Category: pop culture

“Plastics.”

“Plastics.”

Some of you will read that one word sentence and recognize the allusion to The Graduate. It comes to mind now as how accurate it was in the movie.

Plastics was said to be the future. The writers (novelist Charles Webb and screenwriters Buck Henry and Calder Willingham) were prescient. Plastics are everywhere, floating and polluting the oceans and other aspects of our environment, and is now found to be in bottled drinking water. What’s that mean to our health? The effects are being studied.

We’ll find out in the future, won’t we?

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

I dreamed last night that I was driving a convertible with the top down on an oceanside road. I was alone, and the weather was gorgeous. The road could been the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Big Sur and Carmel. I saw myself and the scene from different angles, like I was in a movie montage, but I don’t know what kind of car it was. No one else was seen in the dream, just me, happily driving. (Almost seems like a pretty metaphor for my writing process.) This song, “One of Us,” performed by Joan Osborn was playing on the car radio during this dream montage.

Cheers

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The Watch List

It’s a thin television crop to stream right now. (For me and my wife. It’s always a matter of tastes and preferences, innit?) There’s not much that’s frothy out there. It’s mostly dark drama. Netflix and science fiction have been dominating our streams. This list doesn’t include documentaries and movies.

Watching:

Episodes (final season, Netflix (was originally on Showtime)

Hard Sun (Hulu)

Father Brown (Netflix)

Sneaky Pete (Amazon Prime)

Atlanta (Hulu)

Jessica Jones (Netflix)

The Oath (Crackle) (sorry, I’m a Sean Bean sucker)

Not watching (because we finished them)

Altered Carbon (Netflix)

Frankie and Grace (Netflix)

Imposters (Netflix)

The Detectorists (Acorn, but now offered on Netflix)

The Defenders (Netflix)

Vera (Acorn)

19-2 (Acorn) (The first episode of the second season, involving a school shooting, is one of the best pieces of television fiction I think I’ve ever watched, sharp, gritty, and human.)

QI (Britbox, series N & O, with Sandi)

Upstart Crow (Britbox)

The Brokenwood Mysteries (Acorn)

Inspector George Gently (Acorn)

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Crackle, Netflix)

Tin Star (Amazon Prime)

Not watching (because we fell off the wagon)

Shameless (original UK offering) (Hulu)

This is Us (Hulu)

Longmire (Netflix)

The Walking Dead

Fear the Walking Dead

We’re still awaiting the return of:

Orphan Black

The Expanse

Dark Matter

Travelers

Raised by Wolves

Mr and Mrs Murder

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

Game of Thrones

Alpha House

One Mississippi

Into the Badlands

The next Stranger Things

Mozart in the Jungle

If you know any television shows streaming that you want to suggest, I’m always interested. Cheers

 

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Today’s music is “Sharp Dressed Man,” but this is being performed by John Fogerty and Billy Gibbons, representing two of the FM staples of my rock era, CCR and ZZ Top.  Of course, I used to sing, “Every girl’s crazy about a short, fat man,” as the main chorus in “Sharp Dressed Man.” Ah, it’s musicians playing and having fun.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

On this throwback Tuesday, I found myself in the kitchen streaming an old favorite in my head.

“If you got bad news, you want to kick those blues, coffee. When your day is done and you want to run on, coffee. She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie. Coffee.”

No doubt I’ve posted this before. It’s a rainy day, and it calls for coffee, stat. What better song than Eric Clapton’s cover of the JJ Cale classic, “Cocaine”? While “Cocaine” is an anti-drug song, my version of “Coffee” is not anti-coffee.

Cheers

 

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

I like the time changes of this song. It begins with an older rockabilly tone to it before it segues into 1970s rock. It’s all about music and the generation gap (remember that expression?). Anyway, I thought it appropriate for the U.S., where we just jumped through the daylight savings time hoop. Here’s Loggins & Messina with “Your Mama Don’t Dance” from 1972.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I was stationed in Germany in the late 1980s, doing military service. I returned to America a few times for conferences. I’d usually visit family when I did.

So, visiting Dad in Helotes, Texas, I hear this song on the radio. And I think, I know that voice and that guitar, but I don’t know this song, and that guitar and that singer aren’t usually together. The vocalist was more distinctive. It sounded like John Waite.

Fortunately, I heard the song until the end, and this was a time and station where the song and group were mentioned at the end. The song, with a sort of fantasy sound to it, was “Forget Me Not,” and the group was Bad English.

That made sense. That voice was John Waite, and that guitarist was Neal Schon.

Bad English was a super-group. Super-groups are interesting phenomena. They form with hyperbolic announcements, typically release a few albums, tour, and then break-up. It’s always exciting news when one forms, as they’re well-established stars – that’s what makes them a super-group. The first album is generally well-received, but subsequent offerings, if there is one, are often stale. Think of Blind Faith, Cream, Asia, and GTR.

