Stayed up late last night and watched a show on PBS that is on all week long. It is called Carrier and is about the people on board the USS Nimitz. This is a documentary but very well done. I added some music to the ipod this weekend so let’s see what comes up.
Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast/Wayne Newton/Have A Nice Day, Vol 16. I remember this song from growing up, it was one of the albums that my parents had. The affecting story of a man leaving his family only to have his little girl follow him, yelling Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast and deciding to try and make the marriage work. Newton anymore is best known for Twist and Shout from Ferris Bueller, or being Mr. Facelifted Las Vegas.
Pour Some Sugar Me/Def Leppard/Rock of Ages. Def Leppard is one of those quintessinal 80’s band, big hair, ripped jeans, and lots of power chords. What this song means I have no idea but it has a great guitar and the pounding drums make it a great song. Def Leppards’ drummer losing an arm in a car wreck and continuing to play well, is also of a great story that increases the awesomeness.
Bad Dog, No Biscuit/Daron Norwood/Ready, Willing and Able. One of my favorite TV shows is NCIS. The episode two weeks was about a Marine K9 and this song was featured along with a lot of dog jokes. This song had a really striking riff and a great hook in the words Bad Dog, No Biscuit. A great story of a man who gets in trouble with his girlfriend and ends up spending the night in his truck. It combines all the classic elements of a country song. I looked up two songs from that episode and liked them both. I will be looking for more music from Daron Norwood.
Uptight,Everything’s Alright/Stevie Wonder/Greatest Hits. I love Stevie’s voice and lots of his early Motown songs are catchy. They have the Hitstown, USA groove on. The sound provided by the backup musicians at Motown is such that you would know that this is a Motown production just from the sound of it. It is a sound you can hear behind many of the early Motown groups. I just said Motown way too many times in that paragraph.
New York, New York/Frank Sinatra/The Best of Frank Sinatra. This song has been covered so many times that it is ridiculous, but to me this is the definitive version, even better than the version from the movie. I rediscovered The Chairman of the Board when I was getting back into Jazz after reading On The Shoulders of Giants.
Protect and Defend by Vince Flynn; 2007; Atria Books, New York, NY; 403 pages; 978-0-7432-7041-0; 4/19-4/21
Mitch Rapp is back for another adventure, with this decades villain d’jour, the Iraqi’s. Things are going along quite well, until the director of the CIA meets with an Iraqi minister of something and is kidnapped. Mitch is given 24 hours by the president, no questions asked to rescue her. He then goes nuts doing things only people do in movies, shooting 20 people dead with just two guns and no help. Then he proceeds to torture his detainees in way that make waterboarding look humane. If you want some mindless action, this is the place. But if you are thinking caring person, you probably shouldn’t read this. Good action novel, bad actions by the hero. I don’t know why I continue to read Vince Flynn because I disagree with so much of what his main character does. RRRr
Cheek to Cheek/Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong/Forever Gold. The gravel in Louis’s voice is matched by the sweetness in Ella’s. These two friends recorded at least two albums of material together and this is one of my favorites.
Louie, Louie/The Kingsmen/The Very Best of the Kingsmen. The unofficial rock anthem of the Pacific Northwest. This tune has been recorded by everyone and investigated by the FBI, (your tax dollars at work). I once worked for a gentleman who had managed the Kingsmen and one year for his birthday I found an album of Louie, Louie done by a multitude of bands from Black Flag to a university marching band. Wish I could find that again.
Green Peppers/Herb Albert and the Tijuna Brass/Whipped Cream and Other Delights. Herb Albert’s take on Booker T and the MG’s classic, it sounds wonderful. A nice mellow, but not too mellow song.
Ohio/Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young/ So Far. CSNY recounts the shootings at Kent State. On May 4, 1970 National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd at Kent State University and four students were killed and nine were wounded. Some of those killed were traveling from class to class, the one of the four closest to the soldiers was 265 ft away. One of the dead was even enrolled in the ROTC chapter at Kent State. One of the photographs taken that day won a Pulitzer Prize and changed the attitudes of some Americans to the war.
Hey, Pretty Baby/Count Basie/ Count Basie Greatest Hits. I was reminded when I was reading Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s On the Shoulders of Giants how much I liked jazz, so I got a bunch of CD’s from the library and uploaded then to my itunes and put some on my ipod. Count Basie and his Orchestra makes a good mix between vocals and the band.
Education for Extinction, American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams; 1995; University Press of Kansas,Lawrence, KS; 396 pages; ILL from University of Portland; 0-7006-0735-8; 4/9-4/19
We need to awaken in him wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent. Then he begins to look forward, to reach out. The desire for property of his own may become an intense educating force. The wish for a home of his own awakens him to new efforts. Discontent with the tepee and starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers,– and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars. Merill Gates
A second them was man’s fundamental interrelatedness with nature. Unlike Christianity where God and man stood apart–really above-nature, Indians lived in ecology harmony with their environment, approached it reverential humility, and ultimately ascribed to it a spiritual significance unknown to European-Americans.
Another obstacle to self-sufficiency was the traditional Indian ethic of sharing. “With the Indians, he is richest who gives most, with us, it is the one keeps most.” mused William Hailman, Superintendent of Indian Schools…
Around 1875, “reformers” came up with a new twist on the adage, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”, the new and improved adage was “Kill the Indian, Keep the Man”. With this in mind, Native American youth were plucked from their families, sometimes by force and sent to school. Some of them were sent all the way across the country so their was no influence by families and the tribe. The point of this education was not just to teach the children the 3 R’s but to teach them to be white. All external trappings of who they were removed and prohibited, no long hair, no painting, no speaking their native languages, no practicing their religion, anything associated with being Native American was bad, the only good was being white. American consumerism, which we often think of being somewhat new was obviously in vogue then, as shown by the first quote above. To make man civilized we have to make them want, we have to make them want more than others. We have to make them stop sharing and hoard. A poem many of the children had to learn was “The Man who Wins”, which says the man who wins is the one who hears the crys of the envious.
The white man has come to realize, hopefully, that we need to be more interconnected with nature and be good stewards of what we have. We have, again hopefully, come to realize that we need to share more. We cannot simply be concerned about ourselves, because what happens to one of us affects us all.
For a University Press book, this study is very readable and not too lofty and ivory towerish. RRRR
Where are you, Caboy?
Our head wrangler at Young Life’s Woodleaf was Pat Day, whom we called Caboy, not Cowboy, but Caboy. All of us cowboy and cowgirls were posers except for Pat. He handled the horses and all the rest of us around the horses real well. He and the other wranglers would take the campers on trail rides. I saw Pat about 4 years later, in October of 1984, I rode the Greyhound bus from Portland to San Diego to see friends I had known when I lived in the Great State of California.
I remember twice that my heart quickened on that trip, first going across the Siskiyou’s and entering California and then again cresting the top of the Grapevine and entering the L.A. Basin. I have lived here longer than anywhere else, but my ??? is in Southern California. Pat Conroy says in one of his books that all military brats lay claim to somewhere they have been and hold onto it. I think for me it is Long Beach, CA, where I was born. Portland is home, my heart is here with Ruth Ann and the boys, The Fellowship of Pirates and our Mosaic family. But there is always a part of me that will want to be in SoCal no matter how much anyone runs it down.
