Vampire Weekend doesn’t suck

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by the Night Writer

And now, as the man said, time for something completely different.

There were those weekends in my college days when my work and social schedule resulted in me essentially being up all night and trying to sleep all day. Those days are what I thought of when I first heard anyone talk about the band Vampire Weekend a couple of years ago; I figured they were a college band with a schedule like mine. Otherwise I didn’t pay much attention to them or hear any of their music since I don’t listen to pop radio much anymore. I was somewhat aware of them as the trendy flavor of the month with some people but my curiousity wasn’t really piqued.

A few weeks ago, however, I read a review of their new album, Contra, and the reviewer described their interesting rhythms and sound as somewhat reminiscent of Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” or work by Peter Gabriel and Afro-Celt Sound System. Since those are all favorites of mine I decided to sample the album via iTunes and was a bit surprised to find out I liked what I heard. Yes, there are Gabriel/Afro-Celt sounds on the album but the music is brighter and more upbeat and with a Martha’s Vineyard kind of vibe. It’s preppy and poppy almost to the point of being dismissed, but then some new rhythm line comes blowing in to bounce the mullygrubs out of you.

Most of the songs are pretty short, about three minutes as in the old days of pop radio, and the lyrics are pretty spare. I think the words from a typical song would fit into a tweet with characters left over, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be beguiling or just off-the-wall enough to make you do an aural double-take. The first song I listened to, in fact, started out with the two lines “In December, drinking horchata, I look psychotic in my balaclava.” I mean, don’t you just have to know what comes after that? The other songs I sampled were also appealing so I took the somewhat impulsive step of blowing the $25 iTunes gift certificate I got for Christmas on Vampire Weekend’s self-titled first album and Contra. I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, whatever disappointment you might be feeling in your life right now, VM may likely cure it with their rhythm and verve. (Wait a minute, make that “Rhythm & Verve” and I’ve coined a new music term – move over Alan Freed!)

So, anyway, I’m not going to try and analyze their music or message, or go song-by-song through their collection opining on contrapuntal constructions and sugar-coated schadenfreude or the socio-artistic relevance of their oeuvre. This is purely happy stuff, and you can take a free listen for yourself here. Just take your shoes off before you do, or at least loosen them. I guarantee your toes are going to want to tap.

The band also bears the Tiger Lilly stamp of approval. Perhaps she’ll add her own thoughts here as well.

No need to spin this

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by the Night Writer

It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but there is considerable brouhaha in the PGA where one pro, Scott McCarron, has essentially accused other pros, most prominently Phil Mickelson, of cheating by using illegal clubs.

The issue stems from the PGA’s new rule this year outlawing clubs (especially wedges) with deep, square grooves. These grooves are what help an accomplished golfer (not myself) put greater spin on a ball so that it’s easier to keep the ball on the green. Due to a long-ago lawsuit the PGA settled with club manufacturer Ping, however, the PGA is not allowed to outlaw a particular older model of Ping wedge which features these grooves. Mickelson and some others continue to use this “legal” club, and it is this that McCarron is criticizing.

Technically, the Ping wedges aren’t illegal, but that’s because of the settlement, not their design. By the spirit of the new rules, however, the club is in violation and clearly gives those who use it an advantage. It’s not too dissimilar from the the days in Major League Baseball when the steroids weren’t officially banned. Golf is different from baseball, however, in many ways and one of the most essential is not just the premiium, but the mandate, the sport places on honesty and integrity. Golfers are expected to, and routinely do, call penalties on themselves or gamely accept their punishment if found to have inadvertently violated a rule, even when the infraction was for something picayune that barely created an advantage.

I’m not saying that all of those years when golfers could legally use the square-grooved wedges should be erased from the record books. These clubs were vetted and approved at the time. Now that the rules have changed, and are clear, Mickelson, et al, should honor the intent of the rule and the spirit of integrity the game calls for. If not, every dollar they earn this year should come with a big, fat asterisk beside it.

