Hello Flowers!

Good Morning!

I visited my great aunt the other day (she is making an awesome recovery at my grandmother's/aunt's house) and when I got off the car I spotted this gorgeous exotic looking flower that has bloomed from some vine that has wrapped itself around my grandmother's Frangipani tree!  I don't know if she knows the name because I forgot to ask her... does anyone out there know what this is by chance?  Anyway, I love its funky form and red and yellow petals!  

My grandmother's Frangipani was not in bloom, but my mother's is!  You can check out the first blooms featured in this post, but you can also take a look below because two or three more flowers bloomed and I took new pictures!

UPDATE:  According to my cousin Gina and Aloha Tropicals the flower above is called a GLORIOSA LILLY, (Rothchildianna).

New blooms on my mother's Frangipani!  They smell so so sweet!....

And of course, I can't forget my daily pictures of our beautiful sky!  These were taken yesterday on my drive in to work....

(All images in this post are my own personal photographs)

The Tracks of My Sounds

Fire in the Twilight - Wang Chung (mp3)
Cry Little Sister (Theme from The Lost Boys) - Gerald McCann (mp3)

For a stretch of time in my life, soundtracks were the most important albums in my life. Often I never even knew it.

Now don’t confuse soundtracks with musical scores, which are also great. It might make my classical music-loving father-in-law cringe, but I’m just as likely to listen to James Horner or John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith or Ennio Morricone, composer of the greatest movie score ever ever ever, otherwise known as The Mission.

But what I’m talking about are soundtracks, collections of songs from a variety of artists designed to give a movie its defined musical soul, to be the movie’s ghost long after someone has left the theater. (You see, back many years ago, people had to go years, sometimes forever, without the chance to re-watch a movie on video. Listening to the soundtrack provided them a connection to the film in its absence.)

The most important soundtracks approach the task in one of three ways:

TYPE A. The Lazy No-Brainer Popularity Contest -- Make arrangements with the biggest record company. Compile some of their bigger stars. Take some B-sides that fit the flick and pay someone with a penchant for writing a catchy single to put something together for your flick. Think Footloose or Top Gun or Pretty Woman.


TYPE B. The Memory Lane -- Best done with movies glued into a specific time, you take the best collection of songs from that era you can afford and cram ‘em into a sort of retrospective. Think The Wedding Singer or Forrest Gump.


TYPE C. The Trailblazer -- Prove your movie is cool by taking musical risks. Collect bands and acts from the indie music fringes, few if any who have signed big contracts or even hit Gold in sales. Your movie is popular and sales for a few of your artists start shooting through the roof, and you’re a hero to musicians and a Creator of Cool. Think any John Hughes movie.

Rarely did I enjoy Type A after I reached my tween years. Sure, Heavy Metal was and still is heavily worshipped, a double album of crunchy raucous goodness, but at some point my desire to be cool meant rejecting candy from strangers, and that’s what those first types seemed like: desperate attempts to make us like them.

Older folks love Type B. In fact, you know you’re at a movie where the target audience is the 30+ crowd when you’re listening to hits from the mid-70s or the early 80s or the freewheelin’ 60s. They’re simultaneously trying to set the scene while stirring every last desperate reminiscent memory about the good ol’ days to help sell tickets.

The soundtracks that meant the most to me and my friends, however, were Type C. They were safe ways to dip a toe into new musical waters. We could sample a variety of artists in a genre without having to sink into an entire album. Some of the great soundtracks of my youth that had tremendous influence, for better or worse, on my musical tastes:

