In the garden with Run-DMSteve

Posted: August 15, 2014 in Miscellaneous, Record reviews
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Sometime around 1990 I broke a shovel while trying to lever a stump out of my wife’s garden. I walked up the hill to our neighborhood hardware store and asked one of the boys there for a good shovel. I’d like to think this was bearded Greg, our favorite. Whoever it was handed down a shovel from the wall rack and said, “This is our best.”

Greg wasn’t kidding. I used that shovel in the yards and gardens of the three houses we’ve owned, digging holes for the A-Z of green growing things that Special D has planted and digging out the remains of plants that displeased her. I moved rocks. I dug post holes. I dug a ditch when one of our pipes burst underground and the plumber, who couldn’t maneuver a back hoe in the confined space at the side of our house, threatened to do it himself for a breathtaking $100 per hour.

I levered out many a stump of a plant or tree that just didn’t work anymore. I’m good at it; so good, in fact, that my metal name is Stümp Gryndr, though the sporting press refers to me as Death to Rooted Things. Here’s an azalea stump I vanquished in 2009, with a 35-pound corgi, the late Teddy, for scale:

Teddy digs it out 0909
Notice: No corgis were hurt or inconvenienced in the extraction and removal of this stump. This corgi received a transfer of one (1) Alpo Snap as soon as he was released from duty.

But last week I fought a four-year-old vine maple stump and the stump won. My shovel gave me 25 years of good service. I wish I could give you the name of the manufacturer but I long ago wore any corporate iconography off the handle.

Recycle, reuse, spend some intimate time with your tools
As a New Englander, I hate waste. What was I going to do with a broken shovel? Turn it into a stake for the garden. You pound these into the corners and when you drag your hoses across the lawn the stake keeps you from decapitating something your spouse might get wicked mad about.

Here’s the patient before surgery.

Shovel 1

Cut off the blade. I took it to my local recycler and lowered it, after a moment of respectful silence, into the metals bin.

Shovel 2

I sliced off the rubber jacket, which amazingly had stayed snug to the handle all these years, and exposed the original color of the wood.

Shovel 3

Then, through a mysterious process known only to me and Black & Decker, I sharpened one end.

Shovel 4

The result is a stake that’s just over a yard long (one full meter to the Russian Federation reader who visited this blog today). Use a heavy hammer to bury it about halfway. Here’s a stake I made earlier this summer:

Shovel 5

What if you don’t want to wait until you break a shovel?
You could invite me over to break one. Better yet, go to estate sales. The people who are passing away now and taking leave of their earthly possessions bought long-handled garden tools in an era when those handles were made of a dense wood that lasts a long time underground and exposed to the weather. I usually find them for a dollar or two. Recycle the metal business end and I won’t yell at you!

On the day I broke my shovel, I walked up the hill to our neighborhood hardware store and asked one of the boys there for a good shovel. I told him my story and said, “I’ll be back for my next shovel around 2040.” He said, solemnly, “I will not be working here.”

Next post: I’m gonna fill you full of lead (No. 2-5/10).

Random Pick of the Day
Petra Haden and Bill Frisell, Petra Haden and Bill Frisell (2003)
Includes their exquisite covers of Stevie Wonder’s “I Believe” and Coldplay’s “Yellow,” though you also have to put up with their perspectives on “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

Random Pan of the Day
Randy Newman, Land of Dreams (1988)
Some beautiful piano work here, particularly on “Dixie Flyer,” but most of it sounds like Mr. Newman’s many many many soundtracks. The rap parodies were funny in 1988, if you were white and nervous about rap. And yet this is the guy who gave us Sail Away (how can you beat “You Can Leave Your Hat On”?) and the soundtrack to The Natural (which brought the whole movie to life).

What I’m doing on my summer vacation

Posted: August 10, 2014 in Miscellaneous, Record reviews
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I’m back and I thank you for your unreasoning faith in my ability to write something worth reading. I hope you’re all having a summer filled with invigorating sunshine and refreshing cold drinks, unless you’re one of my Southern Hemisphere readers, in which case I hope you’re having a winter filled with, well, if it’s winter where you are you’d probably enjoy a hot afternoon and bottles of beer in a tub full of ice.

