Musical Memories – With Pictures!

This is what pretty much every day has looked like for the past several weeks -- clear skies, sunshine, and dry, dry weather. The streetside hanging baskets in St. John's Wood are clearly loving it, with their copious blossoms, but then, the council keeps them watered.

The weather app on my phone says there's a 50/50 chance of rain today, tomorrow, and each day through next Monday. If the odds are right, we should get some precipitation soon. This is so far our driest month of the entire year, with just 1.8 mm of rain -- I would be thrilled to get almost anything. We need a couple of days of slow soaking.

Given our discussion of ABBA and pop music a couple of days ago, I've been thinking about early musical memories. I remember hearing ABBA's "Dancing Queen" on the radio quite a bit as a child -- for some unaccountable reason, my nine-year-old ears heard the lyrics as "the air is clean" -- but of course I'd remember music at that age. What about earlier?

Here I am in what used to be called "nursery school," now known as pre-school, in 1970-71. I'm standing next to the teacher, Mrs. Dahm, holding her hand. Apparently I was big on holding hands back then. The mother of one of the girls in my class -- Kim, on the far right -- told me years later that I'd always hold Kim's hand on the way into school. Seems a bit clingy.

At this point I went to a private Presbyterian school in Tampa, close to where my mom worked at the university. I wasn't quite four years old when I started there, because I had a November birthday, which meant I was younger than most of my classmates for my entire school career.

In 1970, my mom was driving a dark green Ford Mustang with a black interior, and this is where I remember hearing some of my earliest pop music -- riding to and from school in her car. I associate several songs with that Mustang -- Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and "Let it Be."

I also remember going to my friend's house -- he's in the photo above, standing two kids away from me, with the red-striped shirt -- and his mother serving us grilled cheese sandwiches. I don't even remember his name now -- Gregory? Gary? Geoffrey? -- but his mother was very pretty and looked like Anita Bryant. I distinctly remember hearing Don McLean's "American Pie" while at his house, and probably not for the first time, given that it was a huge hit that year.

Just for good measure, here's my kindergarten class, from 1971-72. I love how someone made me wear a clip-on tie but didn't bother to tell me to tuck in my shirt. At least I didn't have to wear a bow-tie or a double-breasted suit. My teacher was Mrs. Fisher. Of course the musical memories I'm describing could have come from this year as well, because we were still tooling around in Mom's Mustang.

When I switched to the elementary school in my suburban hometown, north of Tampa, for first grade, I began taking the school bus, and my exposure to pop music on the car radio diminished. In my house, we rarely listened to the radio when I was little, and my mom's idea of a good record was Brahms or the music from "Victory at Sea." I don't think she even owned a pop or rock album, unless you count the cassette of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" that a friend made for her. (She rarely if ever played it. I swiped it years later.) My dad was more tuned in, but strangely I don't remember being exposed to much of his music until after he and my mom divorced in 1974 and he'd take my brother and me to his apartment every weekend. We'd listen to 8-track tapes in his Volkswagen -- Bread, the Fifth Dimension, Simon & Garfunkel, Donovan, Melanie.

I heard music at the house of some friends down the street, the Betzes -- songs like "The Lord's Prayer," which I've already written about, and "Billy, Don't Be a Hero," and "Seasons in the Sun," which I found weird and scary. (Why was he singing about dying?!)

Eventually our school buses had radios installed, and we listened to Q-105 on the way to and from school. That's when my musical memories really begin to flesh out with more variety. At first it was "Oh What a Night" by The Four Seasons, and "Let 'Em In" by Paul McCartney and Wings. As I got older we eventually moved into the years of the Bee Gees and "Saturday Night Fever."

Anyway, that's what I was hearing as a kid. What about you? What are your earliest musical memories?

Gator Buddha

Our canna lily bloomed yesterday, the first flower we've seen from it this year. The poor thing isn't exactly thriving -- where it once had multiple stalks, now there's only one -- but considering I bought it on a whim at the florist five years ago and wasn't sure it would live beyond one season, it's done amazingly well. It probably needs a new pot and some fresh soil.

We finally harvested some tomatoes! Dave picked these two yesterday morning. They're a little on the mealy side, honestly, but I still enjoyed mine because we grew it!

We spent yesterday entirely at home. In fact I put the yard waste out for collection in the evening and found the door still locked and chained -- or "ginked," as my dad used to say when I was a child. We hadn't unlocked it from the night before. That shows how domestic we were!

I worked in the garden, trimming some stuff and trying to keep our paths reasonably clear, so we could get to the patio without being smacked in the face by the undergrowth like a character on "Gilligan's Island." And I did see a couple of those nasty little flower bugs that give me such terrible bites at this time of year. They're definitely out there.

I did laundry. I cleaned the bathrooms. I vacuumed. That kind of thing.

