For anyone younger than 55 this posting is going to be in a musical foreign language. For those of us older than 55, it’s going to be a nostalgic tour of guilty pleasure (not the R&B of my Funky Soul blog).
Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)
Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.
I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.
When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.
After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”
Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Guilty Pleasures. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Guilty Pleasures. Sort by date Show all posts
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Mark and Steve
As the entire blogosphere knows, Steve Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer this past week. Although he lived for almost six years with a rare, “treatable” form of the cancer, it got him in the end. While the doc in the emergency room who treated Mark used Jobs as an example of everything that’s wrong with a medical system that provides every option for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor, not even a liver transplant and the best care money can buy could save him (see Diary of a Bad Year, February 13, 2011).
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
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