Category: pop culture

The Cusp of Revolutions

I’m pretty excited this morning. Awoke in that state. I owe this excitement to a teenage woman.

I didn’t meet her, but I saw and listened to her. It was during our weekly beer meeting of the BoBs, the pretentious and silly name of our group, “Brains on Beers”. It’s actually a group of retired doctors, scientists, engineers, professors, etc, that meet to have a beer each week and talk. We mostly talk about science, technology, politics, and beer.

We also collect and donate money to buy materials to help local schools and their STEM educational programs. One of the projects we support is the southern Oregon robotics team. The teenager was with that group when four of them came to us to pitch their project for a donation.

An adult leader and three local high school students were making the pitch. Christina, the young woman that I found so inspiring. She loves science. My sense, from listening to her, is that she loves life, knowledge, and learning. Her dream is to join Space X and go into space and colonize other places. Her enthusiasm was like gulping a dozen shots of espresso at once. It was beautiful to behold.

Her comments and enthusiasm trickled into my thinking streams. Eventually, a week later, thoughts came together and bubbled up from my subconscious thinking, and I realized, we’re on a cusp of a revolution.

No, make that revolutions.

People feel and see them coming. That scares and intimidates them. Many people dislike change, or are uncomfortable with change. I’m not too good with it, myself. Processing change requires time and energy. I often feel like I lack enough of either, and just want to climb into bed and cover my head.

Yet, I could see the revolutions coming so clearly in my thoughts this morning as I contemplated my fading dreams. I saw at least another industrial revolution as we move away from fossil fuels and introduce more robotics and automation.

We’re undergoing an information revolution right now. How we acquire, process, and spread information has evolved, and that evolution is speeding up. To combat it, guerrilla warfare comprising of false information and false equivalencies have been

We’re undergoing gender revolutions, and revolutions that are overturning Business As Usual. Sexual assaults, bigotry, and prejudice are being exposed. In a sense, we needed the Trump Administration, because its existence turned on the lights, revealing the ugliness that we’ve institutionalize and accepted as normal and standard.

Of course, the technological and digital revolutions are underway, as well. These are leading to social and cultural revolutions. These revolutions will cause yet greater economic and political revolutions. The great democratic revolution will itself undergo another revolution because the representative form of government, with its elections that establish a ruling class, has been outgrown. So have nation states, as we conceive of ourselves more and more as humans sharing a planet with finite resources, with a need to improve how we use those resources, and begin developing plans to seriously use exo-resources on other worlds.

That’ll launch the space revolution.

It’ll all be a bloody mess for a long time, of course. We know that economic, social, political, and regional stagnation and siloing reduce cooperation and create obstacles and roadblocks. Some like these obstacles. They even want to build walls, because they’re afraid, or they don’t want their comfort zone to change, which is wholly understandable.

But, smart people are out there. They’re perceiving these problems, and they’re conceiving solutions and new approaches.

Trust me. I heard one.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Awoke this morning thinking of spectrums and roller-coasters. We live on a spectrum, hunting for the balance to ride the waves of the day. Those waves often acquire a roller-coaster feel as we rise up from the troughs, reach the peaks, and plummet down again, hanging on with white-knuckled glee or terror. They’re pretty closely related.

From that, my switches shifted. Cake streamed in. I particularly enjoyed their third album, “Prolonging the Magic”. Thinking about the lyrics from “Never There,” I saw the connection between my maundering about roller coaster, and Cake:

We’re always on,
This roller coaster,
If you want me,
Why can’t you get closer?

That’s it: we’re always on this roller-coaster. This era of corporate growth, reactionary politics, and fake news, seems to be worse than other periods. But, I remind myself, this is the only period I remember living through. I suspect other eras felt the same for people of my relative status. They, like me, hope, lament, curse, and pray, and sometimes, we just close our eyes and ears, and try to walk away. But that roller-coaster doesn’t stop.

Here it is, from nineteen ninety-eight, “Never There.” Hope you have a fun ride today.

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Monday’s Theme Music

This song is fantastic. Its lyrics were written by Carolyn Leigh. I know covers by so many performers, but I like this version, by Peggy Lee. I figure I probably know it through Mom playing it. I have to admit, I do have a powerful fondness by the covers by Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and Diane Shuur.

It’s a good Monday song. Here is Peggy Lee with “The Best Is Yet to Come,” from nineteen sixty-two.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Hey, writers north of the Equator. Guess what? It’s December, and it’s winter. That puts me into a winter state of mind. Some of that crystalline white precipitation tops the mountains, hills, and forests surrounding our valley, while we endure fog, low gray cloud cover, and meek sunshine.

