Back then, Kathy's parents lived just south of Silicon Valley. We had a visit planned that summer and just before we left, Kathy found out that one of the semi-final games of the Women's World Cup was being held at Stanford while we were there. Best of all, the US had just beaten Germany in the quarter finals, so the game would feature the US team against Brazil. She bought three tickets so her sister could go with us and off we flew to California.
As it turns out her sister chose not to go with us, so her mom did instead. On July 4th, we drove over to Palo Alto, fought through the traffic and headed up and up and up into the stands. You might notice the ticket says Row 80. Yeah... 80! We were waaaaaay up at the top of the stands, but at least we were at mid-field.
I thought the game was pretty exciting, though the New York Times described it the next day as "largely uninspired." Maybe it wasn't the greatest game ever, but it was great to just be able to see that team play... Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Brandi Chastain, Brianna Scurry. A US women's soccer team full of household names? How strange. Was this how it would be in the new century?
Obviously, the US won the game—Wikipedia tells me it was 2-0—and went on to play China in the final six days later. They won that game, too, when Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal and famously ripped off her shirt in celebration. 1999.
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I haven't done one of these in a couple years...
Wow. We took a lot of pictures last year! I had a renewed interest in photography even before the 7D arrived, but the new camera really lit a fire under me. Late in the year, The Daily Shoot came along and threw gas on the fire. Why do I care how many pictures I've taken? Well, I don't per se. But to quote the Daily Shoot site: "Photography is an art and a craft. Getting better at both requires practice—lots of practice."
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Last month, I tweeted a link to a very funny YouTube video, the Chrysler Turbo Encabulator. Anyone who has ever had to wade through technical jargon will likely find it funny, but to an engineer like me, it was hilarious.
Today, my dad sent me a link to a very similar video, the Rockwell Retro Encabulator. It seems to be somewhat more recent than the Chrysler version, but other than a few minor changes, the script is substantially identical. Interesting. So which came first, Rockwell or Chrysler? Or was there a Proto Encabulator that predated them both?
Wikipedia to the rescue! It turns out the Chrysler video was created in 1988 and the Rockwell one in 1997. But the term "Turbo Encabulator" and much of the script dates back to at least 1946, when it appeared in a Time Magazine article, Science: For Nofer Trunnions. It appeared again in a General Electric data sheet (PDF) in 1962. The classics never go out of style, do they?
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There's not much to go on here. Some mysterious concert at a place called the State Theatre. What could it be? I seem to remember a State Theatre in Albany... did I see a band there? Hmm.
After some thought, it occurred to me that this was a place in Portland (Maine). It was a beautiful old theater on Congress Street that had fallen into disrepair. By the time I moved to Maine in 1989, the place had been subdivided into smaller theaters and was showing porn flicks. Sometime in the early 90s, the theater was purchased by a group of investors and restored to some likeness of its former glory. Which brings me to this stub.
Soon after the theater reopened, we had our first chance to see a show there. Los Lobos were coming to town! What a time to see them, too! They'd just definitively removed themselves from their La Bamba pigeonhole with the release of Kiko. Wow. Kiko. At once rootsy and wildly experimental, it would define their sound for the next couple albums.
Like many of these older concerts, I know I enjoyed it, but I don't remember much of the show itself. I do remember being impressed that a five-member band (or was it six) could be so tight. They could go off on wild tangents and all come back together in perfect sync in a single beat. Many of the Alt bands I was seeing at the time almost reveled in their sloppy wildness (The Replacements and The Pogues come to mind). Los Lobos could be wild without being sloppy. Good Stuff. I'd love to see them again.
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Last year, I wrote a weblog post about my discovery of R.E.M. A few months after my eyes were opened, I found out R.E.M. was coming to DC. Actually, I found out the night before the concert. I spent the next day at school trying to convince anyone to go with me to the concert. Despite having all the zeal of a new convert, I didn't have much luck. That afternoon, I was working in the yearbook office—yes, I was on the yearbook staff—still singing the praises of R.E.M. when another staff member came in the room asking "is someone talking about R.E.M. in here?" Bingo. Kelly's older brother had returned from college bearing new music. She was hooked, too. That night, off we went to George Washington University's Smith Center.
We arrived fully expecting the place to be packed, but I guess I wasn't the only one having a hard time convincing friends to come. Smith Center isn't that big (Wikipedia says it holds 5,000) and the general-admission crowd didn't nearly fill the floor, let alone the seats. I'd guess there were no more than about 1000 people there.
The opening band that night was The dB's. They were introduced as "the best band nobody's heard of." They were full of wild energy and jangly guitars and I loved every minute of it. Their "big" album Like This had just come out and it really seemed like they were finally going to break out. Alas, that wasn't to be, but their performance won me over into their small band of loyal fans.