• The Breakfast Club -- It’s easy to overlook now, but Simple Minds wasn’t exactly a guaranteed pop chart-topping success. The album is full of decent if not superb 80s alterno-syntho-pop and includes arguably Wang Chung’s best song. (Which, yeah, is debatably not saying much.)
• The Golden Child -- No, seriously, this was one of my first exposures to anything along the lines of funk or soul or R&B or whatever. Unless you count Hall & Oates. But it also had an Ann Wilson song and a Ratt song on there, and the B-side was the musical score, so it was a wild mash-up of sounds.
• Valley Girl -- A friend of mine made a tape of this when the movie was making its heavy rotations through HBO. Either the original version included “I Melt With You” or it got added by this girl.
• The Lost Boys -- This album forced me to reconsider INXS, which I’m sure many readers will think insults me or insults this soundtrack. The Echo & the Bunnymen cover of “People Are Strange” forced me to reconsider The Doors long enough to remember why I never liked them. And the song “Cry Little Sister” was haunting enough to keep you awake at night yet also keep you moving the needle back so you could get chilled by it one more time.
• She’s Having a Baby -- The Kate Bush song is worth the price. But Bryan Ferry’s awesome cover, Love & Rockets’ “Haunted When the Minutes Drag,” and an assortment of other fringy alternatives pulling in some strong pop moments makes this a personal favorite.
• Say Anything -- Cameron Crowe was the kind of genius who managed to make soundtracks that went a little in all three directions. Maybe a classic song or two, or at least an older tried-and-true artist. Lots of music from the edge. And he has occasionally thrown a clear hit into the mix. While Fast Times... and Singles bookend this movie and are equally amazing at capturing the zeitgeist, but this one has the Replacements, the Chili Peppers, Cheap Trick, wife/hottie Nancy Wilson and Peter Gabriel, which is in bowling terminology, right in my pocket.

I’m a little too removed from those youthful years to say for sure that art of the Type C soundtrack has diminished. Maybe it’s actually gotten better with the slow death of radio. Although I haven’t seen the Twilight movies, I was definitely encouraged that the second and third soundtracks went a little further off the mainstream line. They didn't have to. Good for them.

We need ways to expose ourselves, sometimes accidentally, to music we might not otherwise consider. For a stretch of time, soundtracks was hands-down the best method. Now? I guess it's music blogs.

Contrast Colors: My Apartment Decor

Here are some previously shared images of my apartment design, only this time I've doctored them up with the color contrast feature on my iphone's Black and White Camera application (as first discussed in last week's post on my garden).  I like how adjusting the color contrast creates so much drama, not to mention helps make my poor quality photos somewhat better!  I know, I know... I really need to buckle down and go get a good camera already!

 

 

   (All images in this post are my own personal photographs)

My New Suzanis!!!

Good Morning Monday!

Ooops, I did it again....  I scored two more gorgeous Suzanis from my friend's Ebay store, Pakobel Rugs!  

Well, just take a look at these beauties, could you have resisted!?   

This authentic Uzbek Suzani has stunning hand-embroidered circular floral designs in vibrant turquoise, red, pink and black on a yellow fabric..... Downright gorgeous! (9' x 5')

 

 Aaaaand.... the other winner is....

 Another genuine Uzbek Suzani with circular floral patterns in pink, yellow, turquoise and blue on a gray fabric (8' x 5')

And sadly, I wanted this Suzani too but I lost the bid war!  Grrrr!  Oh well, it wasn't meant to be, but let's admire it for a moment anyway.......  ;)

(All images via Pakobel Rugs Ebay Store)

The Concert

Neil Young--"Thrasher (live)" (mp3)

1978.

A full arena. The lights go down. Everyone cheering, expecting the performers to walk onstage. Instead, taped music begins. First, Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner." Then the cheering gets even louder. Then the Beatles' "A Day In The Life."

The expectations are unbelievable. Whatever follows had better be pretty fucking good.

The stage set consists of giant amplifiers with covers over them and a giant microphone at the front of the stage. Slowly, the cover lifts off of the amplifier on the left; underneath it, the performer stands up, dressed in white, holding an acoustic guitar with a harmonica holder around his neck.

