1995-2000 (MY BIRTHDAY).

Today is a day; a day I arrived at once a while ago (my mom was there, ask her if it happened the way I don't remember).

Here are some words, most of them real, reminiscing an important six-year stretch of my life and the going-ons, 1995-2000, as these events were on my radar.

Love like a good human. Learn to build a robot. Breathe in, Peace out.
- Joseph

95 THE BENDS, STRETCH DAILY!
Celebrity attorney-ed OJ trial.
Cameras whir; system defile.
Biggest news my brain could recall
since '86 Challenger tragic skyfall.
Wondering what made one deed News and other deeds not.
Through news feed I skimmed; stories hot and ones of human rot.
USA Today swiped off vacated coffee table.
Filled with narratives wicked as Cain did Abel.
Oklahoma City bombing downtown; homegrown rage,
Rwanda and Packwood and Balkans and Million Man March of all age.
Latter an October event to which I unfortunately did not went.
But a sign of hope and love and possibility of making a dent.
The Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, and J. Buckley scored
and Pitt, Leonardo, J. Depp young and abhorred.
By chest-thumping dudes anyway.

96 IF YOU TOLERATE THIS OUR CHILDREN WILL BE NEXT, OR MAYBE NOT.
Mad cow a Denny Crane-ish fear;
Atlanta Olympics, Unabomber in cuffs, no more Chechnya riot gear
Clinton vs. Dole,
Russian FBI mole,
An education's the goal,
Bank account a big hole,
Baby sister born, Fugee love to my soul
Freeway a misnomer when collecting a toll
Classmates smoke a bowl.
Wheaties or oatmeal in my bowl, s'il vous plait
The Preachers of Manic Streets
screaming politics loud; antonym of sheeps' bleats,
fleets of foots I once was, now I swiftly read Keats.

97 OK, SLEEP THE CLOCK AROUND.
An unethical Newt in the House,
Monstrously quiet like a monstrously loud mouse.
A Tiger roars, Clinton a second term soars, Russian prez Boris signs cease-fire for us with force.
Or rather, Chechnya, duh,
Duh duh duh dum, Di dies
Sound of millions of cries;
Spy satellites in the sky for cash and commerce,
Remembering not so much the verse:
love your enemy
with hugs and non-venomy anemone-
like transparency and glasnost
no longer a thing from sea to coast.
Okay, computers now the evolution
of long-coming revolution.
Radio dead,
Head, ahead is the future with un-fired lead, steroidless bread, Grandaddy’s Humanoid Jed.

98 XO, DESERTERS. 
Euro coins made,
Four million slayed
in Second Congo War;
a war scale we swore would happen no more.
Clones banned,
Lewinsky’s name canned
Oval Office on sinking wet sand.
Rushdie’s fatwah removed,
but may want to stay off Iranian land.
Iraq nuke inspector get the boot,
Kate get Leonardo Titanic steamy in birthday suit
Nagano Winter gold,
Windows 98 sold
bad blood Kosovo
Big Blue beats Garry, new low.
Chilean Pinochet caught too,
extradited, charged, crimes never paid, judicial process a zoo.
Matthew Shepard’s life stolen, sad but true,
humanity’s soul, makes my heart blue.
Mercury, rev, rev, vroom,
sweep the sadness off the universe with a
giant justice broom,
and a bottomless wastebucket for the bigots and vermin to meet their doom.

99 PLAY, SURRENDER, MAN-MULE.
Gretzky says quits
Menacing Phantom with lightsabers Jar Jar and other odd bits
Musharraf coup d’état,
Mandela au revoir,
Boris says ta-ta.
Vlad the Impaler, Vlad the new leader
Putin in power, not what I call a super good-deeder.
Family Guy starts, SpongeBob begins,
College students plus Napster make more deadly sins.
AOL, dial-up jam-up,
Bill out of a jam, no Dow logjam;
hits ten K, bam! Merci, Ma’am,
I’m still no millionaire,
or thousandaire, just
lover of fresh air, messy hair, Icelandic maidens so fair.
WTO protesters Seattle,
WTF global financiers soulless prattle,
Enron megawatt Nevada re-rerouting sociopathic addle.
Balkans trying for peace,
Columbine shooters easy access to piece,
Yugoslavian treaties hard to long-term lease
when wars pit brother against brother and niece against niece;
not nice.
I am Moby, Melville’s descendant might boast,
a vegan techno-electro-punko geek who the Chemical Brothers might roast,
but a fine album of digital analog smashup, to that a thousand commercials did toast.