Bad English’s first album had a few hits. I bought it but didn’t play it much. They were more corporate-glam than I preferred. They released a second album and broke up.

Not really fond of this song, but one line, “I will be your keeper, you will hold the key, forget me not, forget me not, you belong to me,” sometimes streams in as I’m walking.

As it did today.

 

 

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Today’s music came out in 1965, when I was nine. I lived in Wilkinsburg, PA, around that time. A group of us liked going into one girl’s basement and pretending we were musicians, singers, and daughters. The Outsiders, Monkees, Nancy Sinatra, Johnny Rivers, the Turtles, and Paul Revere and the Raiders provided us with our music via forty-five RPM records. We’d take turns performing. It was a way to spend time. I don’t know who provided us with that record collection.

Anyway, “Time Won’t Let Me” by The Outsiders, was one of those songs. Later, after reading the book, and then much later, when I saw the movie, I wondered if the Outsiders had taken their name from the novel. Then I found that the band existed before the novel. Oh, well.

As an aside, the movie was interesting. Francis Ford Coppola directed it. The cast was an amazing ensemble of young stars. Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, and Matt Dillon all come readily to mind.

One final aside, I read the novel around 1970, when a teacher recommended it to me. The novel is controversial and remains one of the most frequently challenged books in America.

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United Airlines Lottery

United Airlines put me on a roller coaster this week. First, they announced plans to stop giving employees bonuses. They would instead use a lottery to reward them.

I thought it was a great idea. I always feel like it’s a lottery flying with United. Yes, I have a ticket for the flight, but do I have a seat? Will I get on a plane? And will it be on the day that I’m scheduled to be flying? Let’s start a betting pool!

The betting pools always made those of us waiting in the gate area feel better. Even though there was a chance we wouldn’t make the flight (or the flight wouldn’t go today), at least there was a small chance that we might win. It was a little rain of sunshine on a bitter day traveling on United Airlines.

I thought having employees rewarded by lottery would help employees and passengers bond. Now employees would feel how we passengers feel when we wait to see if we’re going to fly on the flight that we bought a ticket for.

I don’t think the executives were going to participate in the lottery. I felt sorry for them. It seemed mean of United to exclude them. I accuse United of being executivists, treating executives differently just because they’re executives. It seems like companies will discriminate about anything these days.

But then, United announced they were not going to do the lottery. Say whaaat? Apparently, the employees weren’t as excited about the bonus lottery as I was.

That surprised the president of United Airlines, Scott Kirby (which admittedly sounds like a movie star’s name in the 1940s). Kirby said, “Our intention was to introduce a better, more exciting program, but we misjudged how these changes would be received by many of you.”

I admit, I paused when I read that. The company president was surprised that people weren’t happy that they weren’t going to receive the bonus money that they were probably counting upon. I think that gives us a little more insight into why United sucks more each year (hell, each month) as an airline. It explains why they’re surprised when passengers are pissed about paying extra for the blankets, food, and a seat that isn’t out on the wing.

Is it surprising that United will start selling priority boarding for coach passengers? I believe they’ll next be selling priority exiting, too. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’re going to start charging for the seats in the crowded waiting areas around the gate. “I’m sorry, sir, can I see your ticket for that seat? You can’t sit there if you don’t have a ticket. Would you like to buy a ticket? Just five dollars per hour. What’s your flight number? Oh, you’ll need about six hours, then.”

Then, like all of United’s twisted, greedy thinking, they’ll oversell the tickets for the seats in the waiting area. “Sorry, just because you have a ticket, it doesn’t mean that you have a seat.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that United Airlines employees must buy desk time at work.

United Airlines: “Fly with us. It’s a lottery.”

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Friday’s Theme Music

Today’s music is a little gross.

Supine in bed, I would feel the mucus shifting. It moved with a soft snapping and crinkling sound, like it’s trying to sneak around my head. From that, I began singing, “Mucus stream,” to the tune of Bush’s “Glycerine,” from Sixteen Stone.  I was making up whole verses for it by the time I stole into sleep.

That’s not to denigrate “Glycerine.” I like the song, and enjoyed the album. It still lives in the shuffle space dedicated to that era.

(My CD player holds two hundred discs. They’re divided into eight sections. Sections are assigned genres, eras or purpose. Like, one section is for the blues, and houses Buddy Guy, Albert King, B.B., SRV, etc. Another section is home to classic rock, with Cream, Blind Faith, Traffic, Led Zep, The Who, and so on. Bush lives in the section I call post disco rock, along with Def Leppard, the Scorpions, later Van Halen and ZZ Top, and STP. My wife has a section of her favorites, and I have a section of my favorites. Since my punk and alt offerings are small, I just mix them in with other sections. Anal, aren’t I?)

(And of course, the CDs are stored alphabetically by group or performer’s last name, and I’ve indexed them on an Excel spreadsheet. Yes, anal.)

Returning to the song, the lyrics fascinate me, and I thought the video reflects the song’s mood.

 

 

 

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