you haven’t clearly defined isn’t going to get you very far. In those cases, I write things.

Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I’m not sure I could

Forgive. Forget. These two words are often paired up in idiom, though in my mind, they’re too different concepts, all but incompatible in anything more complicated than the inconsequential. There are a lot of definitions out there for “forgive,” which in itself presents a problem. Again, if no one can agree on what a concept means, it’s rather difficult to implement that concept. I don’t like it in the context of “forgive and forget,” which many people interpret as tabula rasa – a complete writing off of whatever happened in the past and starting over from scratch*. I suppose that if all parties are entering such arrangement in good faith, and the writing off is equitable all around this could work, but the odds of such a thing happening, in my experience, is relatively low.

That’s really the big reason I personally divorce “forgive” from “forget” – “forgetting” something is really the act of cutting ourselves off from our past experience, which is our primary means of learning about life, ourselves, and others. Sure, many of our past experiences are painful and traumatic, but all are valuable, and by “forgetting” those experiences, we’re willfully ignoring those lessons.

I’m simply not a big fan of setting aside knowledge and experience. Past experience is the best predictor of future behavior. Lacking evidence of factors indicating change, things (and people) tend to continue along more or less as they were. Newton’s First Law applies to people in much the same way it applies to the idealized particles the scientist was theorizing about. Of course, theorized particles can’t choose to deny that external forces exist and continue along the same path in spite of them**.

“forgiving and forgetting” in the popular vernacular is, more often than not, an invitation to just continue the old dynamic that resulted in the conflict in the first place.

That said, I am a huge fan of forgiveness, but in another sense. I like forgiveness as a personal letting go of the cycle of conflict and pain***. Forgiveness, as giving up the pain of being hurt or betrayed by another, but not forgetting the actions that hurt us or hurt others, or the consequences that come from those actions, but learning from them, and building forward from that point…it’s a healthier option than resetting the clock at zero.

That’s not to say that I’m always successful at living life this way (or even successful a majority of the time), but it’s something to aspire to, and having goals is generally a good thing. And, in falling short of a goal, one can find an opportunity to learn more from the experience.

______________

*-this interpretation is probably rooted in Christian thinking, and while comforting for the sinner, is far from the only interpretation. The person petitioning for this kind of forgiveness from another is often also the kind of person who misinterprets the “turn the other cheek” concept, and expects the forgetter to just roll over and take further abuse. In fact, in the context of the society that spawned the historical Jesus and/or the writer of Matthew 5:39, the concept means pretty much the opposite: a demand to be treated with respect as an equal – it’s appealingly rabble-rousy.

**-Denial is one of humanity’s most common superpowers.

***-I came around from this definition initially from mishearing of the quote “Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me” as something like “…giving up being hurt by your hurting me.” Not that the first isn’t valid – it’s an integral part of breaking that cycle of conflict – but as I’m fond of saying, it’s more complicated than that. There’s actually a lot to like related to both versions in this piece which is almost surely copypasta to fill space on a web site, but it’s mostly good copypasta. That said, I’m more comfortable with the idea of letting go of the hurt, because that’s the kind of thing most of us don’t really have time or space for in our lives.

Sci-Fi musician and all-around decent guy John Anealio addresses in song one of the more interesting hazards of social networking with “Pr0nbot”:

Shot live at balticon this past year, where I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from this camera person.

This is what you people miss by not going to these convention things!

Whenever I see someone talking along the lines of the individual that slacktivist is talking about here, the whole business about how the founding fathers intended the United States to be a Christian nation, and the squinting at and bending of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment to try and justify that position, I like to point to the following three words: Treaty of Tripoli.

Because you see, there really isn’t more conclusive evidence of exactly what the founders were thinking than this: an official document, signed by President John Adams (For God’s sake, Sit Down!), who’s about as “Founding” a “Father” as you can point to, that contains the following sentence:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…

Does it really get any clearer than that?

…here are some kittens accidentally turning on the vacuum cleaner:

A great time was had by all at the TMBG w/ Jonathan Coulton show; nice to see so many friends there. Plus, you know, it rocked. Coulton w/ the band is really very good, and TMBG are as awesome as always (and not just because Flansburg hits me up on twitter now and then). Now, it’s just time for a lazy Friday, paying bills and doing a little shopping before just crashing out.

Here are a couple of photos, and then some tunes:

1. “Mr. Wrong” – that dog
2. “The Great Beyond” – Aimee Mann
3. “Beth” (live) – KISS
4. “South Dakota” – Liz Phair
5. “Golf Shirt” – Nerf Herder
6. “My Pillow is the Threshold” – Silver Jews
7. “Six Days on the Road” – Steve Earle
8. “Watching Over You” – Seabound
9. “Near You Always” – Jewel
10. “I Wanna Be Your Hero” – Def Leppard