open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Day at Work” - Nouveau Vélo. Man, I was sure these guys were Australian until I looked them up. They’re Dutch?!?! That jangle sounds straight out of Sydney to me. “My Smile Is Extinct” - Kane Strang. Now this cat is from the South Pacific, although New Zealand rather than Australia. A great example of taking depressing lyrics and hiding them behind a bouncy melody to hide their pain.
A little behind, so better catch up as I hit the summer reading season. No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach - Anthony Bourdain. I’m working through a number of shows I have stockpiled on the DVR, watching the Royals most nights, and still trying to read. But I do attempt to squeeze in an Anthony Bourdain show on Netflix about once a week. I’m a big fan, and have been for years.
Memorial Day weekend is in the books, the girls are out of school, and summer is officially here! The school year wrapped up uneventfully. All three girls passed. Or at least we assume so; middle school grades are mailed so I supposed there’s still a tiny chance we’re going to have an uncomfortable talk with M about her academic plans for next year. I kid! By our calculations she’s going to get her highest GPA of her career.
Special playlist for a special time of year. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Friday I’m In Love” - The Cure. A highly significant song in my life. Although it was Pearl Jam and Nirvana that were most responsible for shifting my taste in music away from Top 40 pop and R&B back in 1992, this song had a huge impact as well. It was so bright and shiny, unlike the gloom that I generally associated with The Cure.
You probably heard that Roger Moore died yesterday. History has been very kind to Sir Moore. Once upon a time, his run as James Bond was laughed at and derided. Eventually, though, people figured out that his portrayal of Bond was perfect for its time, and making his Bond dramatically different than Sean Connery’s was necessary. Connery might have turned Bond into a sensation, but Moore turned Bond into a franchise that fills theaters to this day.
For the third time in three seasons, M’s kickball team advanced to the City tournament. For the third time, they came up short. A disastrous top of the 7th inning put them on the wrong end of a 19–8 score in yesterday’s championship game. It was their second-straight, second-place finish. Their run began with a semifinal loss in the fall of 2015. While the result wasn’t as lopsided as their 26–1 loss last fall, this one was probably more crushing.
Last weekend of spring, last week of school. Just four more mornings of an alarm at 6:35 and the normal grumpiness as the girls and I navigate the time between me waking them up and dropping them off at school each day. We set the stage for the summer by putting the boat into the water on Saturday. We’ve usually done it a week or two earlier, but had a good excuse for waiting this year.
At first it didn’t hit me why Chris Cornell’s name was one of the headlines in this morning’s New York Times Morning Briefing email. “Why is he listed, did he say something about Trump?” was my first thought. I just did not expect his name to be listed because the news was just breaking that he died overnight. You can break down the 1990s Seattle bands a lot of ways. Nirvana had the biggest cultural impact, and Kurt Kobain’s suicide was a massive moment in our generation’s coming of age.
It’s a birthday day for us today. C is now 11. I don’t go back and re-read what I’ve written in previous years about each girl on their birthday, because I think they haven’t changed much. Or at least the two older ones have largely been the same kid for several years now. So I imagine this will be repetitive C is still our most sensitive kid. She’s the most likely to get upset about something and stomp off in tears.
A pretty busy few days, anchored by kid sports. So we’ll start with those and add in the other fun things that were a part of our weekend. First off, C’s kickball season came to an end Thursday night. You may recall her team was in a three-way tie for first place going into the final game of the season. All three teams were scheduled to play teams with worse records, so we were stressing about how the league would break the tie.
open.spotify.com/user/224a… “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” - The National. The first single off the next National album is a shot out of the dark. So many of their songs are slow, brooding, builders. Here they get right to the point. Which confuses me. I’m used to it taking a long time to get into their albums; it took me a full six months to fully connect with 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me.
I came across this piece on Twitter and really enjoyed it. Gone The Way Of The Zambezi Zinger The Zambezi Zinger was awesome. It didn’t have huge drops, didn’t loop, didn’t go insanely fast. But all those turns and the consistent speed through the ride were tons of fun. I kind of forgot that you didn’t even strap into the cars. You just sat 2–3 deep and that kept you from flying out.
Part one of the spring kid sports roundup will focus on the kickball girls. First up is C, who is playing in her third season, and on a team mixed with 3rd and 4th graders. They’ve had a really good season, sitting 5–1 and tied for first with a game to play. They won their first three games easily, and then got destroyed in their fourth game. Adding insult to defeat, one girl on the other team kicked a ball that hopped a low stone wall, rolled into the street, and got hit by a car.
I made a quick trip to Menard’s yesterday morning. I was inside for maybe 10 minutes, and in that time the car I parked nose-to-nose to did not move. However, while I was inside, someone did decided to jam a shopping cart between my vehicle and the one opposite mine. They didn’t do any damage to either car. But I did get super annoyed. The cart corral was about 15 feet away, and some person not only couldn’t be bothered to walk that far on a beautiful spring morning, but they also decided to put their cart where it was touching two other vehicles.
A couple kind of heavy songs in this week’s list along with a healthy dose of Ryan Adams. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Headless Pin Up Girl” - Chemtrails. Written just as lead singer Mia Lust was coming out as Transgendered, this is all about the meaning of identity. “Burn Blue” - Flasher. Hazy but not quite shoegazey. “I’m Not” - Daddy Issues. A driving, moody track about sexual abuse. Just the thing to give you a lift on a Friday, huh?
