Month: February 2018 (Page 3 of 3)

Friday Playlist

It’s been a decent start to the new music year in terms of singles. But there has yet to be a great album that has captured my attention. And, sadly, the list of February releases is looking pretty meager as well. I’ll hope the solid singles keep rolling out until we finally get some long plays that require my attention.

Oh and after a brief warm spell we’re back to winter. The windchill has dipped near zero and there’s a chance for snow on five of the next seven days. No big storms seem likely, but we are slipping into one of those patterns that slowly suck the life out of you by dropping an inch of snow every 36 hours or so.

Combine all that with a couple timely new songs and I thought it was the perfect week for an all Australia/New Zealand playlist. Because it’s summer down there right now. And the songs are pretty good. A couple new ones and several classics to, hopefully, warm your soul a bit.

“Mistake” – Middle Kids. Nothing warmed my week more than this new song by Middle Kids. It’s really good and another sign of how promising this band is. They will (finally) release their debut full-length album in May. The only downside is it is built around the songs from the EP they released about a year ago. And, of course, “Edge of Town,” which came out two years ago. Oh well, as they’ve yet to disappoint I expect all the new songs will be excellent.

“Mainland” – Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. I called them the Aussie Parquet Courts last year. This song suggests there’s a lot more to them than just faux-snotty art rock. 

“Avant Gardner” – Courtney Barnett. The current queen of the Down Under indie scene. The line “The paramedic thinks I’m clever cuz I play guitar, I think she’s clever cuz she stops people dying” is one of the best lyrics of the decade. 

“No Taste Bomber” – Salad Boys. Our New Zealanders for the week. I had this terrific 2015 track set to add to a playlist a few weeks back. And then Salad Boys dropped their new album so I paused, meaning to include one of those songs. It’s a good album, but this song is simply undeniable. 

“Roll On” – The Living End. From the heady days just after the turn of the millennium. TLE took the best of the Clash and Rancid, adding some lefty Aussie politics, and cranked it to 11. Here they sing about the righteousness of cause of striking dock workers. Rock and roll! I drove around blasting this a lot in the summer of 2000.

“Blue Sky Mine” – Midnight Oil. The 80s were full of visually compelling lead singers. One of those was Peter Garrett, the bald, 6’4”, merrily dancing frontman for Midnight Oil. (Urban myth held that he was actually 7-feet tall.) Midnight Oil’s lyrics were always deeply political, concerned with the treatment of the Australian Aboriginals, the unfairness of capitalism, and protecting the environment. Garrett famously went on to become a member of parliament and served in two different minister-ships under two different prime ministers. It’s interesting to read his Wikipedia page and see how becoming a part of government caused him problems as he had to reconcile views he held as a private citizen with the desires of the administration he was a part of.

Old Man

I have passed another milestone of the aging process: last week I picked up my new pair of glasses, my first with progressive lenses. If there was any uphill left in life it is now certainly in the rearview mirror.

My eyes are still adjusting, which is kind of always the case with me. I have a nutty prescription – both bad nearsightedness and serious astigmatism – and have weak corneas. Combine all that and even in the best of circumstances it’s tough to get perfectly corrected vision. If the angle of the lenses or the correction is off by just a hair, it can throw either part of the prescription off by enough to be noticeable to me. And my weak corneas mean my prescription is always in flux. I’ll see great for awhile then suddenly everything is out of whack for a few weeks before it returns to center.

In other words, I’m a pain in the ass. Or at least my eyes are.

Anyways…I’m still getting used to the new lenses. I will say they’ve gotten better over the past two days, so hopefully I’m getting locked in. But there is still a chance I will need to go back and have the lenses checked and, perhaps, redone.

The one big win is the whole reason you get progressive lenses: my up-close vision has improved dramatically. I had reached the point where it was impossible to read anything that was in tiny print, because that meant bringing the object near my face, where my eyes just didn’t work anymore. I had become one of those people who took a picture of, say, the directions on a bottle of medication with my phone and then looked at the image on screen to figure out the proper dosage.

Sad and pathetic.

But now I can read that shit!

For those of you not in the progressive world, it has been a little tricky getting used to the “tunnels” of vision these lenses offer. It’s frustrating to have to move my eyes or head a few degrees up or down to bring something into clear focus. That’s the one area where I worry about whether these lenses are correct, because at times it seems like I’m working too hard to find that perfect spot. And I don’t know if that’s just something I need to get used to, or only happening because the lenses are off by just a hair.

Two other downsides to the new glasses.

1) I had to go to a bigger lens/frame size to accommodate the progressive correction. I’m not wearing 1980s Phil Donahue lenses, but they are certainly bigger than what I’ve been wearing since I went to specs full time a decade ago. I’ve also been wearing Oakley frames for years and didn’t love the ones they offered that would take progressive lenses. The frames I chose are decent, but I also don’t love them like I loved my old Oakleys.

2) Holy crap these are expensive! I already had expensive glasses because of my prescription. Damn near doubled that already significant cost. And I’m going to need new sunglasses once I’m sure these lenses are correct. We could put a couple more kids into private grade school for the cost of my glasses now. I mean, I need to see, right? But that seems a little ridiculous. I do go to one of the fancier eye places in the city, only because my doc is the uncle of one of S’s best friends. But I’m starting to think I may have to go to a less fancy place that charges 15% less for my next set. I’m thinking about braving the discount glasses world for my sunglasses, although I worry about fit and getting the prescription right at those places. We’ll see.

So, nine years old = first pair of glasses. Fifteen = contacts. Thirty-seven = back to glasses only. Forty-six = progressive lenses.

Now I shall go curse whichever one of my ancestors are responsible for my terrible eyes.

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