A few more records I’ve been pulling randomly from my big box o’ CDs and listening to on long drives:

♦Halfway There: A Central Pennsylvania compilation: For a couple of years in the mid 90s, Central PA had something of a renaissance of original music. Music that people noticed and appreciated. People like record company A&R guys, on the lookout for the next Seattle to sell to the masses. History shows us, of course, that such a scene never happened. The spark of originality and verve soon fizzled. All the cool music venues closed, and live music fell largely back into the traditional crappy cover bands playing to sparse crowds in fire halls. Still, for those few years, Central Pennsylvania was in interesting place to be (I still feel I was fortunate to be involved in a small way as a fan and amateur open-mic participant), and several very good bands got (usually fleeting) major label contracts and videos on MTV and VH1 (back when that meant something); groups like Live, Fuel, and the Badlees, largely considered the kings of that appalachian hill. This record was one of the several compilations of Central PA talent that got released during those years. The Badlees lead this one off with their “big” hit “Angeline is Coming Home,” and are followed by a relatively slapdash collection of other groups, including scene standouts The Martini Bros., The Syn D’Cats, and element (once known as “motherfunk”). re-listening to the disc now, it brings back a little bit of a wave of nostalgia for the college years. Even though I can honestly say I feel no compunction to ever move back to the land of my youth, I’ll always have a soft spot for the music of that time and place.

♦Brian May – Back to the Light: The biggest surprise about this, the second solo project by the Queen guitarist, is that the traditional “Brian May sound” is doled out so sparingly. For most of the record, I’m reasonably sure May’s playing a typical late 80s/early 90s superstrat. What this serves to do, mostly, is cause involuntary fist-pumping and headbanging whenever the red special comes out, in all it’s compressed and double-tracked glory, even though the rest of May’s guitar playing is appropriately first rate. It’s interesting to hear May separate from Freddie Mercury, though this record goes to show how much of a collaborative project Queen really was, because large swaths of the record sound exactly like Queen, which really is a very good thing. I suspect lots of the song ideas that made it onto this record were probably originally conceived for Queen records, especially “Too Much Love Will Kill You” (indeed, research tells me that there’s a version of this ballad with Freddie Mercury vocals out there that I need to track down). If you’re a fan of Queen, or of musicianship in general, this one’s worth the effort to track down, especially tracks like the aforementioned “Too Much Love Will Kill You” and “Driven By You.” It’s also almost certainly the best rock record ever recorded by an astrophysics PhD, at least in a universe where Buckaroo Banzai remains a fictional character.

♦Dog’s Eye View –Happy Nowhere: At first glance, I’d classify this band as one of the lesser Hootie-likes from the early to mid-nineties, stuck firmly in the largely generic, rootsy flotsam and jetsam upon which 90s superstardom floated, along with contemporaries like Tonic, Sun Volt, Edwin McCain and my personal 90s favorites,The Badlees. At second glance, I’d still put Dog’s Eye View in that category, though as the Badlees earned my home town affection, each of these bands managed to command enough devotion in their own niches to draw the attention of major labels and earn a shot at the big leagues. In short (to paraphrase Stan Lee), every one of these bands is somebody’s favorite, and probably with good reason; that’s the filter through which I re-listened to Happy Nowhere. The band’s one breakthrough single (and the only track I’d ever heard before purchasing this) was the peppy ode to entropy “Everything Falls Apart,” which was catchy enough, but doesn’t stick out today as particularly special. Thankfully there is some really excellent stuff on this record. Overall, the band makes excellent use of dynamic range; going from quiet to loud and back very effectively, and making use of some atypical instrumentation to hit all the right emotional notes. Skip the radio-friendly pop and spend some time with the cello drones on “Waterline” to get a better feel for the band and what they’re capable of. Definitely a record that works for me a lot more fifteen years on than it did when it was shiny and new.

♦White Lion – Mane Attraction: White Lion was always an interesting case; musically, they were the epitome of 80s hair metal: huge outsized riffs and extra noodly guitar virtuosity on the rockers, and always extra tender and melodic on the ballads, which, along with how pretty singer Mike Tramp was, really drew in the female fan base. Lyrically, however, they were different than many of their peers, as they tended more toward social issues rather than projecting their machismo and sexuality; tackling, sometimes artfully, sometimes ham-handedly, topics like child abuse and environmentalism. This record’s no exception. the lead-off track, “Lights and Thunder” is essentially a heavy metal groove take on Lennon’s “Imagine,” and the power ballad “‘Till Death Do Us Part” is about as sweetly, sickeningly saccharine a paean to the wedding-industrial complex as I can possibly imagine (though I loathe to admit that I thought it was pretty good and would totally mark me as a sensitive desirable prospect when I was a stupid, socially inept teenager with absolutely no idea how “love” or “marriage” really worked). That isn’t to say that the single that caught my attention from this record, “Love Don’t Come Easy,” isn’t a remarkably well-constructed and infectious pop tune for a band like this, though it’s still not as good as “Wait,” the breakthrough single off of Pride.

