Category: pop culture

Today’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is based on a song that came out in 2015. A deeply provocative and thoughtful song, it received a lot of air play and was said to profoundly affect millions of people around the world.

‘Uma Thurman’, by Fall Out Boys, states the secret dreams and desires many of us had when we watched John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in Q. Tarentino’s 1994 hit film, ‘Pulp Fiction’. 

 

It also features a riff out of ‘The Munsters’, altogether creating an unusually memorable turn in the song. When it came out on the radio, you’d be driving along, listening, and then suddenly hear that and think, “WTF?” The song ends up then addressing not only life in 2015 America, but part of our culture from 1994 and 1964.

‘The Munsters’, starring Fred Gwynn and Yvonne De Carlo as the father and mother of a family of monsters living at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, is classic 1960s American television. Here’s the theme music, in case you can’t place it.

0

Today’s Theme Music

Blasted through another night of dreams. I traveled the world, saw confusion and met it with more confusion. A little clarity came with reflection after I was awake for a while.

Sometimes, you know, you wonder how people get away with what they do. You wonder, where the hell is the justice? What trick of fate lead some through lives of dissatisfaction and loss as others thrive no matter who and what they destroy in the process? We wish for instant karma or some kind of reckoning. We want to know what happens to them. Why do you follow all the rules only to end up bitter and sad as others break the rules and end up wealthy and happy?

I wonder but there aren’t answers. What’s the point of wondering, right? Sure, the unexamined life is much easier to live.

Let’s just rock the days away. Here’s ‘Best of You’ with Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters, from 2005. It was a song I heard quite a bit that year. Back then, my team was still in the SF Bay area. They were working from home from Santa Rosa, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, Pacifica, San Jose…all over. Once a month, I’d drive down from Ashland in Oregon and meet with them for planning and team building. We’d have lunch, discuss trends and problems, and just chat. The drive wasn’t difficult until I edged into the Bay area traffic around Fairfield. After that, it was hellacious.

0

Today’s Theme Music

Today’s choice isn’t a favorite but I hear it in the radio and it’s stuck to the flypaper of my mind. It also lends itself well to singing to the cats.

The song is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ by Walk the Moon. Some lines go, “This woman is my destiny, she said, shut up and dance with me.”

Applying that to cat life is easy. “This kitty is my destiny. He meowed, shut up and come feed me.”

He does other things. He purrs, shut up and pet me. Shut up and let me out. You know, things that cats do.

Yeah. I might be a little crazy. Bring me more coffee.

1

Today’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music streams in from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the massacre in Tienanmen Square.

The Berlin Wall wall was first a fence and then a guarded concrete wall. Built in 1961, it made East Berlin an island of Soviet Union totalitarianism and communism amidst western culture, democracy and freedom. I traveled through East Berlin by train while the wall was up. Still scarred by the tanks and guns of World War II, the streets were ghostly empty avenues behind crumbling concrete and rusting steel.

The massacre in Tienanmen Square is sometimes called the June Fourth Incident. The People’s Republic of China was experiencing a spring of democratic thought in 1989, with its people hoping for greater freedoms and independence. They dissented with their government’s position and were killed by their government for their ideals.

Now, in 2017, the Berlin Wall has fallen. The Union of Soviet Socialists States has fragmented into smaller nations, dominated by Russia. The PRC, often just called China, remains. While shifts have occurred there, it remains a nation of oppressed people with little freedoms.

Here in America, a billionaire has been elected POTUS with less than the popular vote. He wants to build a wall to protect us. As a child and adult who lived with a wall as a symbol of political differences and repression, I’m dubious of his motives and ideals, and leery of what might come to pass.

The events of Tienanmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired Seal to write this song. Let’s hope this song inspires us and we avoid becoming the people behind the wall.

Here, from 1991, is Seal with ‘Crazy’. We’re never going to survive unless we get a little crazy.

1

Today’s Theme Music

Testing, testing.

Can you hear me?

Excellent. Let’s get started.

Today’s theme music is by Fine Young Cannibals. This is ‘Good Thing’, from 1989. I think you’ll be pleased with the selection. It’s a fine song for streaming in your head as you conduct your business today.

Have a nice day.

That is all.

0

Today’s Theme Music

Ah, Sunday morning.

An overcast sky hides sunshine. Temperatures in the upper forties keeps the light rain from becoming something more, and daffodils and blossoms on trees are powering serious Spring imagery. The coffee is brewed…soon pancakes will be prepared. Something light is required for such a serene sense of home and harmony.

Naw. Fed by dreams of insistence and resistance, the soul is hungering for something with a meaty beat. Enter Metallica. ‘Enter Sandman’. Enter 1991.

This song was released a few months after my arrival back to the United States. Living in the super-expensive SF Bay area, we were signed up for base housing. Meanwhile, we lived in a large one bedroom apartment on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, less than two miles from Onizuka Air Station, where I worked.