00 CHARTSENGRAFS.
Y2K deal, computer coding,
too many numbers loading?
Type of hype we like to gripe
Jobs pitches $30 OSX beta,
Yugoslav Milošević told bye-bye, see ya lata, hata.
Politics hot,
Al and George W. friends?
Sort of, but…not.
First female Prez of Finland
Hillary to Senate, plans with no end;
India at a thousand million,
AOL Time Warner cozy up for a hundred sixty-two billion.
Sydney Olympics in summer,
Elián González custody raid bummer,
Playstation 2 release,
Nintendo plays too with GameCube piece
Bombing of USS Cole,
collective hurt of country’s soul
G.W. selected
Later elected,
court trauma with Gore
Story often a bore
Fifty percent country sore
No liars, no more
International Space Station
first crew; dedicated to investigation
Universal elation,
or earthly happiness of most every nation.
Sophtware won’t save us,
numbers minus and plus
don’t trump;
digital technologies
hubristically rise and inevitably slump;
the abstractions of a good conversation top
the binary dimensions of a
one, zero, or two.
We are the real hero.
Until the robots.
Happy future, universe. I’m still around.

OSHA READY.

In the furthest recesses of my memory,
I try to recall,
or imagine,
a world in which we had no children to assist with household chores.
But it is too challenging,
and the thought of going back to that world;
a world in which the adults had to do all the work ourselves,
is simply too horrid to dwell on.
Thank goodness for enthusiastic work ethics,
good shop vacs, and extra-safe safety accessories.

PEOPLE > LAWNS.
Do you want to see my really serious expression?
he asked.
Sure.
I said.

And then finish landscaping really quick. Almost there.

The Reader.

AORTA.

I'd like to think I have a decent music sensibility, and a relatively alive cultural awareness, but I also hope I'm the kind of person who never stops getting goosebumps when Phil Collins comes on singing "You'll Be in My Heart."

Jonny Long, I know you know what I mean.

____

Phil Collins

You'll Be in My Heart

Tarzan soundtrack

1999

YOU'LL BE ON THE STAIRWAY TO MY HEART FOREVER.

I respect Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven as the ambitious epic that it is, but I don't really enjoy listening to it. Dull and way too long over sustained listenings.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily respect Phil Collins' You'll Be in My Heart, the ubiquitous Disney standard from the Tarzan movie, but I never get tired of it. In fact, I kinda love it. Unassuming, generic pop, yet strangely timeless and compelling. It has no pretensions to greatness. And it knows when to end.

The End.


FACEBOOK RESPONSES

Dave N.
This IS heresy!

Me
That's what they said about Galileo.
...and I like Led, I just don't have them on a pedestal

Opening howls of Immigrant Song = one of the best intros ever.

Also, I like what Robert Plant has done with with his career post-band. Some really great collaborations and a couple solid albums.

Dave N.
Whew! You were shaking your shoes over sacred soil! Haha.
Funny, though...when I saw them along with Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull way back, Tull stole the show.
Led Z. weren't technically as good as a lot of groups. Neither were Credence Clearwater which I also loved.
I'll let you get back to your Top 40 love fest now.... 'Vicious snicker'...Taking away your Tom Waits card!

Me
Top 40? Sure, as long as you remember Zeppelin isn't exactly indie cred. Loved by the masses, dismissed by plenty of critics The spirit of Thomas Waits is an iconoclastic one about following your own path. I like what I like without apology or remorse - and Phil Collins, long ago, was an edgy rocker himself dabbling in Tull-like prog-rock. Then Disney came calling and he couldn't say no. Kind of like Aerosmith with Michael Bay.

My Tom Waits card is tucked securely in my trucker wallet, right between Wainwright and Ween. And it's booby-trapped. So try and pry it from my cold fingers.

Phil Collins
You'll Be in My Heart
Tarzan (official soundtrack)
1999

GONNA HAVE ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE AND I AIN'T GONNA FEEL BAD ABOUT IT IN THE VALLEY BELOW (HOMAGE TO HUGH MACLEOD).

I'm driving home in rain, thinking about the one more cup of coffee I'm going to have when I get home.



The White Stripes / The White Stripes (1999)

Grocery store a few minutes ago. Went through self-checkout, and I was on the way out the door but then a magazine caught my eye. Rolling Stone's end of year issue, which includes their picks for the 50 Best Albums. I am a sucker for those yearly wrapups.

I backed up two steps, thumbed through to the section where they have all their picks listed. Some usual suspects, plus a few surprises. Frank Ocean, Muse, Beach House, Passion Pit, Azalea Banks, Dr. John. Others I haven't heard. No Jason Lytle. Lame.

This lady came up to me. A checker. Anything good in there? I looked up. I've seen her before. The person who oversees the self-checkouts to make sure nobody's slipping Butterfingers or five dollar DVDs into their bag.

I said: Oh, I'm just checking out their end-of-year music lists. I'm kind of a music nerd. Have been ever since I was a kid.

She goes: Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah, my family is too. I just bought all the kids mp3 players at Christmas. We listen to everything: oldies, Christian, hip hop, rock and roll, I mean we listen to it all.

We started chatting, talking a little about our listening experiences. Sounds like their family has a record player as well. A mini-conversation about the joy of music.