As for R.E.M., can I barely remember their set, but for a feeling I had. I felt like I was watching a door open into a secret new world. Concerts can be like this? It was so different than the slick, organized production that the Billy Joel concert had been. It wasn't really anything new; I'd imagine it's the same feeling people had watching punk for the first time. It sure felt new to me, though. This was gonna be big.
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Rick Springfield? Really? How did he fit into my new alternative WHFS musical world? Well, he didn't. The summer after high school graduation, my sister found out about this special concert sponsored by Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) and a local radio station. It was super-cheap ($5) and was meant to celebrate the year's graduates, or something of the sort. The headliner was Rick Springfield. Even $5 was too much to pay to see him, as far as I was concerned. But we heard the opening band was supposed to be 'Til Tuesday. Five bucks for Aimee Mann and "Voices Carry" sounded great.
We headed down to DAR Constitution Hall—the same place my high school graduation had been a month earlier—got in our seats, and waited. Right on time, the lights dimmed and out out came... Rick Springfield. Wha? Where was Aimee? We didn't made it through more than a song or two before we headed home. I don't think we ever figured out whether 'Til Tuesday were ever really on the bill. Ah, youth.
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I've got something a little different this time. No tale of newly-discovered music today. In fact, no music at all!
Yup, it's true. Kathy and I participated in the great coming-together that was Hands Across America. Mocked by The Simpsons, called a failure before it even began, Hands was a huge benefit to fight hunger and homelessness. Whether it actually made much money is up for debate, but it certainly was a spectacle. It was an era of fundraising-as-spectacle: Do They Know It's Christmas, Live Aid, We Are The World, Comic Relief. It's as though a bunch of celebrities woke up in the 80s with the realization that, hey, Jerry Lewis might be on to something with that telethon thing. Now, of course, we help the world by buying stuff. But I digress...
We showed up at our allotted stretch of Route 355 a little while before the scheduled 3:00 start time. I seem to recall a that a lane or two had been closed off for the event. There was music (the "Hands Across America" song was so memorable, I'd completely forgotten about it until I looked up the event on Wikipedia today) and a general sense of expectation. There was also a lot of self-mockery for taking part and a thorough lack of organization. As 3:00 approached, we linked hands and stood there for a few minutes (was it really a full 15?). Then it was over. People milled about for a bit and dispersed. "That was it?" It reminds me of the whole Y2K thing: there was so much hype leading up to it and then... nothing.
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Ah, The Pogues. Clearly I had moved on to something a little different than Billy Joel by this time. My Billy Joel fandom ended in large part because I switched from listening to top-40 radio to "alternative" radio. Sometime in about 1984, I discovered WHFS, a legendary alternative station in the DC area, and my musical tastes were changed for good. I've written before about how R.E.M. kicked it all off. They were the spark, but HFS was the rocket fuel. I remember one particular night hearing Alison Moyet, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade, and Kirsty MacColl all for the first time on HFS. What does this have to do with The Pogues? I'm getting to that...
You see, I rushed right out and bought whatever music I could find by Alison, Sade, Strawberry Switchblade and Kirsty. That'd be Alf, nothing (Sade's album wasn't out in the US yet and there were no imports to be found), a 12" single of "Since Yesterday," and a 12" single of Kirsty's cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England." Kirsty is probably best known in the US for her song "They Don't Know," which was covered by Tracey Ullman, and for (drum roll...) "Fairytale of New York," her duet with Shane MacGowan that appeared on The Pogues' album If I Should Fall From Grace With God.
Because of some recording-contract ridiculousness, Kirsty MacColl was pretty much unable to release a new album for most of the 80s. I always kept an eye out for her, though, so when I saw a blurb in a music magazine saying she was recording an album with The Pogues, I thought I should check them out. The next time I was in a record store, I bought their album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash. Like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures before it and Pixies' Surfer Rosa after, I'd flipped past it many times in the record racks before deciding to buy. The Pogues' wild mix of Punk and Celtic Folk was something new at a time when I was getting a little jaded by the whole Alt scene.
By the time I saw The Pogues in 1989, their masterpiece If I Should Fall From Grace With God was all over college radio and they were pretty well known in the US. It was also pretty well known that the quality of their shows varied depending on Shane MacGowan's lucidity. It would be a couple more years before he'd be thrown out of the band for his drug and alcohol abuse, but going to a Pogues show was a bit of a crap shoot. We lucked out. He was obviously neither clean nor sober, but he careened his way through the performance with Punk aplomb. A great show.
If I remember right, proto-Queercore musician Phranc opened the show, mostly to slack-jawed disbelief.
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