Sergeant York, in his own words

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by the Night Writer

Last week Mitch had a discussion going about the best movies you’d use to teach someone from another country about America. It was a great discussion and quite an impressive list. One that I suggested that was largely overlooked by the others is Sergeant York, the 1941 Gary Cooper classic (he won an Oscar) about the Tennessee ruffian who had a profound religious conversion that changed his life and his outlook, and who then had to struggle with his faith and duty when drafted into the Army in World War I.

He didn’t believe it was right for him to kill others but after a day of seeking God’s will (prayer and fasting is implied in the film) he decided he should fight. He went on to become the most celebrated U.S. soldier of the war, single-handedly using his sharp-shooting skills to force more than 130 Germans to surrender to him and the decimated remains of his unit. True to his character, he turned down the glittering celebrity opportunities offered to him by the government and his fame. I’ve used Sergeant York as part of the Fundamentals in Film class that I’ve taught to teen-age boys, and the lessons from it are about faith, repentance, honor and humility.

Coincidentally, a couple of days after the on-line discussion I received an email from someone who wasn’t part of that forum, with an excerpt from York’s diary describing the events of the day that led to his Medal of Honor. Here’s the description in his own words from his diary and, I think, from a message he delivered:

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Little boy lost?

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by the Night Writer

How old do you feel?

How old would you feel if I told you it has been a little more than 14 years since the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (December 31, 1995) appeared? Well, before you fall out of your rocking chair you might want to check out this link to a new interview with the reclusive C&H creator Bill Watterson in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. You may also be please to know that the U.S. Postal Service will issue a Calvin and Hobbes stamp this summer in honor of this iconic comic strip.

calvin_hobbes

It’s hard for me to believe that the strip has been so long, and hard not to think that our world is the poorer for it’s loss. Of course, it’s not really gone since the books are still readily available and Google turns up a multitude of (legally questionable) images. As Watterson notes in his interview, it’s probably better that the strip went away while it was still hitting its stride rather than limping on into irrelevancy or bloated, cynical repetition (Calvin and Garfield, anyone?). The strip was a perfect combination of art and entertainment with an inspired premise — a stuffed tiger that was alive only when alone with Calvin — and boundless creativity nearly as unconstrained as Calvin himself.

And, behind the chuckles, it was an often profound and poignant look into the mind of an active boy in an increasingly “Sit down!” world. Boys are naturally energetic and imaginative, quaities that are non-conducive to factory schools. In my day I was fortunate enough to have teachers who recognized this and found ways to constructively challenge and channel our exuberance and hyper synapses. From what I hear and read today, and the studies I’ve seen, it appears the current approach to boys is to dope them with drugs or stupefy them with routine, slowing the brains and deadening any love for learning.

It was fun to see Calvin wage hopeless war against well-meaning but hapless orthodoxy, and hope that there was a brilliant man inside him, waiting to come out. Today we no longer have Calvin the cartoon; I hope to God we have not lost the character.

Catherine

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by the Night Writer

The last of my grandparents, my maternal grandmother, is fading away. I don’t know if she will last until I, too, become a grandparent later this summer. Her tiny frame shrinks a little more each day, her grasp on time and place as shaky as her fingers trying to take hold of a coffee cup. She’s 93, and so restless she won’t stay in her room at the nursing home, setting out in her wheelchair at all hours, or thinking that she just got back from another town some distance away.

I can’t blame her. If I was in her place and had a single thought it would be “What am I doing here?” I don’t know that I could shake the sense that I belonged someplace else, someplace I couldn’t quite remember, or someplace I had heard about, or someplace just a little bit beyond the hazy cloud wall in my mind, someplace…just …not here.

My mother holds her hand, holds her own breath. Holds the memories of all that has been, holds off the thoughts of what will be. When we are babies our parents hold us, carry us, anticipate our needs for rest, for food, for a change because we have no words for what bothers us. When dissatisfied, or frightened, we wail and our parents make comforting noises. Long years later, the children sit and anticipate the needs of the parent , who may have the means to speak, even if it is only to ask “Why?”, and the response, again, is comforting noises.