I also archived all my pictures and backed up my computer, which is always a process.

I know some of you watch the show "Poker Face," with Natasha Lyonne. I was watching the night before last, and it was a kind of Florida-Man-on-Steroids plot, involving a jealous police officer who spikes a fellow officer's pet alligator, Daisy, with methamphetamines. Daisy then kills her owner and becomes a hunted creature, and it's up to Natasha Lyonne's character to return her safely to the swamps. It was a fundamentally silly plot, making fun of those wild Florida Man news stories we often see.

Anyway, at one point Natasha's character, Charlie, peers into the gator's eyes and sees a sort of cosmic, psychedelic swirl suggesting that Daisy is an elevated spirit, perhaps a divine creature. The final frame in the psychedelic swirl is the image above, which I took from the TV screen because I love it so much. I'm not sure a more perfect image has ever been created to combine the Buddhist and Floridian threads in my own past.

Anyway, it's my Facebook profile image now. I'm waiting to see if anyone recognizes the source.

Dave, by the way, doesn't like "Poker Face." He has trouble with Natasha's gravelly voice. I think as a musician he just hears vocal cord damage and it sends him over the edge.

Little Crumbs and ABBA

Here's another picture I've been meaning to take for a while, and I finally had the opportunity on Saturday. I passed this little shop many months ago while exploring this area but it was closed. I thought it was a cafe, and only later on Google Street View did I see it was actually a junk/furniture shop that regularly spread out its wares on the sidewalk. So I wanted to go back and catch it while it was open.

Given the sign, with a little cup of steaming something over the word CAFE, I deduced with the confidence of Dr. Watson that it perhaps had been a cafe at some point in the past. And indeed, Google shows it as such way back in 2016. Two years later, it was looking more like a vintage/junk shop. Now it's positively crammed and, inside, a bit dark and musty.

I didn't buy anything, but this item was intriguing -- a small bedside cabinet decorated with stencils of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I might have bought it if I were 30 years younger (and it was really inexpensive). Now I need it like a hole in the head.

Yesterday I finished my book, "My My!: ABBA through the ages," by Giles Smith. I must say I was a bit surprised when I mentioned reading a book about ABBA a few posts back, and no one challenged me about it. No one said, "You're reading what?!"

Of course it could be that none of you particularly care about my reading habits, which I TOTALLY understand. But I must tell you, this was a very enjoyable book. It wasn't an encyclopedic dissection of the lives and recordings of the ABBA musicians, at least not in any dry, referential sense. It was very readable, more a story of Smith's personal experience with ABBA (like most of us, he discovered them as a young teenager) interspersed with information about the musicians and the records and the photos and the concerts. As Smith himself put it on page 302, the book isn't for die-hard fans so much as "for people who find they have had the members of ABBA and their music in their heads, on and off, practically all their lives without really trying, and might be curious about how that's come to happen."

Having said that, it does go on some peculiar tangents. There's pretty much a whole chapter discussing the wisdom of the line "feel the beat of the tambourine" in "Dancing Queen," ABBA's signature song. Apparently there is no actual tambourine in "Dancing Queen," which I must admit I never knew, and although it sounds like a throwaway rhyme about a silly grade-school instrument, Smith points out that properly playing a tambourine is actually more complicated than one might imagine. Besides, as he says, "feel the beat of the drum machine" doesn't sound nearly as good.

I became an ABBA fan around the time I was 14, when I asked for and got the K-Tel album "The Magic of ABBA" for Christmas. A couple of high school friends were also very into ABBA -- we were not a rebellious crowd -- and I spent hours talking to my friend John on the phone in the evenings, planning ABBA mix tapes that we never made. A few years later I bought their album "The Visitors" at the mall. This was relatively late to ride the ABBA bandwagon, given that they broke up right around that time, but I went on listening to them and I've never really stopped. Their music is still in my iTunes. They really did have a knack for writing and performing musically perfect, if sometimes linguistically awkward, pop songs.

It was always cooler to listen to the Ramones or the Sex Pistols or even Blondie, but I was never a fan of harder-edged music. (I did eventually own Blondie's "Greatest Hits," but I wouldn't call them particularly hard-edged either.)

Anyway, you've probably read some of this before, in my posts about going to the ABBA exhibit or the ABBA Voyage concert in East London. Smith also discusses ABBA Voyage as well as the music's use in the musical "Mamma Mia" and the movies "Muriel's Wedding" and "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," which as you know are two of my favorites. Those ABBA musicians, who are all now approaching 80 years old, just keep popping up like groundhogs in our cultural landscape.

The Tiger and the Carrot

When Sharon and I went to East London last weekend, we passed this building on the bus. I tried to take a couple of pictures out the bus window, but they didn't turn out very well, so I went back yesterday to get some clearer shots. It's a pub called The Tiger near Hackney Wick, and I'm not sure it's still in business -- but that mural is pretty impressive.

