You think this is cold? Remember the winter of 1994?

By any measure, it’s been a cold and snowy winter for the upper Midwest.  As of the end of January, Chicago was hovering around the thirteenth coldest winter on record, and this week continues the trend of below average temperatures.  We’ve had four school days cancelled already, and our kids will be paying dearly for it come June, exhibit A of how delayed gratification is often the better bet.

The cold has naturally brought about bragging rights of those old enough to recall, say, the blizzard of ’79 or the cold streak of ‘85.  I’m no exception.  For me, this winter brings to mind January of 1994, when I resided in St. Paul, parked my ’85 Tercel outdoors and wondered why I hadn’t gone to grad school in Arizona.  I was working at Federal Cartridge Company in Anoka about forty minutes away, and my poor car had to be jumped multiple times at the end of the work day.  This was standard procedure for the folks in Anoka, as they had a truck available specifically for this purpose. 

January 2nd began a 22 day cold spell of temperatures remaining below freezing.  In the midst of this streak, my friends followed what is normally sound advice in such circumstances: get the hell out of Dodge and head for warmer pastures.  We decided to take a road trip to Kentucky, my roommate’s home state, and take advantage of an opportunity to watch the Kentucky-Tennessee basketball game, ogle at young coeds and enjoy some warmer weather.

We succeeded in the first two goals.  Warmer weather was not to be. 

On the drive down, the moisture from our wretched breathes condensed on the windows, forming a thick sheet of ice that provided an outlet for the artistic endeavors of the passengers.  Arriving in Lexington on January 15th, we were greeted to a high of 9 degrees and a low of 2 below zero.  Returning home two days later only made matters worse.  Here are the temperature highs and lows for Minneapolis during the cold streak of 1994.

Jan 14 -18, 6

Jan 15 -25, -9

Jan 16, -25, 0

Jan 17, -17, 0

Jan 18, -27, -7

Even the University of Minnesota cried “Uncle” that day and cancelled classes.  My Tercel also acquiesced to Mother Nature.  It wouldn’t start without a jump from my buddy’s El Camino.  Still the streak continued…

Jan 19 -27, 1

Jan 20 -27, 2

Finally, on January 21, we made it to a high of 28 (but still a low of 3 below zero).  Temperatures didn’t make it past 32 degrees until two days later, and even this respite was short-lived.  Beginning on January 29th, we endured 18 consecutive days of below normal temperatures.

So yeah, it’s been a cold winter.  Our heating bills are going to be high.  And my back – twenty years older than it was in 1994 – it about ready to call it a winter.  But at least I have a garage this time around and a car that’s less than ten years old (and money to purchase a new battery if it comes to that). 

Perhaps in twenty years time, the young whippersnappers of today will blog about the Winter of 2014 with fond recollections.

Supertramp, 1979

1979.  The year of The Knack, Led Zeppelin’s first album in over three years, 52^nd Street, Tusk, The Long Run, and…

Breakfast in America. 

Living in Milwaukee in 1979, there was nobody bigger than Supertramp.  Already mainstays of Milwaukee radio from their previous three releases, Supertramp was kept in constant rotation on WQFM and WLPX, with “Logical Song,” “Goodbye Stanger,” “Breakfast in America,” “Take the Long Way Home” and “Lord Is It Mine” all making the airwaves.  Supertramp played at Mecca Arena on March 22, and then returned to Alpine Valley for three consecutive shows on June 15-June 17, just a week after exiting the Billboard best-selling album ranking (only to return a week later).

The tour culminated six months later in Paris, after selling over four million copies of Breakfast in America in the US alone, the fifth-best selling album that year, eventually winning the Grammy for the best engineered recording.  The Paris show was recorded and subsequently released as a live LP, and though the concert was also filmed, it wasn’t made available in video.  This glaring omission in rock concert libraries has now been rectified, as the show is now available on DVD and Blue Ray.