I spent my evening taking in a screening of Super 8. Good movie; sort of like a lost Spielberg classic from the early 80s. Great sound design, and very evocative of the type of film it pays tribute to (even if such tribute is sometimes a little too on-the-nose). If you happen to find yourself in the position to, say, take in a rainy afternoon matinee, I’d definitely recommend it.

It has, however, convinced me that Star Trek was not a fluke: J.J. Abrams almost certainly gets paid by the lens flare.

Amanda posted an interesting piece today on the resurgence of Republicans (particularly this cycle’s crop of presidential aspirants) claiming that they once had Democratic tendencies, but had some experience that brought them to their senses and to the proper Republican path. She points out, rightly, many of these stories are merely fabrications to endear the candidates to certain segments of the party, particularly Evangelical Christians, who thrive on the spectacle of “Road to Damascus” style conversion stories, particularly from evangelists themselves, who often claim outlandish youthful lifestyles of drugs, orgies, black magick and Satanic ritual before “seeing the light” and dedicating their lives to ministry.

It’s a good piece, I highly recommend reading it, as it touches on other interesting points regarding shifting party affiliation (how people in the aggregate tend not to do it, and how those individuals who do shift, but shift left, don’t make a big deal about it).

However, What hit home the most for me were a few of the comments on the piece, which sort of expanded on the premise, and seemed awfully familiar. For example, I’ve known too many people like those that commenter “RickMassimo” describes:

Don’t Forget the angle of “I was a Democrat like all irresponsible childen are, but now that I’m a serious responsible adult I’m a Republican who knows How The Real World Works…”

There’s also the bonus of these types of people generally being assholes trying to lord their “maturity” over you to try to minimize your status in the relationship. It’s the classic “bully” conversion story, and usually soon followed up by the whole “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 30, you have no brain” nonsense.

I really like the way commenter “Tyro” elaborates on it; I think they’re on to something:

It’s also a status ambition. Sales, accounting, medicine, etc., depend partly on projecting an image, and if you want to create a veneer of respectability, especially if you have few other class markers to fall back on, being a “Republican” is a good way to do that. I’m not sure these guys were democrats so much as politically apathetic college students who liked drinking and watching the big game on Saturday. But when it came to a desire to acquire some more social and professional status as an “adult,” joining the local Republican party and the rotary club probably seemed like the right thing to do.

I also think that this is the origin of the trop of liberals as “elites”- because among middle and upper middle class professionals having the freedom to be a Democrat and a liberal means that you have a certain amount of freedom and social capital that they do not -since they’re socially obligated to silently (or vocally) agree with their republican bosses and colleagues to appear “respectable.”

That really does kind of sum it up. The folks who tend to use this sort of justification for their politics, for the most part, haven’t really fundamentally changed their politics, as they never had much invested in politics anyway. They merely traded adherence to one predominant peer group for another, because it’s what the herd expected of them; and for those sort of people, total conformity with the perceived social order is paramount. It’s this type of person who generally goes into the bullying business, and justify it by believing they’re doing the good work of enforcing social order.

I’m really tempted to totally buy in to the idea in the second paragraph, about how liberal got labelled as “elite.” There’s something to that, I think, but it feels like it’s very close to tooting one’s horn about “how it’s really we who are special, not them” (same reason that I feel kind of hesitant about Paul Graham’s otherwise good essay “Why Nerds are Unpopular”); and despite my inner persecuted nerd’s desire to go there, I recognize that it’s not the most mature way to behave, because even though someone’s an asshole, they still might have something important to contribute, so you can’t immediately dismiss them out of hand. That said, the thesis is probably the best way I’ve seen to explain away the dichotomy of the conservative position that liberals are both inferior to “real” Americans and an elite class to be knocked down off the high horse.

Oh well; I don’t have a particularly good way to end this. I always have a little trouble sticking the landing on these sorts of things.

Best to just let it go.

Had a doctor’s appointment today, and my blood pressure kicks ass. What a difference a year makes; comparing my numbers from last year to those from this morning, it’s a wonder I wasn’t half-dead…though i actually probably was. Lifestyle changes do make a difference at heading off a crappy hand at the genetic poker table.