Her name was Basillia, I believe. She was kind of ignoring the other customers while we were speaking, which made me feel extra-special. Our conversation ended abruptly when she had to help someone else.

It was cool how she approached and initiated conversation, based simply on my perusal of a music magazine. Sometimes I've wondered, in a larger sense, what is the importance of my caring about music when I'm not really contributing anything to it? In the visual arts, I am a contributing producer in both what I teach and in what I create.

Sometimes I have existential conversations with myself about Music. It is an art form like no other. It doesn't need explanation or translation. You can simply enjoy it on its own; as stand-alone, simply enjoying the melody or the beat or as background soundtrack. You can also go as deep into it as you want, critiquing, analyzing and evaluating and connecting it with other larger aspects of life.

In one important way, Music and Coffee are relevant to me in a way that's more than a self-centered luxury:

They are both conversation points. For me. They are a thing; what Hugh MacLeod might call a social object ("a node in the social network"). I could sit alone in an empty room, listening to Grandaddy or Cat Power with a cup of coffee, and I would still appreciate that coffee and melody. But in an even more meaningful way, coffee and music are something that have helped connect me with other people as a catalyst for conversation and interaction.


Bob Dylan / Desire (1976)

People say 'why would I buy a cuppa coffee when I could make it at home myself for a fraction of the price?'

Economics are certainly important. But I think that what is missed sometimes is the fact that oftentimes hobbies or interests are not just gratuitous luxuries. They are important because they help connect you to people. Sometimes they help connect you to people in obvious ways:

e.g. you really like LEGO, so you connect with other LEGO aficionados.

Other times a particular interest is simply a starter. A catalyst that helps start a conversation. That's why pursuing hobbies, having interests, having things that may seem gratuitous are so important. Not just for your own individual soul and ability to be emotionally healthy and happy, but also in a larger sense to help you connect with other people. To help introduce you and put you in the path of strangers. To create opportunities for tiny conversations.

Gonna go have One More Cup of Coffee. And listen to Bob Dylan or the White Stripes. Both versions are fantastic. I haven't decided which version is the greatest ever. The easy answer, of course, is 'how can you ever improve on the original?' But that's not really fair, because so many other artists have already improved on Dylan's originals. Just listen to the Byrds (Mr. Tambourine Man), Hendrix (All Along the Watchtower), Guns N' Roses (Knockin' On Heaven's Door), Johnny & June (It Ain't Me, Babe) or even Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova (You Ain't Goin' Nowhere).

Bob Dylan the Songwriter trumps Bob Dylan the Singer. But I gotta lotta love for both Bobs. And Jack and Meg. Okay. Onto another cuppa coffee. Anybody wanna come hang out?

Bob Dylan
One More Cup of Coffee
Desire
1976

The White Stripes
One More Cup of Coffee
The White Stripes
1999

MEANINGLESS (THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE UPPER NORTH LEFT SIDE OF MT. NORWAY).

In the mid-1950s, French director François Truffaut first proposed the idea of the Auteur Theory in film (auteur = French for author). The idea that a (good) director is the true author of the film; that regardless of how industrial or collaborative the filmmaking process may be, that a (good) director's distinctive vision, personal expression, and promotion of particular themes will make their films unmistakably identifiable.

Although there is considerable controversy surrounding this notion (who writes the stories to begin with?), then I have always admired those creative figures whose sheer force of vision seeps into everything they do (e.g. Tim Burton, Coen Brothers, Shel Silverstein, Sofia Coppola). And Stephin Merritt, musical mastermind who has been the force behind not one band, but four. Yes, four.

The most famous of those has been the Magnetic Fields, with whom he recorded a number of albums, merging electronic ABBA-esque pop with lo-fi instrumentation and variety of vocalists. The apex of their output was 1999's "69 Love Songs," an ambitious 3-disc set of songs about love, in all its bright and dark and fatal and bittersweet and beautiful incarnations. Despite the adventurous and varied spirit of the 69 different delightful tracks, his persistent vision and voice come through as his and his alone; it is unmistakably his grandly-realised magnum opus. Tres magnifique.

Amidst a fantastic album full of great titles (Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits, Nothing Matters When We're Dancing, The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be), there are two songs that stand out:

Meaningless (fatalistic murmuring indie pop over ukelele)

{like when two fireflies flouresce
Just like everything I guess
it was utterly meaningless }

The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side (bouncy, cheerful indie pop with lovelorn lyrics)

{Andy would bicycle across town in the rain
to bring you candy and
John would buy the gown for you to wear to the
prom with
Tom the astronomer who'd name a star for you}

The more I think about it…they are probably, neck-and-neck, pound-for-pound the two best songs I have ever heard in my entire life, in all the world. Greatest Songs Ever. Definitely. Unmistakably Stephin. Auteur of beautiful, happy-sad love music. In my dreams, he would score a Truffaut film.

****
the Magnetic Fields
Meaningless / The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side
69 Love Songs
1999