Greetings once more from the bustling hamlet of Horse Cave, Kentucky, USA.
We’ve had the gamut of weather experiences here lately; on Thursday it was warm enough to cut my grass for the first time this year. It had gotten really shaggy and I had finally picked up most of the thousands of twigs, branches, and limbs that had fallen from our backyard trees in the recent windstorms. Got on my old riding mower, cranked it up for the first time since last October, it took a few tries… but it finally started and I said what the hell, might as well do this. And I did. By Friday we had downpours and cooler temps all day. This being Kentucky of course, by Sunday it was sunny and warm again. I also cast caution to the wind and made an impulse buy, a battery-powered grass trimmer (or “weed whacker” or “weed eater”, your choice), a Craftsman from Lowe’s. The price ($99, plus a free battery) was right so I pulled the trigger. I can’t get up next to my house on my mower, and always have to trim, which has meant in the past going to my Mom’s to get hers. Now, I no longer have to do that. Of course, I have yet to assemble it. Procrastination, thy name is David. (Update: I did assemble it yesterday, and it works fine. Long live Jambi.)
Baseball season is coming up soon, and once again I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic about my White Sox. I like the Reds and Braves too, so I’ll follow them as well but the Sox are my baes. It’s also Fantasy Baseball time; yes, I too am infected with that disease. Started with football in long ago and distant 1990, and here I am in 2023, still chasing those elusive championships, pride, prestige, and yes, money. Well, I’ve won a league a couple of times in the last 33 years, so there’s that, but usually for me playing Fantasy Baseball is like paying someone $100 a year to kick you in the balls every day for 6 months. So naturally, I’m in 3 leagues- one a rotisserie 10 teamer, another a 12 teamer auction league, and last and least, a mind-blowing 16 team league head to head (you play an opponent each week, rather than move up and down in the standings based on your point totals) league that ensures if you have an injured or struggling player you will find very little, if anything, to replace him in the free agent pool. “It’s a challenge” - Keith Branstetter. I quit the league once because I alone am the only one who thought this was ridiculous, but like a good addict, I bought back in a few years later. So here we are. My teams are all named The Cathead Biscuit Boys, because back in 2008, I think it was, we took a trip to Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg Tennessee, and I saw a small restaurant that advertised “cat-head biscuits” on its sign. Never having heard of this culinary treat before, I was amused and thought it would make a dandy team name. I’ll talk more about my Fantasy Football experiences later on, assuming I’m still doing this by September.
TV/Movie-wise, about the only newish thing I’m currently watching is Showtime’s series Yellowjackets, which “combines psychological horror, dark comedy and coming-of-age drama” to quote the AV Club. A combination of desiring to follow a series as well as nothing else in that vein to watch is the reason, plus a lot of good word of mouth, especially for Melanie Lynsky and Christina Ricci, who play grownup versions of two young women, members of a high school soccer team, who, because of the plane carrying them to a tournament crashing, are stranded in the woods for 19 months, left to fend for themselves. We spend a lot of time with the survivors, now adults, and all the issues- personal, professional- they’re dealing with. The ping-ponging is handled well, and the characters are compelling.. so while I was uncertain that I wanted to put something so potentially unpleasant in my head- as I get older, the less tolerance I have for really horrible mass entertainment consumption- but 5 episodes in on season 1, I’m hanging in there. I’m sure worse is yet to come.
Music, most notably, Judee Sill: I read something online about her, a singer/songwriter I’d never really listened to before, although I did hear a cover Warren Zevon did of arguably her most well-known song, “Jesus Was a Crossmaker”. It did not lead to me investigating her then. However, having finally taken the plunge, I found a lot to like. She’s strong musically, has a distinctive, often quirky voice, and had led quite a life before she finally got around to recording, which gives her legitimacy, I think. After her second album, Heart Food, she was dropped by the record company because of low sales and she seemed to just say fuck it and went back to the rough life she led before, dying of a drug overdose in 1979. Sad story, but I found her albums very listenable. Also listenable was Feels Good to Me, the debut album by the group assembled by the great Bill Bruford, onetime King Crimson, Yes, and others drummer, between King Crimson gigs. Proggy, unsurprisingly, but also jazz-tinged and most of all nicely textured- guitarist Allan Holdsworth (a figure revered by many but someone whose work didn’t leave much of an impression on me when I listened to the U.K. albums) really shines here. Interesting vocals by another obscure figure of sorts, Annette Peacock, also add a lot. I liked it a lot, and now I guess I should check out more of this.
I’ve been following “The Music Aficionado”’s ongoing posts about Santana’s “non-commercial” years, 1972 through 1974, and the music/albums he and the band made or collaborated on. Fascinating reading, at least to those who care about those records, and it got me to dig out the unreleased-in-the-US 1973 triple live record Lotus, which didn’t really grab me much when I bought it as an import sometime in the late 70s, so I thought I’d give it another shot. Still not grabbed, but there is some mighty good playing. Finally, the other day, in my endless search for diverting stuff to listen to while I walk around in circles at the high school track, I remembered Lenny Kravitz and his performance of “Calling All Angels”, which sounded nice enough as he sat there during the Grammys Dead Reel… so I thought someday I’d find out what album that song was from, and that album turned out to be 2004’s Baptism, which I have never owned. I bailed on Lenny, whose music to me has always been too derivative if very well played by some very good musicians who seem to have been with him for many years, and lyrically more often as not inane. “Calling” is no exception; nice melody but the lyrics are ridiculously simplistic and really don’t have much to do with remembering those who have passed on, which I find amusing now. The one keeper from that album, though, is “Lady”, a chunky-funky rocker with equally inane lyrics but when the band is in a groove that tight, often lyrics don’t matter- just ask Marc Bolan. I remember when “Lady” got used in a trailer for the Alias TV series one year.. Jennifer Garner, we hardly knew ye.