In any case, that’s all I have for today. I have errands and stuff to run, and some impatient young ladies waiting for me to go do them. Here is a list of songs:

1. “Your Complex” – Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
2. “Never Say Never” – that dog
3. “Something Fast” – Sisters of Mercy
4. “From Auschwitz to Ipswitch” – Jarvis Cocker
5. “Adeline” – Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
6. “Todd The T1000” – Jonathan Coulton
7. “Severe Tire Damage” – TMBG
8. “Walk Your Valley” – Indigo Girls
9. “No Other One” – Weezer
10. “The Boys of Summer” – The Hooters

More little record reviews. I hope I’m not repeating myself.

♦Never The Bride: I bought this record after hearing the band’s amazing version of “Goin’ to California” on Encomium, a Led Zeppelin tribute album. I know very little about them, other than the fact that they’ve got a vocalist with an amazing female rock voice; a voice, that sadly ought to be out front on songs with more aggressive, rockin’ arrangement than you’ll find on this particular record. I get the impression that in a live setting, this band will make you beg for mercy (assuming you stop yourself from dancing), but the production here is really understated: lots of twinkly piano and arpeggiated acoustic guitars. I get the feeling that the major label producers stifled some of the rawness to attempt to make things more “marketable.” There’s some nice songwriting here, and some pretty nice guitar playing, though it gets lost in the mix for me. Leading off the record is the really strong “Saving Grace,” and “Cry Out” is a really great song, though it’s got some really trite “cheer up” lyrics over some interesting minor chords – kind of distracting.

♦ Barenaked Ladies: Born on A Pirate Ship: Maybe You Should Drive is probably my favorite BNL record, though this one maintains a lot of the same sort of energy the band had in the mid-nineties. They’d broadened their songwriting horizons a bit since the whimsy of Gordon, writing some really interesting dark, sad, literate lyrics over some intricate, poppy melodies (the dichotomy of which works exactly the way the song mentioned in the previous review doesn’t), but still keeping the quirk that caught my attention early on, without totally giving over to it as it feels like they did once they hit it big a few years after this. Standouts include “When I Fall”, “The Old Apartment” (the first real US hit), and the throat-tearing vocals on “Break Your Heart.” My favorite track though, is “Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank,” which has some great Jim Creegan string playing and the unlikely subject of some guy who stalked Anne Murray. Also, I saw the band on this tour, in a relatively tiny dive in Philly; they were still unknown enough at that point that we got to hang around with the band post-show and shoot the bull for really quite a long while. It was very cool.

♦ Def Leppard: Retro-Active: Rather than a “greatest hits” package, this is a collection of rarities and B-sides recorded between 1984 and 1993. While never a superfan of Def Leppard, I always enjoyed their stuff, as it was always more complex and better crafted instrumentally than most of their “hair metal” peers. I still own a cassette copy of Hysteria, but I doubt it works anymore, as I played it so much. There’s some really good stuff on here (most of the B-sides from the Hysteria and Adrenalize sessions), and some interesting, against type stuff; like a “From the Inside,” a little acoustic track with the Irish band Hothouse Flowers backing them up. It also has the first recorded Def Leppard tracks with Vivian Campbell (there he is again) in the band. It’s not as tight as Hysteria, but it’s a good and worthy listening experience.

♦ Van Halen: Van Halen 3: The first time Van Halen switched singers, fandom was divided, though many eventually accepted Sammy Hagar as a worthy, if somewhat different, replacement for David Lee Roth. When Sammy was fired/driven out/quit to sell tequila, and the band eventually got around to finding a replacement in Gary Cherone from Extreme, however, the resulting record was almost universally hated. That said, there really is, IMHO, some really good stuff on that record – the first seven tracks are really quite good, though it really does start to get excessively noodly and unfocused after “Fire In The Hole,” and stays that way all the way through “How Many Say I,” the overly indulgent and not very good piano ballad featuring Eddie on lead vocals. That front half of the record, particularly on stuff tunes like “Without You”, is pretty good, especially when the instrumentation tends more toward Cherone’s vocal style (i.e. when the band sounds more like Extreme than Van Halen). Given the general internal turmoil Van Halen has, I’m not surprised Cherone only lasted one record, but that record (and the tour, which was pretty great – Cherone and Michael Anthony did some great work on the Roth tunes, though the live show fell apart when they hit the weak stuff from the back half of “3”), was not as much of a catastrophe as everyone makes it out to be.

