Thursday, November 19, 2009

On This Date in (Mark's) Automotive History



The 2007 Honda Fit - the car I'm currently driving, which replaced a 1996 Dodge full-size van - turned over 50,000 miles today. It's a silver Sport model, though I don't think of it as a sporty car, to be honest. It's all of three cylinders and five forward gears in the automatic transmission, four small tires and an iPod jack.

That's my car - it's Chicago, and the Blues Brothers, and old jazz, Louie Armstrong, Dave McKenna, Kristen Chenoweth, Broadway musicals, Dr. Demento, The Beatles, Deep Purple, Cheap Trick and Steely Dan; it's Rich Mullins, Sierra and, not the least, eight sets of Carolyn Arends, she of relative minor fame who deserves relative major fame.

And, truth be told, it's also 23 sets of Frank Zappa and three of Black Sabbath; podcasts of NPR's Fresh Air, Car Talk, Science Friday and A Prairie Home Companion, Old Time Radio Comedies and Old Time Radio Thrillers (138 and 143 of the latter two, respectively). And it's Bill Cosby, Larry the Cable Guy, Woody Allen, the 2000 Year Old Man, Allan Sherman, Eric Idle/Monty Python and 19 other comedians.

All told, it's 5,764 songs and 535 podcasts.

Here's a sample of what I heard at lunch time:
  • A segment of Dean Martin's Las Vegas show from 1966 or '67
  • Bye Bye, Love - Simon and Garfunkel
  • Not Alone - Carolyn Arends
  • Truck Drivin' Song - Weird Al Yankovic
  • Drive My Car - The Beatles
  • American Woman - The Guess Who
  • Dancing Days - Led Zepplin
  • Ain't Misbehavin' - Leon Redbone
  • Mighty River - Louis Armstrong
  • A segment from Larry the Cable Guy
  • Sweet Thing - Van Morrison
  • All is Well - Carolyn Arends
  • Loves Me Like a Brother - The Guess Who
  • Love Was New - Chicago
  • Oye Como Va - Santana
  • Oh, What a Beautiful Morning - Oklahoma Cast Album
  • The Boston Rag - Steely Dan
  • In My Life - Bette Midler
  • If Love Is Trouble - Dizzy Gillespie
  • I Need You - The Beatles
  • The Andy Griffith Show Theme
  • Love From a Heart of Gold - How to Succeed in Business Cast Album
  • Soap Theme (TV Show)

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Chicago, As It Was


Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people, Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Poet Carl Sandburg in Chicago Poems, 1916

Love This Lyric . . .

. . . from West of Hollywood, Steely Dan

I'm way deep into nothing special,
Riding the crest of a wave beaking just west of Hollywood


Way deep into nothing special??? Sounds cynical to me.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

In My Fifties, Looking Back to High School

". . . one finds, especially by the time one reaches one's fifties, that there are a limited number of types of people in the world, and you went to high school with every single one of them. You can visit the Eskimos, you can visit the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you can go to Israel, you can go to Egypt, but everybody you meet is going to be somebody you went to high school with."


Humorist P.J. O'Rourke


I don't know if this is especially true - perhaps it's just because I'm not observant enough - but I do know that I look back to high school every now and then. It's funny, isn't it, that we spend some 17-18 years growing up, moving through grade school, middle school and high school, and then find ourselves looking back from twice that distance (35 years for me), thinking about those years.

Shouldn't my high school years be overshadowed by things that came after? Four years in my life versus all that came with a 28-year marriage, four kids, a career, nice home, et al. But here I sit on the couch, reading the PJ O'Rourke quotation and I find myself walking the halls at Prospect High School, completing a verb quiz in German class, intercepting a pass during gym, driving my '67 Olds through the neighborhood, finding that I don't fit in everywhere, working at the A&P, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon at the beach with the gang . . . It couldn't have been as much fun as I remember it was, could it?

And the really funny thing is that I know my dad generally feels the same way - especially when we talk about growing up in Plainville, Kansas - and he graduated 71 years ago!

Monday, November 9, 2009

And the Name Is . . .

"Bishop's Gate"

Yes, this is the name of the band which will be performing a reprise of the "Beatles Service" I wrote for church. Bishopsgate is written into a line in the song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite - "The celebrated Mr. K. performs his feat on Saturday at Bishopsgate".

I should note that we didn't have a name the first time we did the service.

“Bishopsgate” itself is a road in London, named for one of the seven original gates in the city wall. (See the wikipedia.org article here for a more lengthy description.)

The band members are on board; next, I have to talk to upper-management at church - the senior pastor. We're not going to do this during an actual service time. It's to be scheduled after a pot-luck dinner on a Saturday night. This frees us from the approx. 60-minute limitation of Sunday morning. Indeed, I think I'll add a little more!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Time: Perhaps This Is What I've Been Trying To Say

“I have begun to suspect that time is, in some sense I don’t yet fully comprehend, subjective to the viewer. What a day signifies to me is quite different than what it signifies to you. How strange my day might seem, were I able to see it through your eyes.”

“When we are young . . . the days crawl by. I remember summers of my youth that seemed to last for generations. But as we grow older, the months and years flit by like dragonflies, one after another in their dozens. But by the calendar, a day is still a day, is it not? Why is it, do you suppose, that the duration of a span of time should seem so different to us in one circumstance than another?”

The character Ling Xuan in Chris Roberson’s short story,
“The Sky Is Large And The Earth Is Small”.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

The Beatles Service: Reprise

So. . .people - namely my wife Nancy and friend Carol - are after me to do The Beatles Service again. For those of you who don't know - and you are without number - I wrote an entire church service using the music of the Beatles and re-written lyrics. We ran it at all four services (Saturday night and three on Sunday) the week after Easter in 2007. Then we added one more service for the confirmation kids.

I had a lot of people tell me how much they liked it - that was nice. But the best compliment I received was from one of our (now) pastors. She said, "I want to tell you that this was the best service I have ever been to at Messiah, and I've been to a lot!" That was nice . . .

So we're looking at a Saturday night "extra" service, as it's sometimes difficult to schedule things within the framework the ELCA provides our churches. And now I'm thinking, "Why do only an hour's worth of Beatles music?" I have a lot of music I'd like to do, and three drama's as well (all musical). We could make it a full two hours! Why not? If you're going to do it, do it right!

We'll see what happens . . .

Monday, November 2, 2009

Eternity

"Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed."

"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no 'brief candle' for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

George Bernard Shaw