If you haven't been reading A Softer World, well, then, go do it.
August 2004 Archives
Since moving to Los Angeles and taking on new employment, my schedule's been a bit irregular, as I can find myself working at any time between 8 AM and 10 PM, seven days a week. So between work and writing, the missus and I haven't had that much time to really get out there and explore the area as much as I'd like. We've been to the Getty Center, which is beautiful, and gone hiking in the parks around the CIT Jet Propulsion Lab, which are not, and we've gone hiking at the Resevoir a couple times; but for the most part, we've been happy to just spend time together and enjoy our house and our neighborhood, away from festering summer traffic and crowds of annoying Angelinos.
But I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see John Williams conducting some of his film scores at the Hollywood Bowl. So last night, we packed up the picnic set we received as a wedding present with cheese, crackers, cookies, and rice cakes, and off we went.
The Hollywood Bowl on a summer evening is a splendid thing. The Bowl is wide and open, hence the name, and the noise and bustle of the city is kept at bay by the surrounding hills and vegetation, and with the darkness and the chorus of crickets, there's a feeling of calm isolation akin to being on a remote island. The show was popular, but not crowded, and we were able to spread out on our benches and snack on pepperoni and Wheatsworth as the orchestra warmed up. And as John strode on stage, launched into "The Star-Spangled Banner," then moved on to some of his Olympic themes, I sat there full and very content and let the music flow over me. Though I stood for "The Star-Spangled Banner," of course.
The first half of the show was Williams' music from the Olympics, which was perfectly enjoyable, but it was the film scores were what filled the Bowl. I think the trend as of late has been to dismiss John Williams' themes as sugary and overtly sentimental, but it's impossible to deny the power of his music when hearing it live: the instantly recognizable opening beats of his SUPERMAN theme that drove the crowd wild, the ominous Imperial March from STAR WARS, the lifting of the E.T. score. This is the music from the movies that brought me here, and if it's a bit hammy or repetitive, I don't give a damn. I love it.
And I wasn't alone; the audience brought Williams back out for multiple encores, until he finally finished up with his iconic STAR WARS theme, made a gesture that he was going to sleep, and walked off to a standing ovation.
All in all, a perfect way to spend an evening.
It's true: Guided By Voices, the best rock band since the Replacements, is calling it quits. Their final album, "Half Smiles of the Decomposed," will be out next week. Their final tour will end in Chicago on New Year's Eve--it was supposed to end in New York City on that date, but they probably had trouble booking a venue. And then, after roughly twenty years of rocking the house, GBV will be no more.
Okay, so there's a bit of hyperbole involved. Guided By Voices was rarely more than Robert Pollard, the vocalist, songwriter, and mad musical genius with an abbreviated attention span that rarely took a song past the three-minute-mark, if not the two-minute-mark. And Bob will continue doing his thing, as he's done over umpteen solo and side projects over umpteen years. So really, what's the big deal?
The big deal is, Guided by Voices wasn't Bob Pollard and Friends--it was Guided By Voices. It was the best band you never listened to. It was the pure, unadulterated sound of raw, untempered guitar pop driven by a brilliance that produced over nine hundred songs in two decades. Through Guided By Voices, Bob put out gems that, had they been done by anyone other than Guided By Voices, could have been playing on your radio every five minutes. And he put them out roughly once a year.
Go. Listen to "Liquid Indian." Listen to "As We Go Up, We Go Down." "Back to the Lake." "How's My Drinking?" Listen to the best damn pop song you'll hear this year, "The Best of Jill Hives."
Okay, I'm a little biased. My wife and I started our romance at a GbV concert at Bowery Ballroom in New York City, on Valentine's Day. And they were the first, and really only, band that I felt personally involved with, because I picked one of their CDs up on a whim after hearing the singer was a schoolteacher from Dayton, Ohio, rather than waiting to hear about them from a friend or the radio. Guided by Voices is mine, the way a band can be yours when you're a sophomore in college and you grab some record out of a discount bin and discover something that makes your world a different place. And when you find something like that, you tend to be a bit possessive.
Anyway. Tickets for the Los Angeles stop of their final tour go on sale tomorrow morning. The final album goes on sale next week. Which means that you can expect, by the end of next week, a record review to end all record reviews. Be prepared.
Getting a degree in engineering is not what you'd call a hell of a lot of fun. At the height of the final year, I was working at it pretty much 'round the clock. That meant getting up at 7 AM for a morning lab, class through 'til lunchtime, lunch, class, nap in the library, class, dinner, T.A. in the structural testing lab, then an evening class. Then I'd start my homework, which meant going up to a room reserved for seniors on the top floor of the engineering building and staying there until 2 or 3 in the morning. Sometimes I'd grab some shut-eye on one of the padded benches outside the Dean's office before getting back to work. Then I'd stagger back down to the house I was living in and collapse in bed for a couple hours of sleep. Then start the whole thing over the next morning. Sometimes, I just wouldn't sleep at all, just work the whole night through.