He begins to play "Sugar Mountain," a song his fans know only from bootlegs and from a muddy version from a retrospective album. The acoustic guitar and the vocal are superbly miked and command the entire large arena. He follows it with "I Am A Child," a Buffalo Springfield classic. The acoustic set continues with "Already One," a song from the album he has just released. The other songs no one in the audience has likely ever heard before, and they are stunning. The first, "Thrashers," which builds on the metaphor of human life being like a stalk of wheat waiting to be chopped down by a machine. The second he introduces by saying, "When I get old, I'm gonna get an electric guitar." And with "My, My, Hey, Hey," he begins one of the most distinctive riffs and messages in the history of rock and roll.

The performer, of course, is Neil Young. He is in the midst of pulling off the greatest concert I have ever seen.

We have all seen good concerts, I hope. Maybe exceptional ones. I saw the Who on their final tour with Keith Moon. I saw Led Zeppelin in a baseball stadium in Pittsburgh when they were touring behind Houses of the Holy. I saw Yes, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Bowie put on shows with elaborate sets and light shows. I had my rock and roll spirit reawakened on Springsteen's Darkness tour twice.

But Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps tour stands as the pinnacle in my mind. We can never really fathom how much Neil Young plans, since so much of his music is based on first takes, so many records and cds cobble together songs from different times and places, so we can’t know if he envisioned this particular tour as the most ambitious of his career, but I’d like to think so. Here’s why I think it set the standards for an ultimate concert experience:

1. The right blend of new and old material. And, I would add, the right blend of acoustic and electric. While it may not be the easiest thing to make a list of Young’s “greatest hits,” it is fair to say that he did not play them in 1978. Except for “After The Goldrush.” Instead, he played fan favorites—“When You Dance, I Can Really Love,” “The Loner,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Tonight’s The Night”—as well as fairly recent guitar workouts like “Cortez The Killer” and “Like A Hurricane” that would become concert standards in the years to come. Add to that the “wow” factor of the new material—“Welfare Mothers,” “Sedan Delivery,” and especially the beautiful story song “Powderfinger” (which Skynyrd was to have recorded but for the plane crash), as well as the aforementioned “Thrashers” and “My, My, Hey, Hey”--and we knew that whatever came next was likely to be magical.

2. An assault on the senses. Something always going on. In addition to the aspects of the set mentioned about, the show included taped Woodstock announcements between some of the songs, roadies dressed as Star Wars characters, a giant fan for “Like A Hurricane,” crazy figures who came out and interacted with the band. It all played out like a hallunincatory dream, part personal history, part American history.

3. Surprise. When Young embarked on the Rust Never Sleeps tour, he had just released Comes A Time, a slickly-produced (for him) countryish album of mostly-acoustic songs, so an average concertgoer like me had no reason to suspect that he was going to unleash the second version of Crazy Horse at the peak of their powers. The concert did include two songs from Comes A Time—“Already One” and “Lotta Love” (which was a Top 40 hit for Nicolette Larson). So the sheer force of the rock, the surprise of a second acoustic set, and finally, the final encore featuring the sonic assault of an electric version of “Hey, Hey, My, My” left the crowd in a delighted stupor, not quite sure what had just hit them.

4. Kick-ass performances. The death of original Crazy Horse rhythm guitarist Danny Whitten left a void that Frank Sampedro began to fill around 1974, and while he wasn’t as inventive as Whitten, Sampedro’s guitar (and occasional keyboard) helped create the wall of fuzzed-out noise that earned Young the eventual title “The Godfather of Grunge.” For the fan of great riffs, lead guitar, distortion, acoustic playing, tight drumming, thunderous bass, Crazy Horse circa 1978 was one of rock’s peaks.

Young must have known it was a great tour. Not only did he release it as a film, but he also tried to go back to that well time and again with muted success—the Rusted-Out Garage tour had similar ambition, but weaker material; several tours, including the Greendale tour and Everybody’s Rockin’, tried to spring surprises on the audience, but surprises that were too much or too unpleasant.

