After that big, painful, confessional bowel-movement of a preceding entry, I think we ought to have a little fun, don’t you? Here’s a meme that Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog both did earlier this month, which I’ve been trying to get to for a while. And for the record, I also swiped that animated GIF from SamuraiFrog, just because I thought it was moody and cool…
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Just to bring you all up to date, I turned 43 a little over a month ago.
Friends and long-time readers know that I don’t especially enjoy my birthdays. Not anymore. I used to. My old photo albums are full of pics of me holding up the latest cake designs for the camera and looking happy. I used to anticipate the landmark rite-of-passage-type birthdays as eagerly as any kid ever followed an advent-calendar countdown to Christmas: becoming a teenager at 13, getting my driver’s license at 16, adulthood at 18, finally able to buy booze — legally, that is — at 21. For some reason, I recall 25 was kind of a big deal too… my silver anniversary, I guess. I had a quarter-century behind me and the main engines were still burning, all systems nominal.
Then something changed. I started having a problem with birthdays when I reached my thirties. And they got to be really difficult for me when I hit 40. Other people tell me they see birthdays a chance to celebrate life, or at least a good excuse to have a party. But for me they have become depressing reminders of time lost… no, time wasted… and dreams unfulfilled.
As I wrote on the occasion of last year’s birthday, “there’s just too much baggage now, too many disappointments and regrets. Too much understanding that a single lifetime isn’t enough for all the things you want to do, and if you avoid making tough choices when you’re young — as I did — you might not get the chance to do some of them.” Since turning 40, I’ve also realized, as I further elaborated at the beginning of this year, “that while there may always be possibilities — as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant — the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me.” Pretty hard to party hearty with that sobering truth lingering in the back of your head, isn’t it?
It probably doesn’t help that my birthday falls around back-to-school time, with all the bittersweet memories and melancholic feelings that stirs up, and the waning sensations of summer to amplify the sensation of time slipping away.
And yet, strangely enough given all the discontent and self-loathing that usually accompanies this annual observance of my failure to live up to my potential, this year’s birthday… wasn’t bad. Certainly it arrived with considerably less sense of utter defeat than in years past. Maybe I’m just becoming resigned to middle age, irrelevance, and mediocrity. But it’s also entirely possible that my forty-third trip around the sun was so traumatic that the formal demarcation of its end might have come as more of a relief than a reckoning. Seriously, the past 12 months have been… well, they’ve been something, that’s for sure.
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UPDATE: I found an intact copy of this complete entry and have reposted it elsewhere. See: “Forty-Three” Restored!
Here’s something that’s been going around the InterWebs the last couple days, so you may have already seen it — I’m somewhat ashamed that our esteemed colleague Jaquandor beat me to the punch on this one — but I have to make a note of it anyhow because it’s just so damn cool. It’s the latest masterpiece by artist Dusty Abell, whose tribute to the live-action Saturday-morning kid shows of the ’70s caught my eye a few years ago. But this new painting handily surpasses that earlier one, both in terms of information density — there’s a lot to look at here — and also in the size of the smile it brought to my face. Yes, I can identify each and every character, ship, and object in this painting, and tell you the name of the episode it came from… and you know what? I’m not at all shy about admitting it…
Be sure to click on the image and go through to the highest magnification so you can really savor the detail. If you’re of a certain age and even a mild fan of the original — the true — Star Trek, I guarantee you’ll be impressed. This image is simply magnificent. I wish Dusty was offering a print of it, to be honest…
(Also worth your consideration: Dusty’s “Television Sci-Fi and Superheroes of the ’70s.” They’re all there, man, all my imaginary childhood friends. This Dusty Abell is my kind of nerd.)