I have traveled and done and seen much since I took my break at the end of June, including my birthday, a trip to the Old Country (Massachusetts), a road trip into the mysterious green half of Washington state, the annual Clarion West Write-a-thon, a tidal wave of new music, the Prince Project, the  never-ending story that is my novel, and a freelance client who acts rationally and pays promptly (I can’t figure out what con they’re trying to run on me).

I’m going to take the time this week to catch up. To get going, and to stretch my brain with something easy, here are some shout-outs:

The Rue De L’Espoir on Hope Street in the old section of Providence, Rhode Island, is supposedly French but serves a four-star U.S. American breakfast. When you’ve finished eating, you can walk around the beautiful urban campus of Brown University with its many 19th-century buildings and of course Wilson Hall, where I played chess in high school.

There’s not much to recommend in my hometown of Somerset, Mass., except for the ice cream, my favorite English teacher, and my parents:

60 years
And yet I am so young…

When Loyal Reader Gravel Ax was a high school student in Bellingham, Washington, she had a friend who wanted to be a writer. He didn’t want to stay up late trying to write at home, where he had his parents and siblings to contend with, he wanted to go to a café the way Hemingway went to a café in Paris in 1922. But in Bellingham in that medieval era, this poor boy’s only option was the Denny’s by the freeway. At least they gave him free refills on the coffee.

These days in Bellingham you’d have no trouble spilling your tortured soul all over town because Bellingham no longer shuts down so everyone can go home and eat meatloaf for dinner. Special D and I found this out at 9pm on a Monday when we tried to buy ice cream downtown and were confronted with a line of 100 hip Bellinghamsters in front of us.

At least three of my Loyal Readers are more expert in Bellingham culture than I am, including Gravel Ax and Seattleites Accused of Lurking and his no-nonsense sidekick, Katzniss. But here are two places to remember:

At Blue Fin Sushi, the atmo dial is stuck at zero. The place is located in a minimall on a Gasoline Alley sort of thoroughfare (the Denny’s from three paragraphs ago is nearby). This space used to be a nail salon, or a dog wash, or an auto insurance agency, and if Blue Fin does well and moves to swankier accommodations, it will be again. But the sushi is terrific, generous, and cheap!

Bellingham has plenty of great restaurants now, but The Table is still one of my favorites, particularly in the winter. Do you like pasta? If you don’t you’re no good!

Bellingham may change but the Cascades are pretty much the same, not counting the occasional volcanic eruption. If you can’t get to Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker will pinch-hit. As part of our continuing project to revisit hikes we haven’t done in 20 years, this summer we took on Heliotrope Ridge. The view was stunning and the water in the three creeks we crossed stunningly cold. These creeks are fed by glaciers, and as the sun warms the ice the creeks rise and run faster. (The creek you crossed in the morning is not the same body of water when you encounter it again in the afternoon, on your way down.) Naturally, once the sun sets, the creeks drop and run slower. After all these years of hiking, it finally occurred to me that snowmelt has tides.

Other Mt. Baker hikes we can vouch for: Railroad Grade and one we re-hiked last summer, Skyline Divide:

Skyline Divide 18 years later Aug 13
Run-DMSteve conquers the wilderness.

That’s all for today. When I return in a few days…we’re gonna get dirty.

Random Pick of the Day
Cream, Disraeli Gears (1967)
This is a very British album, eccentric and sly, more like The Kinks or Sgt. Pepper’s than Led Zeppelin’s blues-based storm and drain. But when Cream gets heavy, they reinvent gravity. “Sunshine of Your Love” is that rare thing, a love song that would also fit the soundtrack of the apocalypse.

Random Pan of the Day
Ginger Baker, Why? (2014)
Years ago, the first answer in any pop trivia contest was “Ginger Baker.” (Just as the first answer in any baseball trivia contest of that era was “Ron Santo.”*) The years have passed but Baker drums on, mastering any genre that strikes his fancy, this time jazz. He’s assembled a good group of musicians, and his drumming is impeccable, but I wasn’t moved by Why? and the many extended jams. On the album cover, Baker makes Peter O’Toole look like a supermodel.

