El Burro Volador

So, I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but a while back Rebekah changed her hairstyle.  She went with a much shorter look, and it gave her a certain amount of hipness with which to resume her college career.  One of the unforeseen consequences, and biggest benefits, of the new style has been its tendency to interact strangely with ‘Bekah’s pillow.  It somehow absorbs every toss and turn Rebek executes in the course of her nightly slumber, and when she wakes in the morning her hair is a seismic event, all spikes and crests.  Today she was sporting a particularly magnificent fin, for cryin’ out loud.  I’ve though of surreptitiously photographing some of the more spectacular outcroppings, purely for scientific purposes, but I am so bad with a camera that I would probably just end up taking extreme closeups of my own eye…

Hi all, sorry to have totally bailed on you for the last week.  My habits/schedule have changed, so the morning time I was using for blogging has kind of disappeared.  I am trying to adjust by blogging at other times and just posting it in the mornings, and we’ll see if I can make it work.  Anyhow, let’s not use up anymore time on that.

I recently started my new music experiment.  I mentioned it a while back – each week I’ll be trying out a new recording from 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.  Last week I decided to simply turn to the first entry in the book (it is organized alphabetically) and try that.

The selection was ABBA’s Gold.  Now, considering the fact that I am something of a music snob, and that one of the primary reasons I purchased the book was to uncover obscure artists and new genres to explore, a “greatest hits” album from the world’s second biggest-selling pop band did not inspire confidence.

I was somewhat disarmed by the author’s admission that ABBA’s work can appear to be “air-brushed nothingness” – if nothing else, I am a sucker for a well-turned phrase.  As I read further, he discussed the craft and discipline evident in producing so much perfect pop – the one unforgivable sin in pop seems to be rambling or deviating from catchy hook-and-refrain style writing.  As he discussed how ABBA “polished everything to a blinding sheen”, I began to think that perhaps I was too harsh to a genre which requires such restraint on the part of its writers.  After all, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to crank out a haiku, a form that places supreme value on economy.

So I gave it a try.  Of course I had heard ABBA before – had listened to this very album, as a matter of fact.  The music hadn’t changed, but my attitude had.  What had previously been a guilty pleasure at best is now just a pleasure.  Sure it’s spun sugar – all artifice and sweetness, and occasionally it will stick to things you’d rather it didn’t, like your head just before a long car ride with someone else, but hey, sweetness and optimism take work.

Anyhow, Mr. Moon (author of the book) commends the songs “S.O.S.”, “Dancing Queen”, “Waterloo”, and “Fernando” to your particular attention, and I join him in recommending “Take A Chance On Me” as an especial favorite.

For new converts, Moon recommends Arrival as a good place to dig deeper into ABBA, and in this age of mp3 downloads I feel compelled to add the single “The Day Before You Came” to that recommendation.

For those looking to continue their music exploration in a similar vein, Mr. Moon suggests The Cardigans’ Life, followed by Duran Duran’s Rio.  If you follow these paths, let me know how it turns out – I am pressing on to a selection from the letter “B” later today.

Once upon a day in the world, a burro was detailing a car.  This car had been very much “lived in” by its previous owners, and they had left a few things in it that the burro had to take out so that the car would be nice and clean again.

First, the burro found a screw.  The burro took the screw and put it into the bin where his auto shop kept assorted screws in case they needed them someday – like when they had to put license plates on cars.

Next, the burro found a penny.  This he tossed into a jar full of pennies that he kept tucked away on a shelf.  “Hmm,” said the burro, “my jar is about half full.  Maybe soon there will be enough there to buy a pretty hair ribbon for Mrs. Burro, or a soda pop on a hot day.”

Finally, the burro found a shiny compact disc.  It said “Soulja Boy” on it.  The burro threw it in the trash can.

So, I was leafing through my copy of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die , and I decided that, funds permitting, I am going to start acquiring some of the music therein and listening to it every week.  If you think about it, at 1 recording a week, it will still take 20 years to fit it all in, so I guess I’d better get started.  And if I chronicle my musical adventures here, then y’all can come along for the ride – it’ll be great!

What I wanted to share with you first of all, however, was a gem I discovered while flipping idly through the tome.  It is an album title.   Specifically it is the title of an album released by The Bothy Band in 1976.  For those of you who like to do your own digging, I’ll leave it at that.  For the rest of you, the answer is here.

I’m sorry that I was gone for so long.  I am going to try to set aside more time for this from now on.  The most significant happening in the recent blank interim was Rebekah’s return to college.  This semester she is taking a math course, a composition course, and a course in Colorado history.  She has already been studying hard and just generally demonstrating the kind of preparedness and responsibility that I am not so much known for.  I predict that she will be a resounding success.  Other recent highlights include a memorable trip out on Horsetooth reservoir and Clem’s utter conquest of her Doggie Arena.