I long ago lost track of how many times I’ve seen Star Wars — or Episode IV: A New Hope as the Damn Kids(tm) insist on calling it — so it kind of shocks me that I’m just now thinking about this, but then my recent viewing of that Despecialized bootleg the InterWebs have been buzzing about really was almost like seeing the movie for the first time again…
Anyhow, you know those four Imperial guys Han Solo (presumably) kills aboard the Millennium Falcon while it’s held captive on the Death Star? Remember, the Falcon has been captured, and the initial Imperial boarding party fails to find our heroes because they’re hiding in the smuggling compartments under the floor. So Vader insists on sending a couple of guys in with heavy scanning equipment… we hear that equipment fall to the floor, and then Han’s voice calls down to two stormtroopers at the foot of the ramp, asking for help. They go inside… and we hear blasterfire. So, four (most likely) dead Imperials… whom we never hear about again. What do you suppose happened to their bodies?
I think it’s a pretty fair guess that Han dumps them in the secret compartments for safekeeping until after the Falcon escapes from the Death Star… but I find myself wondering if, in all the excitement, maybe he forgot they were down there. Did Han haul them all the way to the rebel base? And did he remember them there, or was he too eager to get the heck out of Dodge before the DS showed up and turned the fourth moon of Yavin into a new ring around the gas giant? It’s sort of amusing to think that maybe he didn’t get around to dealing with them until well after the movie’s final battle and the award ceremony were over, when all of a sudden a lightbulb went on in his head — no, in Chewie’s head! — and… well, let’s hope the rebels had a hose somewhere in that big hanger.
Yeah, I’m thinking maybe I need to turn in now. It’s been one weird-ass weekend.
No introduction necessary, just watch:
I didn’t know flashmobs were even still a thing. And my reaction is probably amplified by my recognizing the location… I’ve been there! It’s the market street in Koln — or, as we Americans would say, Cologne — Germany.
This whole thing simply made me smile.
For we Gen-Xers, it seemed as if ZZ Top didn’t exist until the night they came blazing out of our cable-TV boxes in their ’33 Ford coupe, fully formed in all their outlandishly bearded glory, but of course the “li’l old band from Texas” was an established force in the music industry long before MTV came along. The band got together in 1969 — the year I was born, kids! — and scored their first radio hit with “La Grange,” an infectious ode to their home state’s infamous Chicken Ranch brothel, in 1973. (Incidentally, that link to the Chicken Ranch is perfectly safe to click… it directs you to the site of a writer who has just completed a book on the subject. Lots of interesting history there… ought to be quite a book!) Even so, there’s little question that the three music videos they made in support of their Eliminator album — “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs” — catapulted the band into much wider prominence than they’d previously known, or have managed to retain in the years since. Of course, it helped that those three songs are great songs, but really it was the imagery and, perhaps more importantly, the mythology established in those clips that linger in a generation’s pop-cultural imagination: the desert scenery; the mysterious (and apparently enchanted) hotrod that appears out of thin air and vanishes again when its mission is complete; the hot babes who teach downtrodden young people how to strike back against The Man and, more importantly, how to score. Admittedly ridiculous in the same way that so much of ’80s pop culture was, this was also deeply powerful and memorable stuff that touched on some primal chord — at least in the young men of the day. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Top would eventually feel compelled to revisit this familiar territory.
Here’s the video for “I Gotsta Get Paid,” the first single from ZZ Top’s latest album, La Futura, which was just released about a month ago:
It’s not quite a return to their classic MTV clips. The band’s sound has become more funky and dirty than it was in the Eliminator era, and interestingly enough, the visuals here reflect that change. Instead of the slick and polished Eliminator car — which mirrored the highly produced music of those days — the cars in this video are the bare-metal, rough-welded “rat rods” that are currently popular in gearhead circles. (My dad loves ’em, for some reason.) Rat rods are literally cobbled together from whatever the builder can find, so they’re very organic and even artistic in appearance, but they’re also raw and primitive-looking… and deliberately so. The girls in this video also have a different look than the classic ZZ Top babes; their outfits, like the cars and the music, have an improvisational, post-apocalyptic trashiness, whereas the old ZZ babes were more refined… in a sleazy sort of way, of course.