If you were lucky enough to have seen this show way back when, then you are probably nodding your head. If you weren’t, then I hope you have had or will have a similar experience.

Why I Hate The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones--"The Last Time" (mp3)
The Rolling Stones--"It's All Over Now" (mp3)

It was not always so.

Back in the late 60's and early 70's, I had two Rolling Stones albums that got as much turntable play as anything else I owned--Big Hits (High Tides and Green Grass) and Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits, Vol. 2). Songs like "Heart of Stone," "The Last Time," "As Tears Go By," "Paint It Black," "Ruby Tuesday," "She's A Rainbow," and "Dandelion" were favorites that I'd play over and over, stacked album side after stacked album side on my record player. The songs from those two records comprised much of the soundtrack of my early teens.

What I didn't realize until I was researching this column is that these songs are hits from the Brian Jones era Stones; by the time Through the Past Darkly came out, Jones was both out of the band and dead.

For most people, I realize, the pinnacle of the Stones as a band came after this--Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street all the way up to Some Girls, but by that time I was already pretty much done with them. In 1974, we all had tickets to see the Stones in Cleveland, but I ended up selling mine, with the vague excuse that I had to work (which was true, but not essential--I was being paid $2.00/hr by the Mt. Lebanon Parks and Recreation Dept. to schedule and oversee tennis courts that cost $.50/hr to rent, but all of them but one was closed due to construction!). I have never been sorry that I didn't see that show, great as my friends said that it was.

What happened? What happened to me? I've never really tried to figure that out until now. I just knew that I had a vague dislike for what the Stones had become, and that feeling has grown from distaste to loathing over the years. I hung with them until about 1972, and then I was finished with them, but for a smatterin of great songs on Exile.

I suppose, in the simplest terms, the, Rolling Stones, especially Mick and Keith, became more celebrities than legitimate musicians to me by the mid-70's. The Stones seemed like they were more of an event, a brand with a logo, and those two guys more like larger than life figures than members of a hard-working band. I suppose it's why I never liked U2 much; they believed their own mythology and became bigger than their music.

Why didn't my disdain spread to other megabands like the Who or Led Zeppelin or Bowie? With the Who, it was obvious: Pete Townshend continued to write songs that helped him to work through his childhood and England and the meaning of rock. Like Neil Young or, even more so, Bruce Springsteen, the songs of the Who always had their contexts built in. With Quadrophenia, whether it was true or not, I always felt like I was glimpsing Townshend's own teenage angst, difficulties fitting in, romantic failures. The Who rocked, but they were confessional, too.

And Zeppelin? Much as they were (rightly) accused of stealing other people's blues riffs, I never doubted that they were bluesmen, that everything originated there. And, I never lost interest in whatever Jimmy Page had to play.

Bowie never pretended to be anything but a chameleon.

The Stones, though, were never more than dabblers. Satanic for awhile when it was cool. Yeah, they went bluesy on Exile, but wasn't it just a pose? It certainly didn't carry over. Maybe go a little reggae a record or two later? Maybe embrace a disco beat when that is hot? Occasionally country for shits and giggles. While some bands can successfully intergrate the latest trends into their sounds, with the Stones, it always sounded to me like a purely commercial endeavor. What sheen could they put on their sound so it would sell?

Sensing the change in rock in the late 70's, Townshend confronted the Sex Pistols, both in person and in song; Neil Young also did so in song and recorded with Devo. Where was Mick at that time? Studio 54.

Because rock and roll is all about the lie. That's right. It's just a lie, but it's a lie that we want desperately to believe. The men and/or women up on the stage, like any performers, must convince us that they are indeed what they seem--troubadors, revolutionaries, chroniclers of our times, lovers, visionaries. We want to believe that the people in those songs are people they know, that they care about, maybe even them. And if the listener/audience member doesn't buy the lie, the whole house of cards that is a band's persona collapses.