I don’t know “why”. I wish I did. Or perhaps I don’t. At some point this summer I will lean over a crib and say, “Sh-sh-sh-sh, it’s all right.” And I will think of another time, and another place, and I will think of a poem I read recently.

Susanna
by Anne Porter

Nobody in the hospital
Could tell the age
Of the old woman who
Was called Susanna

I knew she spoke some English
And that she was an immigrant
Out of a little country
Trampled by armies

Because she had no visitors
I would stop by to see her
But she was always sleeping

All I could do
Was to get out her comb
And carefully untangle
The tangles in her hair

One day I was beside her
When she woke up
Opening small dark eyes
Of a surprising clearness

She looked at me and said
You want to know the truth?
I answered Yes

She said it’s something that
My mother told me

There’s not a single inch
Of our whole body
That the Lord does not love

She then went back to sleep.


“Susanna” by Anne Porter, from Living Things: Collected Poems. © Zoland Books, 2006

Songs of innocence and experience

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by the Night Writer

Riding into work this morning my iTouch randomly played Richard Thompson’s version of “Oops…I Did it Again”; the kind of off-beat juxtaposition I tend to like in my music selections. It also brought back the clear memory from nine or ten years ago of driving my oldest daughter, her cousin, two of their friends and my youngest daughter to Valley Fair amusement park one fine summer morning. The four older girls were just barely into their teens and greatly enamoured with Britney’s original version of that song. Squeezed into my wife’s Mercury, they were singing the song and doing the accompanying hand motions, forming little halos over their heads as they sang, “Sent from above…I’m not that innocent.” Even then the words made my heart ache a little bit.

Ironically, or perhaps cosmically, the next song that came up on my Touch was Mindy Smith’s Hard to Know,

I really didn’t care
‘Cause I was trying to hurt myself
A sticky situation
I’m still trying to work it out

And I didn’t want to know
That I was the one to blame
Pointing my finger
Tryin’ to push all the blame away

Sometimes it’s hard to know
That you need to be saved
‘Til you hit the bottom
And rattle that cage
Sometimes you just gotta keep
Digging away
Until you break through
To the light of day

Since that long ago day on the road to Valley Fair I’ve nearly lost track of one of the four older girls, while two of them have gotten married (one now pregnant) and the other girl lived with her underemployed boyfriend, got pregnant, and has moved back with her baby to live with her parents. A couple of years ago she landed an opportunity to get a job paying $16 an hour, but she needed to go to a week-long training program first. The training site wasn’t far from where I work and her father asked me if I could drive her in the mornings. Sure I could. I’d go to the designated spot to pick her up and I’d see the boyfriend drop her off and drive away in his vehicle with one of those small, temporary tires on one wheel. Each day. A couple of days into the training her father called me to say that she was feeling ill and wouldn’t be able to make it that day. I bit my lip, then my tongue, and picked her up the next morning as scheduled. I gently told her how important it was to make a good impression in a new position and how little things such as just showing up when you’re expected can make you stand out from most others of her age and with her experience. She seemed to understand, but later in the week she missed another day … and was terminated, much to her distress.

When I hear “Oops, I Did it Again” (and couldn’t that be the theme song for all of us?) I always end up thinking about “innocence” and what it means. An Innocent is someone who is unaware or uninformed about some aspect of life, who doesn’t see the sometimes dark aspects of things that are largely bright and wonderful. Such ones can often find themselves caught in the snares of others or find their attempts to cast snares of their own sundered. Ah well, there are easy ways to learn a lesson and there are hard ways, but the important thing is that one learns. As a father, though, I am all too aware that I have to ultimately send my daughters out into the world of wolves while desiring that they be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. It’s a difficult assignment, finding the way to expose them to just the right amount of fire that will temper them without searing or burning them.