While the specifics may have changed, though, there are hot cars and hot women here, and they, like the sound, are unmistakably ZZ Top. And of course there’s that talismanic keychain, fashioned in the shape of the band’s double-Z logo. In the old videos, it seemed to represent freedom, exploration, and sexual license. (Would anyone be surprised if I reveal now that I’ve used a ZZ Top keychain for my old Galaxie since I was 17 years old?) I’m not sure if it has any such symbolism in “I Gotsta Get Paid.” But it sure made me smile when the girl held it up for the camera at the end. It’s good to see it again…
And on that note, hope everyone has some good plans for the weekend ahead!
That’s a question The Girlfriend has repeatedly asked me in the last few years, since the impending end of the shuttle program revived my boyhood obsession with these vehicles. But no matter what statistics or comparisons I’ve thrown out in reply — 78-foot wingspan, about the same overall size as a DC-9 airliner — she just hasn’t been to get a handle on it. And I imagine she’s not alone in this… a big spacecraft is just too outside her usual frames of reference, and it’s tough to imagine the scale of something you’ve never stood beside. But I think I may have found a visual aid that will finally put it all in perspective for her and all the rest of my Loyal Readers who just can’t quite grok the size of the thing we used to throw up into space on a somewhat regular schedule:
That’s the Endeavour, of course, seen Friday during her 12-mile parade through Los Angeles on her way from LAX to the California Science Center. Moving the big old girl has taken a bit longer than originally planned, due to obstacles along the way. Reportedly there have been places where her wingtips came within inches of trees or utility poles. But the last I heard, she was within sight of her new home and continuing to inch her way along, with thousands of people out to see the spectacle of a retired spacecraft rolling down city streets.
Not to be cynical, but I wonder how many of those folks showed equal enthusiasm for the shuttles while they were still flying…
Photo credit: Walter Scriptunas II/Spaceflight Now; taken from here.
If you haven’t seen any of his myriad appearances on TV talk shows this week, you might not know that my main man, Rick Springfield, has a new album out. Songs for the End of the World was released on Tuesday, and I’m sure none of my Loyal Readers will be remotely surprised to learn I already have my copy. (A couple of them, actually, thanks to an insidious marketing scheme involving different covers and bonus content unique to each variant… oh, well. Such is life as a collector/fanboy.) I like it. It’s a good album. I thought at first it was more of the same thing we got with his last one, Venus in Overdrive, but the more I listen, the more I’m thinking of it as a kind of thematic and sonic sequel to his 2004 release shock/denial/anger/acceptance, only with less rage and hurt, and a bit more humor. It’s kind of like we’re checking in on the “character” from that primal scream of an album a few years later and finding him farther down the road to recovery, a bit happier about his life, but still trying to process the emotional hangover. Which, of course, is a pretty accurate description of Rick Springfield in 2012 versus the 2004 Rick.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
You see, I’ve been thinking for quite a while that it might be fun to go through Rick’s entire oeuvre in chronological order, all his official albums — as opposed to the dozens of fly-by-night greatest-hits packages that have been produced since his heyday in the mid-80s, as well as a couple of weird bootleg items I know about — and review them as a recurring feature here on Simple Tricks. Now, before you say something smart-assy like “that shouldn’t take long!,” you should know that Rick has been in this business a lot longer than most people realize. He’s recorded 18 studio albums over a span of 40 years — yes, that’s right, his first record was released in 1972. A long time before anyone ever heard of “Jessie’s Girl.” And that’s just the solo work he’s done here in the United States. He also played and recorded with several bands in Australia before he moved here in search of greater glory. More on that another time, though.
I know going in that this project may not be of much interest to anyone except myself and possibly The Girlfriend. Also, I’ve got to admit I’m really not confident I can pull it off, since music is outside my comfort zone as a writer and a blogger. I love music, especially rock and blues, and I have my opinions about it, obviously, but no actual training in it, no technical knowledge or formal understanding of how it works or why it doesn’t… which means I don’t feel that I have much vocabulary for describing my opinions. But I want to try.