* Unless it was Sal Bando.

It never gets easier

Posted: June 22, 2014 in Dog reviews, Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews, Writing
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Cleo at her command post
This dog is guarding the house.

We had to put our dog Cleo to sleep yesterday. She had been gradually losing control of her back legs, but her descent had accelerated and she was spending more time just sitting, inspecting the grass around her and taking sensor readings of the air. It was five months to the day since I first saw her wobbling at high speed around the pen where she was being held. How can one undersized corgi become an oversized part of your life in just five months?

On her last day, Cleo slept on the bed, ate lots of treats, rolled in the grass, took a few steps on her favorite trail, charmed one last stranger, and (briefly) chased a squirrel. That would be a good day for most humans. I’ll miss the war she waged against the chickadees in our backyard, the way she swam through the undergrowth in the forest, and how she would kick me awake at 3am because she was dreaming about chasing down a moose. Like most of us, in her dream life she was invincible.

Cheryl Strayed wrote in Wild, “The universe takes things away and never gives them back.” But the universe also gives you gifts. Cleo was a gift to us in a dark hour, and we’ll never regret taking a chance on her.

Cleo's tulip parade 041414
Tulips on parade.

Horace Silver, 1928-2014
Horace Silver was my favorite jazz pianist, though I didn’t discover him until his 1996 release, The Hard-Bop Grandpop. The man was a jazz institution and I came to him very late in his career. Two earlier albums that I know and can recommend are Blowin’ the Blues Away (1959) and especially Song for My Father (1964). RIP.

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this/forgive me if it goes astray
Let’s change the mood here. The Prince Project is on hold (just when were getting to the most notorious albums) because I am once again participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. I’m not going to blog about it because doing that last summer was insane. Instead, I’m signing off. See you on August 2. Enjoy your summer!

Random Pick of the Day
The Beatles, Revolver (1966)
Four things strike me as I listened to Revolver after many years of not listening to it:

One is that The Beatles embarked on 14 separate explorations of new musical pathways and brought each of them home in a concise 2-3 minutes. Arcade Fire or Pink Floyd would still be playing.

Two is that the album begins with something as mundane as taxes and ends with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (Do the Tibetans read any fun books?)

Three is that “She Said She Said” would fit into any alt-rock radio playlist in 1986, 1996, 2006, and probably in 2166.

Four is that The Beatles’ experiment with Indian music is like punk’s flirtation a decade later with reggae – interesting, but only to a point, which in The Beatles’ case will come the following year on Sgt. Pepper.

A must-own album. But you already do.

It’s you I really wanna drive

Posted: June 12, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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Dirty Mind
Prince
1980

Chapter 3 of the Prince Project. I really should’ve thought of a better name for this.

Here we are with Prince’s third release, Dirty Mind. In just three seconds short of 30 minutes, Prince creates an irresistible dance album and, by my guess, the first sexually explicit (yet still funny) mainstream album.

I never was the kind to make a fuss
When he was there
Sleepin’ in between the two of us

He played almost every note himself. And he was just 22!

Although Dirty Mind has more rock to it than his first two releases, it’s still a disco album – the best ever recorded. It’s as if Prince has mastered all the disco idioms and can now not only play them flawlessly, he can do whatever he wants with them.

“Dirty Mind,” “Uptown,” and “Partyup” are seamless, unstoppable, and oh-so-danceable. “Dirty Mind,” the opener, is guaranteed to pump up your jam. “Uptown” is everything The Trammps wanted to do with “Disco Inferno” but couldn’t because they were basically not very good. “Partyup,” the closer, is an anti-war dance number. The writing on this one isn’t exactly J.D. Salinger (“They got the draft/I just laugh/Fightin’ war is such a fuckin’ bore/party up”), but who expected this on a party record?

Prince doesn’t stay within the safety of the disco ball’s glittering glow, either. “Head,” the moving saga of a man who receives oral sex from a woman who is on the way to her own wedding (“I came on your wedding gown”), is R&B, while “Sister” shows that Prince had been listening closely to the Nick Lowe/Dave Edmonds roots-rock movement…though those guys never wrote about incest. “When You Were Mine” is a peppy number about the end of a ménage à trois that was covered most famously by Cindy Lauper on her debut and most obscurely by guys I vaguely remember from my first years in Seattle, Hi-Fi (on their 1983 release, Moods for Mallards).

Dirty Mind is the first Prince album that demands to be played loud. Now this is what I call sweatin’ to the oldies.

What I was doing at 22: The only thing I’m going to mention is that in the year I turned 22, I saw an amazing performance by Harlan Ellison. First he and his typewriter spent the afternoon in the window of the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore on Boylston Street in Boston, writing a complete short story. That evening he gave a talk at MIT that lasted almost four hours (about the length of a Springsteen concert) and was never less than riveting. It went on so long that the buses stopped running and I had to walk four miles back to my apartment. I kept thinking, I could do that! I haven’t – but I’m still game to try.

Rolling Stone’s best albums of 1980:

Winner:
London Calling – The Clash

Runners-up:
The River – Bruce Springsteen
Remain in Light – Talking Heads
Doc At the Radar Station – Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
Le Chat Bleu – Mink De Ville

Random Pick of the Day
Killing Joke, Wardance (1980)
This album scared me in 1980. It was murky and nihilistic. It made their cousins, Gang of Four, sound about as scary as the Partridge Family. Thirty-four years later, it seems clear and crisp. Killing Joke is in complete control. I’d buy Wardance just for one song, “Requiem.”

 

Orchestral maneuvers in the hood

Posted: June 11, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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A few nights ago, the Seattle Symphony and Seattle homey Sir Mix-A-Lot performed the latter’s 1992 magnum opus , the subtle and insightful “Baby Got Back.” (“My anaconda don’t want none/Unless you got buns, hun.”) How can anything this stupid be this funny?

AllMusic.com critic Steve Huey writes:

Seldom does a novelty song spark such a fierce cultural debate: “Baby Got Back” touched on hot-button issues of race and sex with a cheerful, good-natured crudeness that was guaranteed to offend. Was it a token of appreciation for women whose body types were rarely given positive cultural attention, or just another sexist objectification? Was it an indictment of narrow, white-dictated beauty standards that left many black women (and the black men who loved them) out in the cold, or did it simply build up one type of woman by denigrating another?

What “Baby Got Back” has got is unimaginative writing and lots of it (700+ words). The music isn’t even as good as MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” and frankly, no one cares that he won’t let you touch it. Plus the dancers in the official “Baby Got Back” video are models. They don’t actually got back. That’s right, in a video celebrating women with generous derrierès, you can’t actually show women with generous derrierès. Federal law.

But I’m seriously impressed that after 22 years, “Baby Got Back” is so closely integrated into the mainstream that when Sir Mix-A-Lot encouraged the ladies in the audience to join him onstage, about three dozen stepped right up. They were mostly white, mostly in their twenties, and they knew most of the moves from the video.

So give a cheer or two for Sir Mix-A-Lot, a rap pioneer and a very hard worker, for sparking this fierce cultural debate. I hope he sells lots of tickets for the Seattle Symphony. But I doubt it.

Random Pick of the Day
The Breeders, Last Splash (1993)
The Breeders, a band led by the sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, follow the grunge pattern closely: the singing sucks and the guitars sound like you’re standing in front of a speaker with a punctured diaphragm.

But The Breeders are way above the alt-rock standards of the 1990s. Amid the stop-and-start of the fuzzed-out guitars they deliver a sweet pop song, “Divine Hammer,” which is easily within the range of The Bangles, and a semi-sweet, “Cannonball.” “Saints” is a gleeful grunge tune built on the chassis of “A Hard Day’s Night.” And “Drivin’ on 9” is, of all things, country.

Last Splash is a rare example of an album that gets better as it goes along.

Random Pan of the Day, sort of
Various artists, Songs of the Civil War (1991)
Not officially connected to the Ken Burns’ Civil War series of 1990, but definitely inspired by it. I owned this CD but only played it once. It was too sad. Also, our ideas of what a song should sound like have radically changed. With Judy Collins, Hoyt Axton, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Richie Havens, Waylon Jennings, and plenty of other expert interpreters. The 25th and last track is “Taps.”

 

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