Watched the mid-season Doctor Who finale, “A Good Man Goes To War,” this weekend. I shall not spoil anything for you, though I will gloat that I know definitively who River Song really is, and it’s quite likely that you don’t.

It’s really quite a good “finale” to tide viewers over until the show comes back in September, even if it does kind of suffer from a bit of RTD-style series-end overkill, but unlike RTD bringing back every semi-important guest star from the previous few seasons for one line apiece, new showrunner Steven “Blink” Moffat fills out the spectacle with a whole mess of new guest stars who we’ve never seen before, each of whom offer up more compelling backstories in their first thirty seconds of screen time than Rose Tyler managed in three seasons.

I mean, I know I would drop everything to watch a weekly series about Madame Vastra, the sword-wielding Silurian and her trusty human assistant/lover Jenny, fighting crime on the soot-stained cobblestone streets of Victorian London.

Seriously, Moffat, get busy making that now. I might even be willing to wait a little while for new episodes of Sherlock.

Of course, I would also accept “Nurse Potato Head: the series” if that’s all you can manage.

I don’t normally write much about the specifics of work, but I thought this little thing was kind of funny. Names and such have been not just changed, but totally eliminated, to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

The project I work on now is an awful lot like the last couple of projects I worked on (it could be argued that it’s just the latest phase of the same project, but whatever); as such, I’m often asked questions about how things were handled on previous iterations.

Today, for example, I got pulled aside and asked about a particular piece of correspondence that needs to be sent out to private industry partners notifying them that the organization is making some changes to it’s internal systems, and how that might or might not their experience in dealing with us during the changeover. This is a pretty standard sort of thing, and now the new organization is starting to craft theirs. I was asked if I knew where we might find a copy of a previous one to act as a template.

Dutifully, I sent out messages to the folks I knew who were around back then, asking if anyone had a copy lying in a disused folder on their hard drive or buried in the back of a cabinet or something. Sure enough, nobody remembered having one, but pointed me to other people who did, so I sent them emails…it’s the circle of office life.

This had been going on for a couple of hours. I’d gone to a couple of meetings, and come back to find that that second round of people didn’t have anything either, but certain other people (who more often than not, fell into the Venn overlap with the first round) might know something…

Then I had an epiphany. I typed five words into google.

Yep. First result.

Being off the road last week, I had less time than usual with my car CD player (at home, I’ve been mostly pushing Pandora Radio through the Roku box, which is convinced that I should really like Eminem’s “Love The Way You Lie,” and damn, if it isn’t growing on me), but, here’s the latest batch of mini-reviews/reflections on the shiny plastic discs I pull out of my disorganized collection:

♦ 10,000 Maniacs – Our Time In Eden: So far, the records that have been falling into this feature are largely examples of output from the has-been or never-was. This one’s different; Our Time In Eden is arguably the product of a group at the top of their game and peak of their talent and success, right before Natalie Merchant picked up and left to go solo (I’ll probably get to Tiger Lily at some point, I know it’s in the box). It’s an excellent record, a perfect example of late 80s early 90s alternative pop. Though Merchant was definitely “the face” (though the band continues with various lineups, they never hit like they did with her) of the band, what struck me on this re-listen was the amazing and understated guitar work – there’s some really great jangly leads running counterpoint to the vocal melody that are really impressive. Although I wasn’t listening to this kind of thing regularly at the time, to me today, this is what the early 1990s sound like, and that’s a good thing. Finally, I expect that I’d think more highly of a lot of my peers if “These Are Days” was in the running for class song, rather than Boyz 2 Men’s “End of the Road” at high school v2.0 (and almost every other small town high school ever*).

♦ Whitesnake: Greatest Hits: It’s interesting that it’s taken me this long to get to a “Greatest Hits” collection, as I own quite a few (it seemed a more economical way to replace aging cassette tapes with digital media). The inherent problem with Greatest Hits records is the fact that they are, by design, collections of disparate items, rather than cycles of songs that (might have been) designed to hang together as a cohesive whole. That’s not a huge problem with this record, because with Whitesnake, you pretty much know what you’re getting – David Coverdale and a constantly revolving cast of band members doing their best to carry the British heavy blues tradition in the absence of Led Zeppelin, and occasionally hitting it right, and otherwise making stylish heavy power ballads that make DJing at the strip club a lot easier for those who find themselves in that vocation (seriously, there isn’t a song here that doesn’t immediately conjure images of a girl on a pole…all the videos with Tawny Kitaen didn’t help). Overall, though, there’s some good work here, especially a couple of gems I’d forgotten from Slip of the Tongue, mostly due to Steve Vai’s guitar playing. Final thoughts? “Judgement Day” really, really wants to be “Kashmir” when it grows up, but even if it fails at that, it’s probably still going to keep the crown for the most effective use of the theme from world 1-2 in a hair metal song.

