My darling friend Lori. We had David Cook, rock and roll, and deep love for each other. So I know that this video would have made her squee with delight. DC, kids, and Bon Jovi.
Just a moment of real sadness for the day. Then I remember she’s kick my ass for being mopey.
It is completely irrational. They’re only a band. Many other bands I love have broken up. Many of those bands have gotten back together for reunion tours. I didn’t even cry when the Smiths disbanded, when I was a child and more prone to overreaction.
But when the news of R.E.M.’s break-up came over my Twitter feed yesterday, I was rendered speechless. It’s not even as if the news was shocking, per se. The band has been uneven since Bill Berry left in the late nineties, and their different projects have taken over their lives.
Whatever.
It still hurt.
Obvious. But correct.
This is where the phrase “No shit, Sherlock” comes into play.
Some music about New York, love, loss, and everything in between after the cut. It’s ten years worth of thought, anger, frustration, relief and love in several YouTube videos- politics, hymns, accidents of time, and Steve Earle.
Kjeld Pedersen, my grandfather
It was just on the edges of town, this plot of land with a white house, surrounded by dense trees. There was a gravel drive, and the cars all parked in a mini parking lot, up against the fence. We kids would run all over, hiding in the trees. Not one inch of that land was undiscovered by us.
I used to have a Facebook page, until the site crashed my computer, and then I had lost my password. So I gave up on it. But I finally caved and went back. Come visit the site’s page when you get a chance, and I do have a personal site as well. That one you have to find on your own, but I’ll gladly give you this link to the site page.
Desert Island Discs, the long running BBC radio programme, recently uploaded a tonne of their archived programming from the late 90s till now on to iTunes. I highly recommend the series, which uses a parlour game where one person (in this case, a celeb of some type) chooses eight songs, one book, plus a luxury of some sort (which cannot be a person, nor can it be an iPod thanks to Nick Hornby) to be cast away with. I have posted a desert island list before (three in fact). But I have decided, while listening to a slew of these programmes this last week on my walks home from work, to play the BBC game.
My picks are after the cut.
Watching the events unfold over the day in Wisconsin, where the Governor is attempting to break unions by essentially eliminating the right to have collective bargaining, I got my ire up. I’m an old-fashioned socialist at heart, and I believe that unions have only made the world a better place. The romantic ideas the right have about Union free lives is truly frightening. They assume that employers are all benevolent creatures who will allow their good fortune trickle down to their workers and all is sunshine and lollipops and rainbows. My life immersed in history tells me differently, as the working class is always poor, and the upper classes are always richer and richer.
In celebration and in solidarity, I have put together a music playlist for the workers of the world, songs that celebrate unions and tell the stories of why they became so necessary.
My TV season was a wash. I spent the better part of the last half of 2010 watching things from the UK simply because American TV SUCKS ASS. Music was pretty uninspiring outside of maybe thirty albums I heard that didn’t make me want to top myself. And every fucking books list is praising Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom like it’s the greatest thing EVER WRITTEN IN THE HISTORY OF MOVEABLE TYPE but in fact, they are wrong and Franzen is an overhyped twat who deserves an enema of 180 proof alcohol just because I imagine that hurts. That, and Emma Donoghue’s Room was the best book of 2010.
I might be taking out a year’s worth of frustration on Franzen.
I noticed an uptick in page views earlier when I began to refine the piece I was writing about Stevie Wonder while listening to my slightly (very) warped vinyl copy of Talking Book. Checking stats led me to see that there was a high number of people clicking through from Roger Ebert’s magnificent blog, where I had posted a comment earlier.
I read Roger’s blog religiously, but I am not a commenter. His readership is so intelligent I tend to get anxious about sharing my opinion. Today I couldn’t help myself. When I returned after seeing the spike in activity. I saw that he had written a very lovely comment about my blog in his response.
Naturally, as he is a personal hero of mine, this caused me to go into a slightly unplanned nervous breakdown ( I usually plan my breakdowns to coincide with long weekends).
Roger Ebert is an incredibly generous man, we all know that. I’m just happy he thought that my little blog had something he liked. So I thank him for the kind words, and I thank his readers for at least giving a peek. I don’t expect them to stay. I’m just surprised they came at all to begin with.