On that same trip to Valley Fair the young Tiger Lilly, who was about six then, stayed with me while the older girls were allowed to run off in their pack. The two of us rode the more age appropriate thrill rides as we made our way through the park. At one point as we were leaving one place I turned to latch a tricky gate behind me while Tiger Lilly ran ahead, not realizing I had stopped. When I turned back around she was already out of sight in the summer crowd. On full alert I jumped up on a nearby 3-foot retaining wall to get a better vantage point, my eyes peeled for a flash of orange hair. I didn’t have far to look because she had only gone about 60 feet before realizing that I wasn’t behind her. Her immediate distress at this revelation caught the attention of a passing woman who stopped to help. They both looked my way as I came down off the wall and steamed through the crowd in their direction like a dreadnought parting the waves. “I bet that’s your father right there,” the woman said. Indeed.

I don’t know if that memory has stayed with her, but I think that Tiger Lilly and her sister have always had a sense that I’d be nearby, flying cover (in word if not in person) while they ventured, ready to swoop if needed. How valuable is that to their confidence, decision-making and sense of security? I suppose it’s impossible to quantify though many may seek to diminish it. I only know — now that one is an adult and the other acts more adult than some grown-ups I know — that I wouldn’t have wanted to try it any other way.

Women’s Media Center unclear on the concept of free speech

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by the Night Writer

While you might argue how “free” the speech is if it costs $2.5 million, we have another example today of the so-called progressive left’s unique views on the freedom of expression: if they hate what you have to say then it must be “hate” speech and banned. The latest case in point is the call by the Women’s Media Center and the National Organization for (Some) Women for CBS to ban a pro-life ad featuring Tim Tebow and his mother from this year’s Super Bowl.

CBS Corp. said Tuesday it had received numerous e-mails — both critical and supportive — since a coalition of women’s groups began a protest campaign Monday against the ad, which the critics say will use Tebow and his mother to convey an anti-abortion message.


Funded by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, the 30-second ad is expected to recount the story of Pam Tebow’s pregnancy in 1987. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child. She later gave birth to Tim, who won the 2007 Heisman Trophy and helped his Florida team win two BCS championships.

Well, I mean, the nerve of the Tebows to use their personal true story. And I thought the left was supposed to be the “reality-based” community. Or not.

On Monday, a coalition led by the New York-based Women’s Media Center, with backing from the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation and other groups, urged CBS to scrap the Tebow ad.


“An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year — an event designed to bring Americans together,” said Jehmu Greene, president of the media center.

This is an event designed to bring Americans together? Well, at least they didn’t say “it’s for the children.” I wonder, however, how an inspirational message of hope and potential is considered “divisive” while a strident attempt to shut someone up isn’t? Perhaps it’s just another example where they’re unclear on the concept. It’s worth noting here that last year NBC did ban a similar themed commercial about how a baby was born into a broken home, abandoned by his father, raised by his mother … and went on to become the first African-American president. You might have remembered this commercial…if you’d been allowed to see it:

Anyway, kudos to another network, CBS, for reconsidering its position on not allowing advocacy advertising. Perhaps they recognize their responsibility, or perhaps they merely listened to their shareholders who were advocating that they not turn down a couple of million dollars. (The network did note that if some group wanted to respond to the ad there were still some advertising slots available.)

As today’s news story indicates, there have been more than a few people who are hailing, not damning, the network’s decision. It’s possible that the women’s groups will recognize they may have over-stepped with the public. If so, I expect they’ll rephrase their protest in terms of how much good Focus on the Family’s $2.5 million could have done for the poor — especially poor children — if it hadn’t been wasted on some frivolous game. If that complaint sounds familiar it may be because you have heard it before (John 12:5) . At which point it will be my turn to say, “It’s for the children.”

Anorex[st]ics Inanemyous 069: And As An Afterthought…

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by Tiger Lilly

Anorex[st]ics Inaneymous 069

I returned my laptop yesterday (it constantly overheated and shut down whenever it felt like it). I can pick up my new one today, except for lack of a ride… I guess I’ll just have to wait until Mom gets home…

Oh, MD and Son@Night aren’t here, they’re house-sitting somewhere else, otherwise I wouldn’t have this problem.

Ciao for now!