♦ Sheryl Crow: This one, the self-titled follow-up to Tuesday Night Music Club is the first Sheryl Crow record to come after she became SHERYL CROW, international pop star. That said, it still carries a lot of the same feel as TNMC; even though it spawned a ton of huge radio singles. As a whole, it still manages to keep that stripped-down, slinky low-fi sound that’s all over TNMC, but people mostly don’t talk about when referring to it. In context, top-10 hits like “If It Makes You Happy” just fit as part of the whole, and work for the listener in different ways than if it was sandwiched between “The Macarena” and Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars” on a top 40 station in the summer of ’96. It’s a great listen in terms of being a solid rock album, with deeper cuts like “Sweet Rosalind” and “Oh Marie” being just as catchy as the charting singles. I honestly fell of the Sheryl Crow train after this record – if the later albums have the same vibe as the first two, I might have to revisit the catalog.

♦ Huey Lewis & The News: Sports: First off, please just insert your own Patrick Bateman/American Psycho joke here, because we’ve already heard them all. the av club recently did a big feature on this record as part of their “We’re No. 1” series, and it’s really worth reading; an interesting discussion of the record’s place in pop culture, and the machinations behind a middle-of-the-road 60s-inspired everyman managed to ascend to the height of pop stardom for a couple of years in the mid-eighties. A lot of people of my general vintage claim this as one of the first records they ever bought – I remember the songs on the radio, and I think I had a copy of the “If This Is It” 45rpm single; but I honestly don’t know where I got this CD. I think, as the Wayne’s World joke goes, this one was issued to suburban kids in the ’80s as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was in the ’70s. That said, the actual experience of listening to the record was kind of an exercise in nostalgia – despite all the really interesting, innovative stuff going on in the music world in 84-85, for so much of the world, including sheltered little ten year old me, this record was rock & roll. I couldn’t help but hum along with all the big radio hits (even if I was singing the lyrics to “I Want A New Duck” instead – thanks, ‘Weird’ Al!). What struck me most, though, was exactly how many synths there are all over the record (including the iconic MIDI handclap!), and that I really liked some of the dark compressed guitar tone on the rhythm parts under all the “Woah Oh!s” and saxophone solos.

_______________

*-except, that is, for high school v1.0, which chose “Dreams” by Van Halen, which wasn’t an awful choice, all told (and not surprising given the almost total metal-focus of that particular construct). Self-help book schmaltz goes down a little better with a driving electric guitar holding it up.

For the first time in who knows how long, we had a bunch of friends over for for what you might call a party. An evening of food, beverages, and, as is often the case with this group of people, Rock Band. As I type this, things have wound down, the guests have left, and the clean-up is largely done (yeah, it’s early…we’re old.). I think things went well. Everyone seemed to have a good time. I hope they did. That said, I’m wrestling a bit with that voice inside my head that keeps saying “bah, they were just humoring you, and are spending their drive home laughing at you and your pathetic attempts at hosting an entertaining evening!” Not that I realistically think or would ever believe for a minute that my great friends would actually be like that, but that voice, that little gremlin of self doubt, is forever there taunting me, because there’s just enough of a certain kind of unpleasantness in my past to feed it.

I really wanna strangle that voice.

Why? because that voice really makes it difficult to simply loosen up and enjoy the time with friends whose company is really wonderful and pleasant. Seriously, damn all those times in the past when people treated me exactly that way, and left me broken enough to forever hold, however small, the expectation that things are going to eventually go south; that no matter how unambiguously great things are, the other shoe’s eventually going to drop. It’s a truly crappy thing to have to deal with.

In any case, I’m going to try not to listen, because that’s what you do. Doesn’t always make it easy.

….finally -ectomied.

Three back-to-back conference call meetings running for a period of over four hours. It was truly a test of endurance, which I guess I passed. Barely.

At least it’s over.

On a totally unrelated note, I took some online training this week. The course included a little through-line plot involving a cast of cartoon office mates. And in the last module, they all had a relaxed meeting at a lakeside resort…SURROUNDING A PORTAL TO HELL!!!!!

No, it’s not that funny, but it’s that kind of day…I laugh at lame jokes to keep from throwing myself into traffic.