With the Rolling Stones, I never had any trouble seeing through the facade. From Keith's pathetic "acting" in Gimme Shelter to Mick's spraying down the audience with a firehose in concert, the Stones became the epitome of Queen's implied mantra: You will not rock us; We will rock you. To me, the lyrics "But what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock and roll band" are among the most laughable I've ever heard. Great a song as "It's Only Rock 'N' Roll" might potentially be, I don't buy it for a second. There's nothing about the Mick persona that suggest that he has ever been the guy with the broken heart, or even that he would be "waitin' on a friend." Sorry, boys, but the public personas can't play the material convincingly.

Finally, you'll notice, I haven't said a word about anything past the late '70's. That's because there isn't anything to say. Their sporadic output of new material over the last 32 years is, to be kind, forgettable, to be direct, embarassing. The Rolling Stones are the worst example of a band that didn't know when to hang it up, and so they have become the Beach Boys of hard rock, dusting off the show every few years for an international money grab from the kinds of people who still believe that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards never got any satisfaction.

I know that most of you will not agree with me. That's fine. But I'll bet you have your own versions of the rock and roll lie that you refuse to believe. This is just mine.

Mama's Garden

While my boyfriend and aunt were in the hospital I slept at my mom's house....  Sleeping at mom's afforded me the luxury of waking up with the family dogs anxiously and happily panting in my face (I fell asleep watching TV on the sofa), eating a delicious breakfast I didn't have to cook, and quality family time - SCORE!  All that aside, I got to wander through my mother's lovely yard/garden in the early morning  "oohing and ahhhing" as she eagerly watered her plants!  Here are some pictures I took, beginning with the image above which features the stunning yellow flower of her Frangipani, which had just bloomed that very same day (last Saturday), our dogs and much more of nature's wonderful beauty.  Thanks for passing on the green thumb mom, you're the best!

Enjoy! 

Our Boxer, "Kimbo".... one of my brother's friends gave him to us when he was a puppy and he already had that name, I guess my brother liked it because it stuck!  Kimbo is quite the character and a VERY intelligent dog.  I love that punk....

He LOVES to swim, he must jump in the pool and swim around at least 2-3 times a day!

Kimbo shakes hands too!....

LOL...Here we were making fun of him, lifting up his ears to get an idea of what he would have looked like if my brother had gone the traditional route and clipped his ears (he didn't clip his ears or tail... the ears I'm glad, the tail, not so much....that thing hurts like a whip)

That look says he doesn't appreciate our evil cackling....hehe...

Our oldest dog, Manchita the Dalmatian.... she is skin and bones and perhaps she should be put down due to many issues, but the girl still has so much life, she gallops around the yard like a horse!  We just don't have the heart... plus, I think she needs to go naturally!....

Last but not least my Chewby Dewby Doo, my caramel Cocker Spaniel.... the family calls him Chewy....  he has one of those sad personalities, poor thing, I think it got worse when my dad passed away.....  But, the one thing that definitely makes him happy is chasing lizards!

 And now, for my favorite part.... The other pictures of my mother's garden which I have enhanced the color contrast for added color and drama!..... Aren't they awesome!?  Yes, yes they are... :)

 Here is a huge bunch of Aloe and those awesome bright eggplant purple plants... don't know their name, but I need some of my own!....

Kalanchoes spilling out of their container..... how I love these Kalanchoes!  The ones in my garden come from my mother's yard, but it amazes me how different both of ours look - it's because they turn various shades of purple and green depending on how much sun or shade they get..... fascinating....

 

You better recognize... Gardeners know the best dirt!  :P

A Bromeliad mixed in with some of that creeping cactus vine, forgot the name.... but it's the same one I have that puts out the gorgeous blood red flower (because we both got our cutting from my grandmother's yard)!

....aaaaaaaaand........a magnificent purple and white orchid in full bloom!.....

(All images in this blog post are my own personal photographs)