Looking out on this world as the furnace says good-morning, “A Hazy Shade of Winter” leaked into the stream. I thought about the Simon & Garfunkel original, and admired again, their talent and genius. But wanting something upbeat and edgier, I took to the Bangles.

Don’t you love those opening lyrics? “Time, time, time, look what’s become of me.”

Here we go.

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Friday’s Theme Music

The temp has hung around thirty degrees F. for hours, locked into that position by an inversion layer that invited freezing fog in. The freezing fog accepted the invitation – have you ever known fog to turn down an invitation? – so here we sit, freezing and foggy. These energy leeching conditions must be countered. With what can I counter it? Pancakes for breakfast and French roast coffee failed. Let’s drag in some music to shift my ass out of my chair.

I’m sure each of you have a favorite that does it for you. I have a catalog of them, myself, but today, it’s the Allman Brothers Band doing that old Blind Willy McTell song, “Statesboro Blues,” as captured live at the Fillmore East, in all their glory. I wore out this album listening to it in nineteen seventy-one and -two.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

The playing and lyrics mesmerized a twelve-year old growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. Equal confusion and interest reigned over, “How does he play like that?” and, “What’s he singing?”

He was Jimi Hendrix, and the song was “Voodoo Child,” sometimes spelled “Chile.” That just flavored the interest.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Still streaming from way back in the last century.

I like the light and peppy feel of today’s theme music. It tells a story, and the story-telling invokes a sense of place and life that I identify with whenever I hear it. But the story isn’t completely told. Gaps remain. That’s how I like my story-telling, with gaps that cause you to wonder even after hearing the story.

Here is Paul Simon with “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” nineteen seventy-two.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Remember the television series called “Get Smart”? It was on in the mid-sixties. Buck Henry and Mel Brooks came up with the idea. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon were the primary stars.

A crazy spy-spoof, “Get Smart” featured an organization called CONTROL, shoe phones, the cone of silence, and other unique devices that made fun of the spy gadgets populating more serious spy ventures. Don Adams was a bumbling spy known as Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86. Smart always doing things by the book, even though doing so was counter-productive. Feldon was Agent 99. She seemed more competent and intelligent, but 86 often ended up saving 99, mostly by accident, it seemed. The two of them, along with Chief, and other agents of CONTROL, fought the forces of KAOS.

The opening sequence showed Adams as Smart marching through corridors toward walls while the theme music played. As he reached each wall, a door would open, let Smart through, and close behind him. Once he’d gone through a number of doors in this manner, he reached a telephone booth. There, he’d put in a coin and dial a number, and then wait until he was lowered from the booth.

I was reminded of this sequence often during my military career. Working in S.C.I.F.s, underground command posts, vaults, and buildings without windows, that television show’s theme music would stream into my head as we went around corners, up halls, and through doors, often without seeing other people. The biggest differences from the television show were that we all wore badges, security cameras abounded in our halls, signs warning about unauthorized access and the use of deadly force were frequent, and getting past the doors usually required us to punch numbers into a cypher-lock.

There were also red-tiled zones where only one person was authorized to stand or be at a time, to help keep the entrance secure. In later years, we also encountered retinal scans in little booths that weighed you as you looked into a scanner and entered the numbers to pass through. Your weight was on record and accessed via your badge. A five-pound leeway was permitted. This was done under the watchful eyes of security people and cameras.

That was over twenty years ago. I wonder if they still do all those things? They’ve probably moved on to comparing DNA by now.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

This is another from the latter days of my childhood. I guess David Cassidy’s passing juxtaposed with the holiday season has opened the memory stream onto that era of my existence.

I learned of Shel Silverstein through Playboy magazine. People would throw them out for recycle pickup; we’d ferret them out of the piles while we were waiting for the school bus. I didn’t know he was a song writer. I enjoyed several of his songs without being aware that he’d written them, not learning about his part in the musical portion of my childhood until Shel died in nineteen ninety-nine.

Streaming today is a Shel classic. Written by him and performed by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” was ubiquitously played and referenced in every sort of social media available in nineteen seventy-two and seventy-three. Why not? The satirical lyrics about the meaning of success substantially differed from other songs out there during that era, and the band played it way over the top. Fabulous.

Listen for yourself and decide.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

In the wake of remembering David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, and Bread, another song slipped into my musical memory stream. Running on infinite loop since yesterday afternoon, I need to share it to dislodge it.

Here are the cartoon/comic strip band, The Archies, with “Sugar, Sugar,” from nineteen sixty-nine.

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