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles As I point often, I amuse myself with my To Read list. I’ll read a blurb about a book somewhere, or see it on a Best Of list, or get a recommendation from a friend, and just throw it on my list and then forget why the book received acclaim. Which is kind of fun, because that makes each book a mystery when I finally get to them.
So yesterday was a fun day: I got to experience the joys of having my first colonoscopy. Yep, big time fun it was. A few of you have already been through this rite of passage. For those who haven’t, fear not; this is not going to be a highly detailed account of what went down at the endoscopy center. The reason I was going in a little early (white folks don’t generally need to get scoped before 50 if they don’t have a family history) is that I’ve been having some weird stomach issues for the past year and a half.
Saturday was an official Big Day for the family. It was L’s First Communion day, a day we’ve all been looking forward to for two years, since C’s First Communion. Do we just love First Communions so much that we couldn’t wait for the next one? Nope, that’s not it. Rather, we’ve been laughing for two years over the prospect of L wearing a formal dress for the first time in her life.
Some really good, brand new music to share this week. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Shine On Me” - Dan Auerbach. The lead single off the Black Keys’ vocalist’s second solo album sounds like Beck channeling George Harrison. Which means it’s fabulous as hell, and perfect for spring and early summer. “Silver” - Waxahatchee. Katie Crutchfield has written some great songs over the years, but this might be her best yet. “Bleeding Blue” - Woods.
Last week was a guest editor week at Kottke. Tim Carmody took over and devoted the week to looking back at where and how the web has evolved over the past decade-plus, and revisiting some of the site’s readers’ favorite parts of the classic web. On Thursday Carmody posted a piece called The Web is a portal to other words, and included links to all kinds of great What If posts from over the years.
I remember when Mondays used to be my blog catch up day. That’s when I’d drop a buncha words on ya’ll about what had gone down in our house, and with our family, over the previous 72 hours. But Mondays have, strangely, become my busiest day of the week. Time just seems to fly by and suddenly it’s school pickup time, we have a practice and/or game to get to, and I still haven’t had a chance to sit down and do a weekend summary.
youtu.be/GDWfT10RF… “Starfish and Coffee” - Prince A year ago I was watching this video - one of the few Prince videos available on YouTube at the time - in tears. Still can’t believe he’s gone, especially as we learned about how troubled his final days/years were. I’ve read a couple retrospective pieces about Prince today, and one of them included this video. Which was ironic because, in prep for my nephew’s morning nap, we listened to the song together three times: two times through the Prince version, and once through Renee Stahl and Maya Rudolph’s version.
It’s a throwback day around our house today. I’m watching one of my 11-month old nephews for the day. It feels like 2005, 2007, or 2009. So I thought for the Spotify portion of the Friday tunes, I’d pull three songs from those years when I was spending each day with my 11-month-olds. There’s some humorous subtext to at least the title of each song. open.spotify.com/user/224a… youtu.be/DTjcRHfR5… “Celebrate” - Little Dragon featuring Agge.
We’ve reached the point in our parenting lives where the annoying moments begin to pretty closely balance the delightful moments. Our girls are all good, but they’re also getting older and hitting natural stages where they become more challenging, whether they’re good kids or not. We had a couple truly delightful moments over the past few days, though. Saturday night we were watching the Royals-Angels game and Albert Pujols came to bat at an important moment in the game.
open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Dull” - Microwave. Thus crunchy, grungy track sounds a lot like something Manchester Orchestra might have done when they were sussing out their more dramatic sound. “New” - Family Friends. A strong, mid-90s vibe alt-rock radio vibe here. “Stars” - Hum. If I’m sharing songs with one-syllable titles and Clinton-era overtones, I might as well go back to the actual age and pull a classic. “Fix “ - Hazel English.
Book catch-up time. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini. As I mentioned in my last Reader’s Notebook post, somehow I never read this book. I know my wife read it. In fact, I bet there’s a copy tucked away somewhere around our house. Several friends read it and raved. I know it was on my list of books to read for ages, but for some reason I dropped it a few years back.
We stuck close to home over our spring break last week. Doesn’t mean we didn’t do fun stuff. As is tradition, a quick recounting of the past 10-ish days. The girls’ final day of school, March 30, was an all-school day of service, a first-time attempt at St. P’s. There were some minor hiccups but, all-in-all, it was a good day. I was supposed to help out with C’s class, but they got rerouted and I ended up at the same place as both C and L, the Down Syndrome Society.
A different sort of playlist this week. On our lazy spring break, I roared through the Pearl Jam Twenty book that was released as a companion to the documentary of the same name a few years back. When I picked it up at the library, I expected it to be just a collection of photos and other memories of the band’s career, layered with little anecdotes from the band the the people around them.
Yes! Baseball is here! As I type this, I’m sitting in front of the TV watching the Royals take on the Twins. There’s humidity in the air, we mowed the grass for the first time yesterday, there are mulch piles all around the neighborhood. Spring is here! Wait, what’s that in the forecast for Thursday? Snow with wind chills in the 20s? Yikes. Anyway, I’m happy baseball season has arrived. I might be a total fool, but I don’t believe the pessimistic forecasts so many experts have predicted for the Royals of Kansas City.
Busy week so low on posts. Still time to share some music, though. open.spotify.com/user/224a… “Please, Let’s Go Away” - Trementina. Today is the first day of our spring break. As we’ve already taken a trip this year, we’ll be staying close to home for the next week. Doesn’t mean we can’t wish we were going somewhere warm, especially since the forecast is cool and rainy for most of the next 10 days.