Time puts a rosy glow on most things. This isn't one of them. This sucked. It was hard, brain-busting work, I was tired all the time, and the only relaxation I got much of the time was from my dreams, which were wild, fantastical events of robbing stagecoaches and rescuing princess on Mars, so vivid and real I would wake up tasting the prarie dust and smelling the alien air, dreams I was convinced were the result of the creative side of my brain attempting to balance all the work the analytical side was doing the rest of the time.
I learned a lot during that last year, and one of the things I learned was that, if there was stuff to do, I would get it done. I would hate it, and I would be a sullen, miserable bastard much of the time, but I would do the work, and plow through with my head down, and not raise it again until I was finished. I would commit myself totally to the job at hand.
It's a good thing to learn. But unfortunately, it's also an easy thing to lose, especially when there's no one riding your ass to get the job done. Which is why, nowadays, I waste a lot of time when I should be writing, and I hit the snooze button when I should be hitting the shower, and I'm generally nowhere near as productive as I know I can be.
Still, I suppose I can take comfort in knowing that the potential is still there, and I can keep working, and work harder, and commit myself more and more to getting done the current job at hand.
Moses is probably in his early 70's, a small, wizened Jewish man with big glasses and a grin that stretches across his face.
He can't hear at all, he says. His hearing just upped and stopped working. Well, he clarifies, when he was born, he couldn't hear a lick, couldn't speak, either, but eventually it kicked in. Now, after all this time, it's cut out again. Moses is getting a CAT scan tomorrow to see if his brain's ok, then he'll probably get an implant so he can hear again. But for now, I'm gonna have to talk pretty loud.
That's fine, I tell him. I can talk pretty loud.
Moses, it turns out, is a civil engineer who's specialized in traffic engineering design for over forty years. He's won awards from the city, state, and country for his work. He's particularly proud of an intersection on North Lake that he tells me I should check out. And as I'm helping him with his computer, he tells me gleefully of the time, when he was working in the signal department of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation back in the 1970's, that he got a call from a little old lady asking him to please extend the duration of a nearby traffic signal so that she'd have more time to cross the street. After telling her that extending the signal would warp traffic patterns all across the city, he says to her, "C'mon, lady! I'm not God! I'm just Moses!"
Moses laughs like it just happens yesterday and pounds me happily on the shoulder, and I laugh right along with him. When I tell him that I'm a civil engineer as well, or at least I graduated as one, he asks me what the hell I'm doing helping him with iPhoto, then tells me to give him a call if I decide to get back into engineering. "Or go work for L.A.D.O.T.," he says, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together and giving me a wink. I dutifully take his email address and give him my card, and he shakes my hand and goes off on his way, nearly deaf and facing possible brain surgery, but as happy as anyone could hope to be because we've figured out his problem with iPhoto.
Fixing people's problems all day can be a trying job at times, and I occasionally need a reminder that everyone, until they prove otherwise, is worthy of courtesy and respect. Which is why I'm always happy for someone like Moses to come along.
My current desktop, taken during the ticker-tape parade in New York City welcoming the Apollo 11 astronauts back to home soil. Click for the full image.
There has been, of late, and will no doubt continue to be, a great deal of talk about the Bush Administration using the recently-growing spectre of terrorism to their political advantage. The New York Times' recent report that the current much-publicized threat was based on dated information has just added fuel to the fire. The conspiracy-minded have even gone so far to suggest that the present administration might allow a terrorist incident to occur, to bolster their own position. And even those a bit more even-keel than the grassy-knoll types have been quick to pounce on this latest Times report as evidence that Bush & Co. are gonna milk this terror thing for all it's worth.
The thing is, that doesn't make any sense.
Does the Bush Administration really benefit from the widespread conviction that the country is a whole is still vulnerable to a terrorist attack? Does it look good that a government that declared an unbelievably vague and all-encompassing "war" on "terror" almost three years ago hasn't even gotten the fight off its own doorstep? At this point, it's far easier to believe that Bush would rather avoid the whole terror issue, as evidenced by his attempt to brush off the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission in their final report, which he might as well have tossed into the bushes in the Rose Garden for all the attention he gave it, before having it shoved back in his face by the media and the public. Of course he would want to ignore a report that presents, in no uncertain terms, a clear documentation of how vulnerable this country continues to be, three years after the biggest wake-up call in its history.
Bush does not benefit from terror. The idea that a terrorist threat, or worse, an actual attack, could help his campaign is ludicrous. Such an attack would only underscore how ineffectual he's been in his promise to protect this country, and would blow his projected ideal of safety and security right out of the water. After September 11th, Bush wasn't blamed for neglecting the country's security for two main reasons: he was relatively new to office and couldn't have been expected to drastically effect the nation's security in such a short time, and the country was collectively unaware that we were so vulnerable to attack. You couldn't blame him for being caught off guard--we ALL were. Almost three years after September 2001, he's got neither of these going for him, and were a terrorist incident to occur, he and his administration would have absolutely nothing to blame but the terrorists and themselves.
These recent announcements and terror warnings aren't the acts of a manipulative administration attempting to use fear in their favor, but of an incompetent administration desperately trying to cover its ass.