So yes, I did get out yesterday to take some pictures. I started at Homerton station and then walked westward, following the route our bus had taken the previous week, and photographed several places along that path. I'll share more of those photos in future posts. I guess I walked a couple of miles before finally boarding the overground train at Canonsbury to get back into Westminster.

Because this was another goal for my weekend -- to see the scene in "Evita" in which Eva Perón, played by Rachel Zegler, sings from the balcony of the Palladium theater. Every performance, nights and matinees, she emerges from the theater and sings "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" completely free to the assembled crowd. It's part of the show -- inside, the audience sees her via live digital streaming, and we in the crowd become, in effect, the Argentinians cheering for their beloved leader. It's a pretty cool idea though it was allegedly rather controversial at first, basically giving away the show's big moment to the public rather than the paying audience. But then, that's very much in the Perón spirit, isn't it? We're the descamisados, the poor shirtless ones!

The word is to arrive early to get a good position, so I got there about an hour ahead of time...

...and I still managed to put a lamppost between me and the balcony, but I got some pretty good shots of Eva doing her thing. She is amplified, and the crowd also hears the orchestration from the theater, so we get the full effect of the song.

I stood next to a couple who were back for the second time, and I could see how this would be tempting to do repeatedly. I bet some drama-addicted theatre queen out there is going every day.

After that I came home and sat with Dave in the garden. We talked about potential travel plans for the fall. He's a bit worn out with traveling, having been to the states four times so far this calendar year, but I am resolute in insisting that we do something for October and Thanksgiving breaks. We don't have to go far, but I don't want to just sit around the house feeling the absence of Olga.

I also read a chunk of my ABBA book and got the houseplants all watered and cared for, including giving our elephant ear a bath to get rid of its mites. (One plant or another always has a bug problem.)

This was the carrot I pulled out of the refrigerator for lunch. Now, I don't mean to be completely juvenile, but COME ON!

The Postmodern Bench

Remember the collapsed bench outside the telephone exchange on Finchley Road? Well, it's still there, three months later, along with its orange conical sentries standing at attention.

Someone stuck a sticker to the back that says "The Museum of Postmodernism." I don't think there is any such museum in London, so that's a pretty deliberate (and funny) comment about its longtime presence as a street sculpture.

I've just been outside refilling all the bird feeders. Those birds can really plow through food. I do feed them less in the summer, recognizing that they need to learn to forage for themselves (among the bolognaise discarded at the back of the garden) and probably also need to know when to migrate as food dwindles. But on weekends I like to watch them on the feeders. It occurred to me that 7 a.m. may be a bit early for the squabbling starlings, but hopefully the neighbors will forgive me.

It's starting to feel quite autumnal out there. Our low temperature is 54º F at night (that's 13º C) and the highs are 72º F during the day (an ideal 23º C). But more than that, there's something about the air -- a crisp edge that suggests the coming of fall. Or maybe it just feels that way to me because I'm back at school.

I spent much of yesterday in the Lower School re-shelving books and putting things in order. I think both libraries are in pretty good shape and ready for the onslaught of kiddies come Tuesday. (Monday is a bank holiday, thank God.)

I have a couple of goals this weekend: I want to go take some pictures; I want to finish this book about ABBA that I've been reading for two weeks (it's mostly just been sitting on my end table next to the couch, but it's not bad and I'd like to finish it); I want to plan some trips for our break periods in the autumn. Plus I need to do the routine weekend stuff like laundry and watering all the houseplants. Our rubber trees have been sitting outside all summer and I suppose I need to think about bringing them inside again, though we won't have any really cold temperatures for another couple of months.

This column in The New York Times really annoyed me, in which David Brooks blames liberals and progressives for the right wing's nihilistic, destructive tendencies. Apparently we overconfident, domineering liberals have beaten the poor conservatives into silent, seething submission, leaving them physically hunched over and unable to express their God-fearing perspectives, to such a degree that they have now decided to simply destroy everything. He holds up Curtis Yarvin and Christopher Rufo as examples of this trend, both of them right-wing extremists of the highest order. So it's my fault that Curtis Yarvin thinks the way he does? Talk about shifting responsibility!

I get so tired of this assertion that conservatives can't express themselves. Rush Limbaugh? Newt Gingrich? Jerry Falwell? Jon Voight? Ted Nugent? I've been hearing conservative voices for decades. I certainly didn't feel predominant in the culture during the terms of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

And I loved this sentence: "For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites." Well, gee, could it be education?!

At least he ultimately comes out against nihilism, but his source of reassurance is statistics that show more young men going to church. Given the growth and persistence of Christian nationalism, I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing -- but I suppose we shall see.

Not Very Uplifting

Here are some of the buildings Sharon and I encountered during our visit to Hackney Wick last weekend. It may be gentrified, but it's still a very colorful neighborhood!

