Loose ends. Unsolved mysteries. These are the things that can keep you up at night, or cause traffic accidents while dwelling on them as you navigate rush-hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway.
I don't mean broad enigmas like "Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?" or "What the hell was Lost really about?"; I'm blogging about dilemmas of a personal nature, like:
How different would my life had been if I'd accepted that job in Chicago?
Why did Grace really break up with me?
Why does my physical appearance resemble that of "Uncle" Fred more than of my father?
Eventually, some of these mysteries will be solved (hopefully before either Fred or your father is on his deathbed) and some won't (Grace's restraining order against you won't expire until 2075). Here's an example of one of the unsolved mysteries from my own life.
I don't know if praise is the right word, but the headline is long enough without having to say "Wow, I can't believe these actors from popular shows in the 1990s attempted hip-hop careers even though the casual observer would likely think it's not a good idea."
Well, I can't believe these actors from popular shows in the 1990s attempted hip-hop careers even though the casual observer would likely think it's not a good idea.
And, uh, wow.
Crossing over from one entertainment genre to another is as old as entertainment itself. I'm sure Sophocles considered himself a very good tap dancer, but the Athenians had banned all sorts of soft-shoe, so he worked out his frustrations in his play-writing, which is how Oedipus the King went on to inspire Footloose, which has an unfilmed scene where Kevin Bacon kills Dennis Quaid to sleep with Julianne Hough, and I know none of that makes sense because I saw neither the 1984 film nor last year's remake so bear with me here.
The reason for this image will become clear soon enough.
One problem with having more than one blog is that you might have trouble deciding under which blog a post should run. (Another problem is having two [or more] reasons for people to not give a shit about what you have to say.)
I'm been working on a music blog centered around the highest-reviewed albums by Robert Christgau, one of the best-known rock critics of all time, and I was going to place this post in that blog, but I feel this particular idea is more personal that what I usually post there, so it's going here.
ANYWAY, here it is.
I was discussing the Marshall Crenshaw album Field Day, which was released in 1983. I'd never heard of the album, which is somewhat understandable because I was in sixth grade at the time and the album was a sales disappointment. However, the album is considered (by some) to be one of the greatest albums of the 1980s.
As I typed up my little blog post about the album, I'd wondered, What was I listening to at the time?
The fact is, I wasn't up on music much (not that much has changed since). For most of my childhood I listened to whatever my brother was listening to, and this is what he was listening to in 1983:
The only other music I remember from sixth grade was "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, but my brother didn't own the Moving Pictures album yet. (He soon would, though, and parts of my brain would be forcibly fed "Limelight" until my ears bled.) But the Pyromania album was huge, and nearly every boy in my grade would be saying "Gunter glieben glauben globen" at least once a day.
It turns out, according to trusty Wikipedia, which quotes from the "official Def Leppard FAQ" (yes, one exists):
These four words that you hear at the start of "Rock of Ages" mean
nothing, though the band sometimes jokingly claims it means "running
through the forest silently." It's actually just German sounding
gibberish, said by producer Mutt Lange
during one of the later takes of the song. Lange was a perfectionist
and would often do dozens & dozens of takes, and after repeatedly
beginning so many with the standard count, "One, two, three, four" he
simply started saying nonsense words instead, the band liking this one
so much that they included it on the album.
A MYSTERY PLAGUING ME FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS HAS BEEN SOLVED, AND I CAN DIE A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER PERSON
Def Leppard was probably my first experience with what was considered "heavy metal" at the time, later called "hair metal," and in retrospect lumped into a category, coined in a Simpsons episode, called Crap Rock.
In sixth grade the music was unlike anything I'd heard — note that I didn't listen to much of anything prior to 1983 that wasn't sung by Sha Na Na or a Muppet, and my parents didn't have cable until after I was married — but it sounded edgy and dangerous.
Allmusic, an online music resource I visit frequently, calls Pyromania an "enduring (and massively influential) classic," but Robert Christgau, who inspired my other blogs, sums it up like this:
Fuckin' right there's a difference between new heavy metal and old heavy metal. The new stuff is about five silly beats-per-minute faster. And the new lead singers sound not only "free" and white, but also more or less twenty-one. [Grade C]
Don't try to figure out what that means. Just revisit "Photograph," whose opening riffs make you want to rip donuts in your dad's car in the parking lot of wherever you're working that shitty summer job.