I missed the 1979 tour.  As an 11 year-old, too young to see rock concerts, I was filled with jealousy when my brother returned home from one of the Alpine Valley shows with a t-shirt in hand.  I made the next Supertramp concert at Alpine Valley on August 28, 1983, for what would be Roger Rodgson’s last tour with the band, and I have terrific memories of Bob Siebenberg starting the show with the kick drum from “Don’t Leave Me Now” as a giant tightrope walker appeared on the film screen behind the stage and the band launched into the song “Crazy.”

Watching the Breakfast in America DVD last night brought back fond memories of that show, but I was also able to watch the band with perhaps a more discerning eye than back in 1983.  A few thoughts:

• Davies and Hodgson have no stage presence whatsoever.  Hodgson sings most of his songs with his eyes closed, and Davies has a twitch that makes him look like he’s expending the greatest of effort even when he’s playing the simplest of keyboard parts.  I remember both of the band leaders having little to no interaction with the audience in 1983 as well, with the exception of Hodgson announcing his decision to leave the band (just before playing "Give a Little Bit").
• John Helliwell, in addition to being a great woodwind and keyboard contributor, is the voice of the band, adding a much needed sense of humor and dialogue with the audience.
• Hodgson is a very underrated guitarist.  I liken him to David Gilmore; perhaps his chops aren’t extraordinary, but his choice of notes and sounds are flawless.  Just hearing him play the tasteful guitar solo in “School” was enough for me to take notice, and I still love his work at the end of “Goodbye Stranger.”
• The stage setup is interesting, so that even though Davies only plays keyboards (and harmonica), he positions himself in one of four different places on the stage: one for the front stage Wurlizer, one for the grand piano, one for the Hammond and other keyboards stage left, and another keyboard setup that allows for Hodgson and Helliwell to have easy access during songs that require guitar and woodwinds.  In effect, you have three of the five members moving around regularly, which makes for a more fulfilling visual experience.
• The highlight of the concert for me is the inclusion of “Another Man’s Woman,” a Davies tour de force and completely unexpected.  Hodgson’s understated guitar work during this song is another example of how less is more.
• Perplexingly absent from the set list are Davies’s contribution to Supertramp's latest release.  Only one of his songs from Breakfast in America is performed, the hit “Goodbye Stranger.”  In the notes from my concert program for the …Famous Last Words… tour, is states, “Rick Davies was so sure that Breakfast in America would not reach the top 5 on the American charts that he bet Bob Siebenberg $100 that it wouldn’t.”  Perhaps he didn’t really like the tunes from this record, which would explain why he played all four of his songs from Crime of the Century, but only one from the best-selling album in the band’s history.
• The screen behind the stage is used fleetingly, and I suspect this was a rather extravagant and expensive proposition in 1979.  On the DVD, film is used only for the songs “Rudy,” “Fool’s Overture” and “Crime of the Century.”  When I saw them in 1983, I recall them using the screen for "Crazy" and “Child of Vision” as well.
• Why the cameras didn’t roll during “Ain’t Nobody But Me,” “From Now On,” “A Soapbox Opera,” “You Started Laughing” and “Downstream” is a mystery, and one wonders if Rick’s contributions to the band were overlooked in favor of the hit-making Hodgson, since four of the five missing tracks are Davies songs.  Luckily, the audio is included for these tracks as a DVD extra.

The legacy of Supertramp has been minimized in my mind due to Hodgson’s departure in 1983, a few uninteresting albums since that time, a lot of extended time off, and the inability of Davies and Hodgson to come to a settlement that would culminate in a reunion tour.  Other bands have stayed relevant without new material (The Beatles, anyone?  Or Billy Joel?), but one has to wonder if Supertramp is one of those bands that’s going to disappear entirely from people’s playlists in the next ten or twenty years.  If so, it’ll be a shame, because Supertramp had a remarkable knack for walking the balance beam between creativity and accessibility.  There is no reason in the world that a song like “School” should have gotten radio play, and yet it did.  Supertramp achieved something remarkable, and I have to wonder if after the inclusion of Heart into the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Fame last year, if they shouldn’t be considered.  I doubt it'll happen, but if the year 1979 is any indication of the band’s impact on the music world, perhaps it should.

Aging Like Peter Gabriel

Aging can be scary.  Just ask my daughters about Peter Gabriel.  But first, a little background…

In 1994 I mentioned to my friend Julie that I thought my hairline was starting to recede.  “Well, duh!” was her response.  Apparently, I was the last to know.  Or maybe the last to know was Alice, my wife, because I managed to snare her prior to my long descent into baldness.  2013 helped spur the aging process, as I put on about seven pound and purchased my first pair of reading glasses.  I figure it’s only downhill from here.  There are exceptions to men aging in unattractive ways: say, George Clooney, Cary Grant, and every man who’s ever played James Bond.

But for me, I think I’m going to go down the path of Peter Gabriel (except for the world stardom part).

Gabriel didn’t really reach world stardom until his album So in 1986 when he was thirty-six years old, a fairly elevated age for a rock performer’s peak, but even six years later, when he toured behind his follow-up album Us and sang about aging issues like divorce, he looked good.  Svelte.  Tireless.  Exuberant.  When my daughters were young, we would play Gabriel’s Secret World DVD over and over, mesmerized by the visual spectacle of the show as much as the musical performances.  Still own it.  Still love it.

And then…

As Gabriel is wont to do, he stayed largely hidden from public view for a number of years, but appeared in 1999 at the Academy Awards to sing Randy Newman’s song “That’ll Do” from the movie Babe - Pig in the City.  You could almost hear the audience gasp as he came onto the stage.

Check out the reaction that people shared on-line immediately following the Oscars (under the heading “Peter Gabriel YIKES”).

My favorite line is: “My husband came into the room and asked me why Marlon Brando was singing.”

Big deal, right?  People age.  Except it was only SIX YEARS AFTER the Secret World tour!  The man went from this…

…to this…

...from the age of 43 to 49!

I’m 45, smack dab in the middle of the road that goes from “tolerable looking” to “ewww”.

Four years after Gabriel’s Oscar performance, I rented the DVD of his Up tour, excited to once again show my daughters an inspiring Peter Gabriel concert.  I don’t want it to sound like I’ve raised two shallow-minded girls, but they practically cowered while watching the hairless, bloated figure on screen.  They were only six years old, but they knew a cover up when the saw one.

“This is the same man?” they asked.

“It is.”

“Are you sure?” 

I wasn’t.  They went back to playing with their Barbies, and I finished the DVD, searching for a melody in tunes like “More than This” and “Growing Up.”  It was as if the songs had suffered the same fate as their creator, plodding along, suffocating beneath their own weight.

It’s said that people see themselves at a certain age, frozen in time, and are shocked and betrayed when the mirror shows their true age.  But better to live by that internal age then the external one.  Better to be surprised when looking into the mirror than validated.

I guess that's the trick.  So I've decided I'm going to live like I'm twenty-one and see what happens. Should be divorced and homeless within a month's time.

Misuse of "Literally"

On TV last week a sportscaster who shall remain nameless said something along the lines of the following: “When they pulled him from the game, he was literally scratching and clawing the floor.”

Yep.  The guy was actually digging his finger nails into the basketball court.

You might be willing to give a sportscaster a free pass.  Call it a minor variation of the old Woody Allen joke from Annie Hall:  “Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym.”  But yesterday my daughter’s teacher who shall not only remain nameless but whose subject will be withheld to protect his/her identity said, “You are literally shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t study for this exam.”

Now, we all say dumb things sometime.  Goodness knows that if compiled all the stupid, erroneous or regretful things I’ve said in my lifetime and shared them on a blog for all to read, I’d be in prison, divorced and friendless.  And in this day and age, when so much of what we do is recorded in some fashion, the occasional flub should be forgiven (Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato back in 1992 caused him endless grief, but heck, for years I was convinced that there was a silent ‘n’ in the word dilemma.  Fortunately, I’m not alone in this mistake.  Back in grad school my friend Don was convinced about the silent ‘n’ as well, and according to this website, there are thousands among us!).

Flubs are one thing.  But when our high school teachers and news broadcasters consistently promulgate an incorrect use of a word (irregardless, anyone?), then we have a bit of a problem.

Or do we?

Martha Gill of The Guardian recently wrote a post about the word literally and cites several instances of the word’s mishandling over the years.  It might be of some comfort to learn that the misuse of the word literally has occurred for – literally – centuries.  But in the Internet Age, when mistakes are repeated and amplified at the speed of light (figuratively, not literally), it's become so rampant that some dictionaries are officially changing the word's definition. 

Gill comes to the conclusion that we should simply avoid the word entirely.  She writes: “At the moment (literally) is irredeemable. It is a moot word. We just have to leave it up in its bedroom for a while until it grows up a bit.”

She may be right. 

Sure, you can fight the trend and correct your friends when they say things like, "Oh my God!  I literally died!"  Alternatively, you could opt for a more passive approach:

Or you can simply avoid the word altogether and move on, accepting that language is fluid, confusing and, at times, infuriating.  After all, doing otherwise could cause your head to figuratively explode.

What makes you cry more? Happy-Sad or Sad-Sad?

Last week my daughter made the following statement: “Happy-sad evokes a stronger emotional response than sad-sad,” referring to the many movies that make us tear up.  Rather than take this statement at face value, we went through the list of the movies that make us cry:  some by her, some by me, and some that we both agreed on.  Here’s what we came up with:

Cinema Paradiso

Field of Dreams

Dances with Wolves

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Color Purple

Awakenings

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Titanic

Magnolia

The Natural

Sense and Sensibility

It’s a Wonderful Life

Schindler’s List

Forrest Gump

E.T.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Roman Holiday

Finding Neverland

The Sixth Sense

Avalon

We could have named another dozen or two, undoubtedly.  Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune cried at the movie Up, but I’ve seen it so many times now that I can’t remember if I cried the first time.  I probably did.  Other movies people seem to mention a lot are ones I haven’t seen: Marley and Me, My Girl, The Notebook, etc.

Looking at the above list, I can draw a few conclusions:

1)      Actors Henry Thomas and Haley Joel Osment are fricking geniuses and Thomas should have been nominated for an Oscar.  Kids are too often overlooked, though thankfully Osment did get a supporting actor nomination.

2)      Music is the big emotional manipulator.  Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up” in Magnolia kills me – KILLS me – every time.  And don’t get me started on Randy Newman’s waterworks-inducing scores to Avalon and Awakenings.

3)      Steven Spielberg could be paid based on tears and do quite well.

4)      Music isn’t an absolute necessity to induce tears.  Sometimes silence is the best soundtrack for us to feel raw emotion.  Watch this clip from The Sixth Sense:

5)      Happy-Sad movies – those that produce a tear even when conveying a happy or bittersweet moment – produce far more tears for me than downright sad movies.  And many movies have sad scenes that don’t evoke as much response from me as the happier moments minutes later.  Case in point: in To Kill a Mockingbird, I don’t cry when Tom Robinson is wrongly convicted of rape, but I do cry when Scout recognizes Boo Radley in her brother’s bedroom near the movie’s end.  Another example: in It’s a Wonderful Life, the only moment that gets me every time is when Ernie reads the telegram from Sam Wainwright.  There’s something about a guy who’s willing to stick by a friend even after losing his girlfriend to him that resonates with me.  Again, this scene plays without music and works beautifully.

Below is the list my daughter and I comprised, this time with an HS for happy-sad and an S for sad.  Happy-sad wins out by a mile for me.

Cinema Paradiso (HS)

Field of Dreams (HS)

Dances with Wolves (HS)

To Kill a Mockingbird (HS)

The Color Purple (HS)

Awakenings (S)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (HS)

Titanic (S)

Magnolia (S)

The Natural (HS)

Sense and Sensibility (HS)

It’s a Wonderful Life (HS)

Schindler’s List (S)

Forrest Gump (HS)

E.T. (HS)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (HS)

Roman Holiday (HS)

Finding Neverland (HS)

The Sixth Sense (HS)

Avalon (S)

What is it about a bittersweet or happy moment that fills us with emotion that exceeds even that of the dourest occasion?  Do we respond to happy moments with the same emotional level in real life, or are we merely being manipulated by the creators of a constructed art form?  If our real lives were accompanied by a score, would we be crying constantly?