This one has a Roy Lichtenstein feel to it...sort of Lichtenstein-meets-Marvel-Comics.

You might be wondering (probably not) whatever happened to my itchy arms. Well, they're still itchy. I have backed off the belief that insects are the cause. I haven't been outside enough in the past week to have encountered any insects. I'm returning to the belief that this is a result of cumulative sun damage over the course of the summer. Now that I'm at work I'm obviously in the sun much less, and I've been taking a daily antihistamine, which seems to help -- so I think the problem is slowly, slowly going away. It's still a very peculiar situation.

The lesson for the future, I think, is that I need to wear sunscreen.

I've been missing Olga a lot lately. The other night I woke up in the wee hours and came out to sit in the living room for a moment, and missed the fact that when she was alive, she would wonder where I was if I didn't come back to bed. She'd come out to sit with me on the couch. I still miss her snoring weight and her presence in the garden during the day, annoying as it could be. It's been slightly more than a month since she left us, but it seems much longer. When a constant presence is suddenly absent, that absence seems even more profound.

I think I'm approaching this year at work with more trepidation than I let on in yesterday's post. This was amplified by a meeting we had yesterday where we outlined what's needed in the coming year, and it sounds like I'll be spending even more time in the Lower School and less doing what I used to do. Every day's schedule is going to be different, and there will be much less routine. I'm told that overdue materials are "just books" (in other words, don't spend so much time trying to get them back) and I'm still doing all the book covering. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what's expected of me, but the message I'm getting is that I should not count on sitting at the circulation desk as much. At the moment, the prospect of another whole year is not very compelling. Maybe that will change as I get more into the rhythm of things.

I think I'm just exhausted with all the opening-week activity, too. I'm ready to have students back and stop with all these meetings and trainings and speeches and socializing.

All I know is, it's not a good thing when I wake up in the middle of the night stewing about work. I am ready to leave this part of my life behind.

Dave had a little more left over bolognaise sauce from dinner on Wednesday night, and I put it out for the foxes once again. I honestly don't mean to make a habit of this but I hate throwing away perfectly good meat sauce, and when it's not enough to save but too much to put in the trash, an animal is the perfect solution. Again, I'm missing Olga!

Anyway, this time around, the fox never came for it. According to the garden cam, a curious cat checked it out but I think ultimately the starlings ate it. The idea of birds eating meat sauce is a little disgusting for some reason.

Pronunciation

I found that sticker on my walk home last night. I'm not blogging it because it illustrates my mood or anything like that -- in fact I've been pretty upbeat this week, even though I have a lot going on workwise. The first week of school (for teachers) is always a crazy time as we go through all of the standard all-school meetings and training sessions. Yesterday we had one on creating "courageous global citizens," and today we have child protection training, which is mandated by law.

And of course, we're still setting up the library, so when the training is done I'm organizing shelves and displays and moving stuff around. Yesterday we divided the board games into three different groups for display in three areas, for example. Plus I'm taking departed patrons out of the library system and organizing magazine sign-ups (don't ask) and blah blah blah.

I honestly don't mind it all, but it is boring to write (and read) about. Hence not much to blog about my days at the moment. Students come back on Tuesday.

Blogger Margaret uploaded this entertaining map the other day, supposedly showing the town names in each state that are the hardest to pronounce. (You may have to click on it to see the names clearly.) Like Margaret, who disputed Washington's choice of Puyallup, I took issue with some of them immediately.

In my home state of Florida, for example, the name chosen is Ocoee, which is a city near Orlando. I would have chosen Immokalee, Chokoloskee or Islamorada, all of which I have mispronounced at one time or other. For years I did not know that the "s" in Islamorada is silent, as in island.

What about Mississippi? Their choice is Louisville, and even assuming it's pronounced LEWISville (because why else would it be hard to pronounce?), a quick look at Google maps offered a host of other worthy contenders. There's Hushpuckena, Arkabutla, Looxahoma, Bogue Chitto, Toomsuba, Shubuta, Eastabuchie and Wiehe -- and also Splunge, which is just funny.

Likewise, the choice for Nebraska is Cairo, which I assume must be pronounced KAYro. (Because, again, why else would it be hard to pronounce?) But they overlooked Unadilla, Ohiowa, Otoe, Niobrara, Verdigre, Minatare, Joder (surely not the Spanish curse word?) and Ough.

And finally, Colorado. Seriously? Crested Butte is the best they could do? What about Iliff, Capulin, Abarr, Arickaree, Hoehne and Gulnare?

There are others I could challenge as well, but I suppose the point is that mispronunciation is in the eyes (or mouth) of the pronouncer. Still, it was a fun exercise. It would be interesting to do it for Britain. I'm sure the winners would be somewhere in Wales, home of the famous Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which is an actual place.