The only new comic I read this week was the first issue of The Immoral X-Men, which seems to be part of a series of ironically-titled books, a la The Irredeemable Ant-Man and The Superior Spider-Man; Marvel and DC, over the last few years, seem to me to have thrown character consistency to the wind; some will say it encourages creativity and fresh takes on decades-old characters, and I suppose that’s true, but it also creates a feeling of illegitimacy, if that makes any sense- instead of reading a comic series about the “real” Fantastic Four, for example, this is a comic series about a version of the FF, robbing them of any agency. Of course, it can be said that the FF hasn’t had any real agency since the Lee/Kirby days, but that’s a subject for a whole different column. Anyhoo, Immoral, scripted by Keiron Gillen, a long way from his Phonogram days, penciller Paco Medina, someone whose name isn’t unknown to me but who also doesn’t have an especially compelling style and to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever owned a comic sporting his byline before, and a host of finishers including another familiar name, inker Walden Wong; another inker and a couple of “color artists”, a letterer who inserts the corporate sounding title “VC” in front of his name, in short, artwise, this is as close to reading AI as I think I want to get. It allows us to be able to ascertain who’s saying what and what they look like, but that’s about it. The story inside is no less unaffecting; now, there are decades’ worth of X-Men events that I haven’t experienced, and so much of it is referenced here; also, holdovers from the stodgy, leaden, melodramatic (well, to me anyway) old Claremont days are still around, as if they just can’t conceive of a world without a Mister Sinister character in it. Everyone has basically the same personality; ironic, distanced, snarky, bemused, you get the picture. They approach the events like they were the staff of a trendsetting style magazine rather than a team of people with extraordinary abilities. All this is personified by the omnipresent Emma Frost, aka the White Queen (I suppose she still goes by this), another Claremont holdover… she is as haughty, too cool for the room, and unlikeable as ever, although I realize that there are many comics fans who think she’s teh sexy, to me she’s always been an annoyance, almost as much as the contrived Magik character. Even more annoying, she, over the decades, has gone from an occasional adversary to a somewhat trusted member, even a leader of teams in at least a half dozen of the endless variations of X-Men teams that we’ve been given since the early 1980s. I know Gillen is a good writer, I have enjoyed his work in the past as I’ve said before, but here he seems to be on autoscript, writing to a template, and the occasional amusing aside or remark does not compensate.
Guess you can say I didn’t like it, so I won’t be going any further in the run.
Book-wise, thanks to a conversation I had with Kevin Bozelka on one of Alfred Soto’s Facebook posts, I became aware that there was a 33-1/3 series book, written by unkn own-to-me Matthew Restall, dealing with one of Elton John’s most (and unfairly, I think) disliked record releases, Blue Moves. Now, back in the mid-aughts, inspired by such artist-focused song-review blogs like Matthew Perpetua’s outstanding R.E.M. blog PopSongs 07-08, I decided I wanted to do one myself. After considering and dismissing the likes of Neil Young, T. Rex, Jethro Tull, and others, I settled on Elton John, whose music from 1970 to 1977 meant the world to me as a young guy growing up and by its nature would provide a lot of grist for the ol’ writing mill. I called it “Solar Prestige A Gammon”, after the Elton song made up of nonsense words, subtitled it “One Person’s Opinions on Almost Every Elton John song from 1969-1977” just in case someone was confused about its purpose, and started it in 2007. Of course, it wasn’t going to go on forever, he only did so many songs and I had no interest in going beyond 1978, so it came to a close in 2008. It was fun. I learned some things, had a few regular and (mostly) helpful commenters, and to this day when Elton’s music from that period comes up in Facebook discussions I link to it for the presumed edification of others (or perhaps they’ll like it so much they’ll want to pay me to write for their site, the dream goes on forever), and some even actually do read it. Anyway, I scanned the sample on Amazon’s page for the book, ordered it, and am now looking at it resting on my chair arm. It seems to be a positive examination of the record, which made me more inclined to purchase; the last thing I wanted to read was some old snarky “stupid boomers” essay. As of this writing, I am only on the first few pages (I will admit to skipping around a little to read about certain songs; it doesn’t seem to be structured linearly, though), and I am already seeing stuff that I wish I’d thought to address in my own Blue Moves examinations, stuff that I was either aware of and had forgotten, or events I was unaware of and didn’t come across in my own (limited) research. I’m also scared that I’ll now want to change all my entries- I am already somewhat more favorably inclined towards the ballad “Chameleon”, which I was not impressed with in 2008 but suddenly find the previously unmemorable to me melody echoing around in my head. I know some songs are slow growers, but it’s been 45 years, this is ridiculous. (Quick note: in the interval between typing this and now, I finished Restall’s book and found it quite informative and interesting. We don’t agree on everything, but he articulates his points very well and I am in awe of how he is able to sum up and bring into focus the events that were happening around the time of the album’s release. I recommend this book highly if you’re even slightly interested in the subject matter.)
That entire 33-1/3 series, in which people write long essays about a certain album, is fascinating to me. I have often wished I had the wherewithall to write one about Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece, pretty much my favorite album, but I guess this old blog post will have to do for now.
And here I thought I wouldn’t have anything to write about this week. Until next time, be good, be good to each other, and may every song you sing be your favorite tune.
Listen to Judee Sill on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Bruford’s Feels Good to Me on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Santana’s Lotus on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Lenny Kravitz’ “Lady” on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Elton John’s Blue Moves on the, you guessed it, streaming service of your choice.