That area of Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Los Altos enjoyed gorgeous weather nine months of the year. By May, the standard forecast called for sunshine, blue skies, and a temperature of seventy by ten AM. We enjoyed our Sunday mornings with the SF Chronicle and a light repast. Frozen unbaked croissants were purchased at the Milk Pail Market at the corner of California and San Antonio in Alta View. We defrosted them and let them rise overnight, baking them early in the morning. Add some fresh fruit from De Martini Orchard in Los Altos, a cup of Peet’s coffee, and three sweet cats to supervise the meal, and it’s the ingredients of wonderful Sunday mornings and pleasant memories.

3

Today’s Theme Music

I’m sorry for today’s selection. I apologize. I don’t know where my head is. My focus is scattered. I’m left with fractal thoughts that don’t seem to begin or end anywhere.

This may be a repeat of an earlier post. I don’t know. Sorry if it is.

What else should I write? What else should I be?

Never mind. I’m just babbling on. Sorry.

Here’s the song. From 1991, Nirvana, with ‘All Apologies’. 

0

Coffee Snob

Yes, I confess: I’m a coffee snob.

I can’t abide most American mass produced ground coffee, like Folger’s, Maxwell House, and Hill Bros. Worse of the worse is Sanka instant.

No, worse of the worse could be the Folger’s Instant Coffee Crystals. Instant coffees taste off to me, as though the coffee has been recycled.

I have friends who swear by Dunkin’ Donut’s coffee. Not me. Dunkin’ Donut cofffee provides a taste that I imagine comes from a dirty tee shirt being soaked in coffee and then wrung out in a cup. Just below it are the foul offerings provided at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast food establishments. I haven’t had coffee from any of those places in decades. Haven’t eaten at them since around 1992, when I returned to America from Germany.

I became such a snob, as with many things, when I was exposed to offerings in other places. Being stationed in Germany was the changing point for my appreciation of not just beer, but coffee, pastries, asparagus and French fries. German coffee seemed so very strong and clear that I was instantly drawn to it. I started buying different Italian coffees available in Germany, examining flavors the way others do with wines.

The same process was followed with wines, and then beers, along with cigars, ports, whiskeys, fruits, chocolate, cheese, fish, oils, vegetables and meats. I learned that an experienced palate will be drawn toward fresher, clearer flavors. Becoming more mindful among the differences in flavors, I became more mindful as I consumed food and beverages. Fresher and more refined foods offered unique flavors on my tongue.

Of course, it ruined me. Returning from Germany and settling into the Bay area, I drove by a KFC. KFC chicken! I remembered eating it as a child. A sudden nostalgic flame consumed me. I ordered a chicken dinner. The eating experience ruined my memories of KFC and made a skeptic of me about all my American favorites.

So, I’m a coffee snob, but I’m also a beer, wine, chocolate, pie, cheese, fruit, vegetable, meat and pastry snob. I’ll eat things because they’re sustenance, and it’s my nature to accept that food is fuel. But I now know that some foods don’t work nearly as well as fuel.

Something about the eating and drinking experience also affected my reading,  news reporting and movie watching. Overall, I became a snob, more watchful, more critical, more mindful. Part of me often wishes that I wasn’t a snob, that I can just turn on the television and be titillated by the latest number one show like so many others, or that I don’t need to research and vet news headlines and reports for the truth and accuracy, or that I can just trot on down to a fast food place for a meal.

With that, time for breakfast, locally sourced and organic, featuring berries and fruit we picked and froze ourselves, and a cup of coffee. It’ll be Major Dickinson today, from Peet’s.

8

Today’s Theme Music

Awoke from my multiple dreams with my cerebral shuffle stuck on this song. I read on the intertubes that if you write it down and share it with others, and then get up and turn in a circle, spitting at the north each time, and then stop and close your eyes and say, “Song, quit me, song, quit me, song, quit me,” the song will magically stop playing in your head.

This might be a re-run. Apologies if it is, but it’s stuck in my head, and I need to rid myself of it. “Out, damn song, out.”

Here’s Foghat’s recording of ‘Fool for the City’ from 1975.

2

Today’s Theme Music

Despite the sobering news out of Europe regarding terrorism and the most recent attack, we go full on pop mode streaming today, with a pause to think of those who were died or injured, those who lost someone, and those now distraught by the latest.

It’s part of the world wide web that we can know such news with the immediacy of video and audio recordings and feel others’ grief, but experience a much different reality on a personal level. A legacy of our immediate wired world is that we reach across the connections to offer ourselves and our resources, no matter how meager they are or their nature, because we feel helpless to do much more.

A cold front bulled in here, shooing the rain away and sweeping out the clouds. Except for some high, feathery cloud remnants, the weather is blue sky sunny. ‘Walking On Sunshine’ has already begun streaming in my brain, establishing itself as the song for the day.

I know, like, five things about this song.

  1. It’s by Katrina and the Waves.
  2. It was a hit in 1985, while I was driving around the southeastern quadrant of the continental United States.
  3. It’s the only song by KaTW that I know.
  4. It’s a bouncy melody with easily learned and remembered lyrics.
  5. The song’s properties lends itself to popular culture, so it’s been part of movie soundtracks, television shows, and advertisements.

Stay strong, everyone. Let’s do this.

 

 

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