I intend to steal some of Rebekah’s thunder over the next couple days.  For some time now she has been running patopatoganso, the world’s premier bird-related blog.  Lately, though, she has let a couple of major bird stories slip through the cracks, so I guess it is up to me to catch them.  I am El Burro Volador, after all, so I guess flying things are sort of my purview.  I mean, if I were El Burro Strollador, then, yeah, I guess I would have to limit myself to news about walkers only.

Anyhow, today’s news tidbit applies to a species of vulture, a branch of the bird family for which Rebekah alone expresses any fondness.  Despite a healthy dislike of the corpse-eaters, however, a team of conservationists recently managed to facilitate the first-ever captive breeding of the endangered Slender-billed Vulture at a zoo in India.  Scientists reportedly achieved the breakthrough by dressing the birds up as members of other, more attractive bird species.  “Well, there is another repulsive creature preserved by the power of human science,” said chief conservationist Mahendra Ojha “I would like to think that the descendants of these horrible birds will one day eat the corpses of my children’s children.”

I find it interesting how television viewing has changed since I was a kid.  Although there are still some shows Rebekah and I sit down to watch when they are putting out new episodes, it is far more common for us to discover a great new series once it’s out on dvd – as often as not, this happens after the show has been cancelled!  I can’t offer a better example of this than our current favorites, Jericho and The 4400.  Both series are gone from tv, but Rebekah and I have been watching at least one episode a day (right now it is mostly Jericho, as Ty has graciously loaned us both seasons of it, while we have to wait for new 4400s to arrive via Netflix).

For those of you unfamiliar, Jericho chronicles events in a small Kansas town after a devastating act of nuclear terrorism wipes out much of the United States.  The 4400‘s premise is that 4400 people who have gone missing over the years suddenly return in a ball of white light, unaged and with no memory of where they’ve been, but definitely changed.

Another recent favorite discovered in this way has been Dexter, a show based around perhaps the most sympathetic serial killer in the history of fiction.

So, Jon Hughes died recently.  He’ll always hold a special place in the hearts of many of my generation, who grew up watching The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Hughes brought a much-needed sincerity to teen comedies back in the day, moving the genre away from the raunchy Porky’s style of movie which portrayed teen boys as sex-crazed maniacs and girls as, well, more or less “targets”.  Instead, Hughes populated his movies with teens that had more complex inner lives, and was instrumental in bringing about the popular view of adolescents as vulnerable fledgling adults trying to cope in various ways with their new place in the world.  If he also promoted a bunch of teen angst, well, nobody’s perfect.

The death of the guy who gave us the bajillion-grossing Home Alone quite naturally eclipsed the death of Budd Schulberg the day before.  After all, Schulberg’s best work went out with Bogart half a century ago.  Also, Schulberg’s legacy is a little more ambivalent – he wrote the scripts for classic classic films like On the Waterfront, yes, but he also named names for HUAC in ’51.  Still, I’ll always recall Schulberg fondly for his work in the seamy underworld milieu of boxing culture.  His writing is full of washed-up pugs, crooked promoters, ghetto kids on the make, desperate longshoremen, out-of-work journalists, and other hard luck stories.  In Schulberg’s stories you took your best shot and probably lost anyway, ’cause the game was rigged to begin with.

I wonder what it would have been like if these two had collaborated?

I could see a Schulberg-penned remake of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which focuses on the hapless principal Rooney, a laughingstock in his own school with one last chance at redemption if he can catch brilliant truant Ferris Bueller in the act.

Or maybe Hughes could have written a sort of sequel to On the Waterfront where Terry and Charley’s teenage sons try to overcome their fathers’ history and become friends, making it out of the waterfront together.

I can even imagine a bleak Schulberg sequel to The Breakfast Club.  Titled High School Reunion it revisits those same characters at middle age, chronicling how their potential has been squandered and blighted, their solidarity revealed to be ephemeral and all but meaningless.

For a while now, Sunday mornings have been pretty special.  Rebekah and I have gotten to go over to Merlyn’s place and have breakfast with him and Abbitha, something I look forward to all week.  This Sunday was to be an extra big day for Clemmie, as she was finally given the green light to tag along.

Unfortunately, Rebekah is feeling poorly this morning, and the mission had to be scrubbed on the very launching pad, as it were.  Hopefully we’ll all be able to get together next week.

Also, as a certain Ferret correctly pointed out, Rebekah’s far-famed Arctic Fox Photo resides here, atop its pile of awards.

Also, I’ve been thinking about a new series of posts here in the blog.  Rebekah says she has a marked preference for posts that are “about something”, and when pressed to elaborate, clarifies “not just about a book or movie, or journaling”.  The recent post on Haggis was offered as an example.  So, in an effort to please my beloved spouse, I’m contemplating a series on various…personages.  We shall see how it turns out.

Lately, Rebekah has been getting quite a bit of recognition for her photography on Flickr.  One of her recent pictures has received like 5 separate awards – as soon as I figure out the address, I’ll link you to it.