I thought Rick’s music was cool when I was young, then I lost it for a while. I’ve told that story before. But in the 12 years or so since I rediscovered him, it’s become, well, meaningful to me. All the moreso as I’ve learned more about the man and his life and his problems. I don’t see him merely as my guitar hero anymore, but as a guy, a guy not unlike myself, an all-too-human being who has screwed up in some pretty spectacular ways and somehow managed to soldier on through. And I like this guy. His music has evolved considerably over the past 40 years. So has he. I hope my skills are up to the job of analyzing the evolution, and conveying why it matters to me.
As I said, I intend this to be a recurring feature. Hopefully I’ll manage to make it a fairly regular one… I know myself too well to make promises about how frequently it will appear, though. Just keep your eyes open, I guess… assuming you care…
About an hour’s drive northeast of Salt Lake, high in the mountains above Ogden City, you’ll find a sleepy little burg called Huntsville, Utah. The surrounding hillsides are dotted with summer homes and vacation cabins, and signs near Pineview Reservoir — the pocket-sized lake that defines the town’s western edge — excitedly proclaim the coming of beachfront condos, leaving little doubt that this bucolic hamlet is going to end up as just another anonymous bedroom community before too many more years pass. But for now, at least, cows still graze contentedly at the roadside, and traffic along the main drag through town frequently bogs down behind slow-moving tractors and combines. It’s a great place to escape to for an afternoon; The Girlfriend and I have been going up there at least once a summer for over a decade now.
We drive the old two-lane highways, enjoying fresh mountain air with the top down, and once we get there, we always enjoy lunch at a quirky little bar called the Shooting Star Saloon, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating tavern in the state. (I’ll write more about that place some other time.) But before we go for Star Burgers and beer, we like to stop into the monastery nestled against the mountains on the other side of town.
Yes, believe it or not, there is a Catholic monastery in Mormon-dominated Utah. The Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity was founded in 1947 by Trappist monks, who set up housekeeping in several World War II-surplus Quonset huts with plans to build more permanent structures sometime in the future. It never happened. The whitewashed humps of the Quonsets are still there, shaded by trees that have grown tall and grand in the last 65 years. But the monks have made do, as their kind does, and their abbey, surrounded by a buffering ring of farmland, is a lovely green respite from the outside world.
I don’t recall how or when I first heard about the abbey. It may have been back in college, when stories went around of a place where young men could go for a few days when they needed to clear their heads. Many a time, I considered taking one of those retreats myself, when the weight of everything I was going through with classes and girls and growing up got to be too much. But I always chickened out. Not being religious, let alone Catholic, it didn’t seem like the best fit, no matter how alluring the idea of unplugging from the world and spending some time just thinking may have been. It felt like I would’ve been taking unfair advantage of someone’s hospitality. At some point, though, I learned about the honey, produced by the monks themselves from hives they kept on the grounds and sold through a tiny gift shop they maintained near their chapel. And that was what finally convinced me to go for a visit.
It turned out you could buy a lot of goods made by the monks in that shop — honey in various flavors and consistencies, bread, oatmeal — as well as St. Christopher medals and holy water that would be blessed for you on the spot, and books and rosaries and candles and other goods of interest to Catholics. I never purchased any of those items, naturally, but I brought home lots of honey over the years, and I sampled the oatmeal, too — simple, coarse stuff, very unlike machine-made Quaker Oats. Often times, I bought more than I needed, so much that it would take me a couple years to get through it all, but I liked the idea that I was supporting a unique local industry. And it really was good honey, which helped.
Anne and I somehow missed going to Huntsville last year. Not sure why; just busy I guess. A few weeks ago, we decided on the spur of the moment that we were long overdue and it was time to re-affirm our tradition. It was my birthday, as it happens, and it was a glorious day, the kind I love, when the sky is like a hard crystal dome arching impossibly high above you and the air is so clear it seems to sparkle a little. For the first time in several years, I was not crashingly depressed by the thought of making another orbit around the sun. I wasn’t thinking much about the passage of time at all, in fact… until we stepped into the little gift shop by the chapel at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity and saw that there was no honey on display. No oatmeal or bread, either. In fact, the only food for sale was some caramels, made by nuns in a convent in another state. Puzzled, I turned to the monk sitting near the cash register and politely waited for him to set aside his reading.