The most memorable memory I have of Pyromania is not directly about the music, per se, but what would be a contribution to the pamphlet Things I Used to Do to Piss Off My Brother on an Almost Daily Basis: A Study in Antagonism, 1975–1993. One of the lesser-known songs from the album is a ditty called "Foolin'":
It starts off as a slow "Monster Ballad" about empty beds and lonely nights and dead fires and extinguished flames but it eventually leads into a faster (I don't have a metronome, but it sounds faster) chorus where Longhaired Lead Singer wants the world to know that he's not foolin' around.
Only he doesn't say, "I'm not foolin'." He says that BABY I'M NOT...FUH-FUH-FUH-FOOL-INNNNN'.
My brother took this song very seriously (he took a lot of things very seriously) and when I would claim that Longhaired Lead Singer was actually singing BABY I'M NOT...KUH-KUH-KUH-KOOL-AID!!, I must have ruined the innocence of the song for him because my mocking would send him into a seething rage. It probably didn't help that I'd yell that revised chorus every single time he played the song.
But at least what I was saying was actual English. I could have been yelling Gunter glieben glauben globen all day long.
Sunday morning I found a twenty-dollar bill at the bagel shop. I spotted the folded double-sawbuck on a table full of baked goods near the counter. There were no customers around, nor was there anyone walking out of the shop as I walked in, so the person who'd left that twenty was unlikely to be nearby -- and I don't think it was part of some kind of found-money social experiment.
I've blogged and vlogged about my encounters with losing money, and Mrs. The Anthony Show and I have endured several ebbs and the occasional flow of cash throughout our lives. Just last week I'd been alerted by a helpful automated phone call from Chase that my bank card was being used in California to purchase nearly 300 dollars' worth of perfume.
Fortunately, the bank put a stop to those fraudulent shenanigans and mailed me a new card within a week's time, but I had to hit up my father for a short-term cash loan since being super-fluid is not how I usually roll.
Anyway, when I saw that twenty-dollar bill, I could feel the pain of the person who lost it. Maybe it was someone like me, who shouldn't be buying bagels and egg sandwiches for breakfast anyway when there's perfectly good cereal and eggs at home. Or maybe it was some well-to-do fellow who parks in the fire lane in his BMW X6 and peeled off a twenty from a roll he carries in his pocket, secured with a rubber band used to keep broccoli in line. After all, if he wasn't carrying a bouquet of twenties, surely he would have noticed his missing money when it was time to pay.
I didn't think it would have been practical to give the money to the cashier and assume that the person would have returned looking for it, and because it was twenty dollars and not, say, the ninety or so I misplaced in a parking lot last summer, and because I figured someone else would have just pocketed the money anyway (and I don't mean that in a moral relativist kind of way) I just concluded I was experiencing one of those few times that some random event worked in my favor, even if it had to be at the expense of someone else.
Still, I felt guilty buying my breakfast with it.
POSTSCRIPT: Later that day, I took the kids to Target, and my son found a bank card on the floor. We dropped it off at the customer service desk. I'll never know if the owner of that card will realize that she lost it at Target, but at least I'll know that she won't be losing any money because of it.
Here's my one-and-a-half cents regarding Gary Carter, who died today.
Back in the early 1980s, my brother and I and another pair of brothers who lived a couple of doors down supplemented our baseball card collection with a baseball sticker collection. Baseball sticker books contained two pages for each team, and something like five spots per page where you were to pasted the stickers for the appropriate players. The best player on the team arrived in a thicker, foil sticker.
We spent what little money we had on these stickers — I cringe when I see that Pokemon cards cost like four bucks a pack today — and, unlike the baseball cards of the time, the stickers have absolutely no value as an investment.
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GARY CARTER?
On each team's set of pages, there was a bit of information about the team, including the name and address of its home stadium.
During that sticker-collecting summer, I shared with my friends an idea: Let's write to our favorite ballplayers, using the addresses for the stadiums, and ask for their autographs.
So that's what we did one afternoon, huddled around our friends' picnic table, writing letters. "You can't just come out and say, 'I want an autograph.' That would be rude," I strategized. So we wrote our letters like this:
