Remembering Roxy Music

Many years ago, when I was in college, a friend introduced me to a band called Roxy Music. I had heard the name, but I had never heard their music. It sounded strange and arty, but I liked it. Still, that was the eighties, and Roxy Music was a seventies band so it seemed old to me. I never bought one of their albums and eventually forgot about them.

Now I have rediscovered Roxy Music, and even though 37 years have passed since the release of the first eponymously-titled album, it all sounds very fresh and modern. How can this be? Am I out of touch with the times?

Brian Eno played on their first two albums so I guess that is why I got back into Roxy Music. I’ve always liked Eno, but Bryan Ferry seemed a little pretentious for my taste. But now I am really impressed by the things he does with his voice and the songwriting. Take “If There Is Something” from their first album. This song starts out with a country twang but half-way through it seamlessly changes into a dark, moody piece in which Ferry, sounding genuinely distraught, begs his love to come back to him. And then it changes again, slowing down, becoming more thoughtful and introspective.

Their second album, “For Your Pleasure”, is probably their best and arguably deserves a spot on my top ten list. Perhaps I could kick out Joy Division who, even though they came along a bit after Roxy Music and sounded fresh at the time, now seem a bit dated. (I’m more likely to listen to Interpol than Joy Division these days). This album features “Do the Strand” which was played on the closing episode of “The L Word’s” most recent season, the only bit of taste that show has ever displayed. (Sorry, but I know bad writing when I see it.) It also has great songs like “Strictly Confidential”, “Editions of You”, “In Every Dreamhome a Heartache”, and my personal favorite “Grey Lagoons”.

But even though I think their second album is strongest overall, the best Roxy Music song ever appears on their third album, Stranded. ‘Mother of Pearl’ is the song I most remember from my college listening experiences. Like the aforementioned ‘If There is Something’, this is a song that starts out one way and then changes into something completely different. It is almost seven minutes long and the first minute and a half are a bit wild, evoking a party atmosphere. A minute and half into the composition, a piano line appears and comes to the forefront. Then Ferry sings “Well, I’ve been up all night, party time wasting is too much fun, then I step back thinking of life’s inner meaning and my latest fling”. The music fits the lyrics perfectly. When I listen to this bit, I, too, get the feeling that I’ve been up all night and now the sun is rising and I wonder what the hell I am doing with my life. What does it all mean? The song gets into a groove and goes on and on with some nonsense lyrics that I won’t bother examining too closely, but they are great to sing along with. But what I have always wondered is what is this “Mother of Pearl” that he wouldn’t trade for another girl. And, of course, the only thing that comes to mind is his guitar. I guess Ferry is trying to tell us that music will always be there for us, even after the party is over. And I guess that’s true because this stuff is still great, even after all this time.

My Meaningless Vote

For sometime now, I have been wondering if I should bother to cast my meaningless vote this November. I have voted in every presidential election since I turned 18, but now, as I grow increasingly old and bitter, I wonder why I bother. This funny video from the Onion hasn’t helped.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

I don’t live in a swing state. I live in a red state, so actually, I do already know how my state is going to vote. My vote is meaningless. The only thing that might get me to the polls would be the hope of getting rid of Jim Inhofe, the stupidest man in the senate. Really, he embarrasses me.

Now, if I lived in Ohio, things might be different. Unfortunately, they are still using a lot of those Diebold systems there, now called Premier. I don’t think a name change is going to make them any more secure. For those of you that will have to e-vote, here’s an interesting article from Scientific American. Hey, I’ll bet your vote is meaningless, too.

We all know that statistics and polls are a bunch of crap, but here is a site that tracks polls by state for the upcoming elections. It might be interesting to look at now, and then again after it’s all over, and the nation’s overlords have pretended to count our meaningless votes.

Ass Will Show the Way

I came across this funny post while surfing the web today. It’s written by an American who teaches English in Japan and concerns the funny English found on t-shirts there. The pictures are priceless. Be sure to scroll through to the end of the post to see the last one.

My daughter recently spent 9 months in Beijing, and while she didn’t get any pictures of funny t-shirts, she did get a couple that are worth sharing. The first is a movie poster for The Golden Compass. The English is mostly fine. The trouble seems to be with the line breaks.

Ass Willl Show the Way

Then there was this bizarre book cover found in a coffee shop. Once again the English is fine but the picture doesn’t quite fit.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition

Of course, I’ve seen shirts in America with Chinese characters printed on them, backwards. Perhaps there are Chinese blogposts out there talking about funny Chinese t-shirts seen in foreign countries.

Well, I decided to do my own Chinese t-shirt. I had recently done a drawing of Jesus using Paint Shop Pro. I based it on those big-eyed children pictures from the 60’s because I thought that would be funny. I didn’t have a good caption to go with it, but now I do. The shirt says ‘Jesus Loves You’ in Chinese. I think it came out rather well.

Rethinking the Civil War Era

My recent trip through Pottawatomie and inability to get into the John Brown museum piqued my curiosity about the Civil War era so I went to the library and checked out a book. The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton proved to be both fascinating and informative.

I was not well-versed in this area before, but this book covered quite a bit of ground, starting with the religious reform movements of the 1840’s through the rise of capitalism and corporate wage slavery in the latter decades of the century. It is not a biography of Lincoln but a sweeping looking at the social, political and economic forces that shaped a century and still underlie modern American culture.

A blurb on the back cover refers to this work as “a major reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history”. Burton casts the Civil War not as a war to abolish slavery, but, rather, as a cultural war to define the very notions of freedom and liberty. Even though the North won in the sense that the Union was kept intact and the Emancipation Proclamation ended slaveholder’s “property rights”, the war itself never really ended. Sure, Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9th, but then five days later, Lincoln was shot. The attempts during Reconstruction to endow freed African-Americans with the full rights of citizenship were briefly successful, but then they were thwarted by the guerilla warfare tactics of the KKK. The details of the violence and corruption during this period are enough to disturb even a hard-hearted reader.

And why wasn’t the federal government there to back up the new laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866? Well, on the one hand they were busy out west fighting Native Americans, and on the other hand they were busy toadying up to capitalistic interests in the North and making small fortunes. Within a couple of decades of the “end” of the war, the die-hard abolitionists had, well, died, and no one else really seemed to care if African Americans had any rights or opportunites. The white working class had their own troubles, becoming, as they were, a cog in the machine of the new industrial age. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which included rioting in several major cities and lasted for two months, was an abject failure. The corporations won and “progress” continued as usual.

Although it is not difficult reading, it took me three weeks to get through this book. The fog from the chemo has, apparently, not lifted entirely and I often found myself reading pages twice. But for the last year I have read almost exclusively science fiction because that was all I could handle. It was a refreshing change to read a non-fiction book, especially one like this that really makes you think. I highly recommend The Age of Lincoln to anyone interested in the roots of our current political situation. It may help you see how much and how little things have changed.