“Do you not carry the honey anymore?” I asked.
The father looked at me through pale, watery eyes, and smiled ruefully. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid we sold the last of it sometime last year. Brother So-and-So has gotten too old to care for the hives, you see, and he has no one to help.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. It suddenly occurred to me that this man — whom I’m certain I’ve encountered before on my annual visits, many times — suddenly appeared to be much smaller and more frail than I remembered.
“Our average age now is 82,” the monk continued. “There are only 18 of us left, and two of us are in a nursing home. So you understand we’ve had to make some changes.”
I found myself apologizing to the monk, although I don’t know what for. Skipping the prior year’s visitation, perhaps, and feeling like I’d come too late. Or perhaps I felt sympathy for the man’s advancing age and obvious physical deterioration. Maybe I was thinking of the articles I’ve read about the Catholic Church’s inability to attract young men to the clergy anymore, signifying the decline of this gentle man’s whole way of life. Maybe I was just sorry to realize that this unique gem of my home state probably doesn’t have much longer before it gets subdivided, too. I bought a candle and some caramels for Anne, to soothe my own feelings as much as the monk’s, and then we drove to the Shooting Star, where I drank a couple glasses of Coors Light and pondered the unfair cruelty of a world where men can work hard at building something for six and a half decades, only to find at the end of their lives that no one is interested in continuing their legacies after they’ve gone. That all their efforts ultimately amounted to nothing. I’m sure the monks wouldn’t see their lives as exercises in futility; I’m not sure I could see my own in any other way, were I in their shoes.
For the record, I still have one cup of “Trappist Honey” left in my kitchen pantry. Brandy flavored. It’s pretty old, but I don’t think honey goes bad, does it? I intend to try it before too much longer, and to use it up if it hasn’t gone rancid. And once it’s gone, I’ll clean out the cup — or at least the lid — and carefully store it in the Bennion Archives. Another souvenir of another thing that once mattered to me, and is — or at least soon will be — no more…
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which took off Sunday evening in the spectacular nighttime launch seen above, successfully docked with the International Space Station first thing this morning. This is the first official cargo run of the dozen SpaceX is contracted to handle for NASA. (The Dragon carried some cargo on that groundbreaking flight a few months ago, but that was still technically just a shakedown cruise; the Dragon is now considered fully operational.) The era of true commercial spaceflight has begun; welcome to the future.
The mission hasn’t been all smooth sailing, though. The first stage of the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster rocket lost one of its engines during the ascent, but despite how it appears in the rather alarming video that’s been floating around, SpaceX insists the engine did not explode. Apparently, there’s some kind of a fairing around the engine that came apart — that’s the debris you can see in the video — and the engine automatically shut down, but continued to transmit data, which it would not have done if it’d gone boom. In any event, the Falcon — like the space shuttle and the Saturn rockets before it — was designed to make it to orbit with a dead engine, and this incident was ample demonstration that the failsafe design works.
The Dragon is scheduled to remain at the station for 18 days before returning to Earth with over 800 pounds of research samples and other material the ISS crew is sending home.
In other SpaceX-related news, the company recently fired up its “Grasshopper” testbed, essentially just a rocket motor attached to a set of spindly landing legs, and successfully hovered it for about three seconds. That doesn’t sound very impressive, I know, but the company’s ultimate goal is to someday have its Falcon boosters and possibly the Dragon capsules themselves return to their launch site and land vertically, on their tails and under power, just like the silver-winged rocketships in all those old 1950s sci-fi flicks. The Falcons are currently one-use-only disposables, and the Dragons have to be laboriously recovered at sea; bringing them home in this fashion would cut expenses considerably, and make the Falcon/Dragon combination into something much closer to a truly reusable spacecraft than the shuttle ever was (as much as it pains me to say that). And, also… 1950s-style rocketships! How cool would that be? Needless to say, I’ll be watching this Grasshopper thing with great interest…
