Some Creedence for Page

Just ordered the complete Creedence Clearwater Revival boxed set on amazon containing every note they ever put on vinyl as well as some outtakes which are always fun. Fogerty is unique and the playing is great for the sculpting work–long jams that get you in a groove and keep you there. So it’s basically a business expense. It’s amazing how quickly you blow through 11 gigs of music on an MP3 player while sitting/crouching/kneeling/standing around with the tools and wood. So much so that I’ll even take a flyer on some Edith Piaf. Anything.

And musically, I don’t much care anymore about the music that I used to get all worked up about in my youth. In fact, the one overwhelming thought whenever I listen to, or think about the music that I listened too (mostly classic rock, the usual), is embarrassment. Because we took this stuff so seriously and it is SUCH A JOKE! These guys had really very little talent and we just worshipped them all out of proportion with what it was. I see it all from my dad’s perspective now. Dad, you were right. They were a bunch of overpaid bums.

That’s not to say that I still won’t appreciate some artistry from time to time, but for the most part, it’s not worth talking about. Take Jimmy Page for instance. I was listening to the new Zeppelin channel on XM coming into work today and they were playing the live Dazed and Confused and they get to that part where Page plays the electric guitar with a violin bow (cue Spinal Tap). I almost drove off the road laughing and I was laughing at how reverently we kids talked about this act. How much esteem we held this in. It was like Page was Jesus for banging a bow on a guitar and making just the most rudimentary amplified noisy sounds! hahaha! He’s a real Joshua Haifitz, isn’t he? hahaha. What a rocket scientist there. Actually, it was brilliant, just not musically, but rather it was brilliant in the same way that P.T. Barnum was brilliant in that he hoodwinked a generation of some pretty smart people into thinking this was “cool”. I bought in. Now I laugh.

But Page is special musically in some ways still. I laugh at his sloppy play and just horrible technique; particularly live. You can listen to the drugs take his playing as the years go by. It starts out decent and steadily declines all the way from 1970 to 1980, when he was so cooked that he wouldn’t have won a high school talent show (Knebworth). But Page was a great producer of records and he got some great sounds like the tube miking for Houses of the Holy and In My Time of Dying. Good production, sloppy play. But the sloppy play is forgivable because most don’t listen close enough to really hear it anyway and it certainly didn’t hurt their sales.

There is a phrase in the song, In My Time of Dying where Plant is singing in silence, “Oh My Jesus, Oh My Jesus, Oh My Jesus, Oh My Jesus,” several times. On the “Oh”, start counting. 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 etc. Page comes in with the slide on a 3, and I’ve always thought that where he comes in is TOTALLY unexpected, but perfectly brilliant, if such a thing can be. The timing is exquisite. I would never think to DO that, if it were me. And I find that while listening to Page, you follow along and mentally try and anticipate what note should follow and he’s always going to a note that (a) I wouldn’t think to (b) is very pleasing.

So I look at it this way. If you broke everyone’s guitar solos/riffs into one-note-at-a-time, and graded them for each note selected in “pleasingness” to the general public, Page’s batting average would be Ty Cobb high. He just “gets it” and selects the best note most of the time or certainly a high percentage of the time. There’s a reason everybody liked, and still likes, those Zep tunes. You want to say he’s brilliant? Ok, fine, whatever. But leave the bow out of it.

Reading a tremendous book on Kid Delicious called Running the Table. What a great book! You hate to finish it because you just don’t want it to end. It’s interesting reading for me also because of the statue I’m doing. I find a lot of the stuff Delicious deals with or experiences to be similar–very, very, eerily similar, but of course on a much smaller scale. The maniacal aspect of it and the highs and lows of self esteem and mood swings, tied directly to how it’s going. Getting in the zone when time becomes elastic and you just feel like superman for a while. Then also the times where it all seems so elusive and pointless. A very good book. I hope they don’t scroogie up the movie (they will). Kid Delicious should play himself!

Click here to launch Kid Delicious’ site in a new window

Delicious’ Road Partner is a pretty fair painter.  I like the style and I am tough

Why I don’t Run With the Bulls

Apparently, it’s all the rage. Want to prove your manhood? Run in front these bulls. I’ve no doubt that alcohol is involved. Alcohol + explosives or Alcohol + livestock = trouble, a scar and maybe a story to tell later on about how dopey you were. Here is the link to the slideshow on Yahoo . Thanks to Cincinnati Bill for the tip on this one. –fog

It’s About Time, Sports Fans

I absolutely LOVE this. I have been hoping for years that American fans get together and do something similar. Maybe now with the internet, there is hope for us.

What am I talking about? Well, at the FA Cup Final (Britain’s Superbowl) at Wembley on May 19, the fans of Manchester United and Chelsea will be boycotting ALL of the non-ticket purchases at the Cup Final. As the English say every 5 minutes or so, “Brilliant!” The prices are too high and so they have gotten organized and decided not to buy any of it.

Prices at sporting events all over the country are out of control but somehow, dopey fans like us still pay them. Things like 15 to park at RFK in Washington. 10 for a beer at Yankee stadium. 15 for a clam roll in Fenway. Match programs that cost over 10 dollars and have no place to actually score the game! It’s insanity. And while they can charge whatever they want, we don’t have to pay it.

This fall at the playoffs, I snuck a huge bag of M&M’s into Shea Stadium in the front of my jeans, where I was pretty sure they wouldn’t pat me down. I bought one soda all night. 4 bucks. Ouch. I always try to eat before a game and to smuggle in candy or peanuts in my pants or my wife’s purse. But why should I have to resort to this nonsense?

American fans need to band together and protest some of these prices. Organize a day where no one goes to the park or no one buys any concessions or merchandise. Hit them where they are hitting us. Baseball has a monopolistic element in that if I’m a Met fan, there ain’t no candy store across the street I can go to. And once in their building, I am a prisoner for up to 4 hours and they are taking advantage of that. It ain’t right. But we have no one to blame but ourselves because we go like lemmings and pay it.

I will be closely following this boycott and wish it all the luck in the world. Good job Chelsea and ManU supporters. –fog

Madonna and JFK seen at shrine

If there was a “Weird Mass” magazine, then I’m sure that they have covered this at some point. Mrs. Pinetar and I went up to Mass for the weekend and around the corner from where we stayed, was this house. This is a completely residential area in Scituate, MA. It’s a beautiful area near the estuary and nothing was out of the ordinary–until this.

Of course I stopped and took some fog-fotos because really, there is just no explaining a shrine to JFK on someone’s front lawn.

It appears to be a custom-built, stone covered, well…er…ahh, “shrine” is what it says so we’ll go with that.

As I got closer to it, the name they gave it seemed appropriate. Inside, directly in front of the storm door, was a half or 3/4 life size statue of Jesus laying down with stigmata. At the far left was a candle holder that looked to be right from a church and a full size statue.

The right hand side had the statue of Mary and the well-worn church style kneelers. I did not go inside. I probably could have if I wanted to now that I think of it but you tend to feel a little self conscious when you’re taking photos of someone’s private JFK shrine. Now, if it was a shrine to General Patton, or Tommy Agee or Secretariat, then perhaps.

There was no one around and no one came out. I am thinking that this thing has been here for years and they are used to the gawkers by now.

Was it because JFK was the first Catholic President that he has all the hoopla? It’s funny about the whole JFK thing. He was young, he was handsome, he had the pretty wife and then he was killed so publicly so the media, understandably, just ran with it for the last 40 years.  Face it, there’s money to be made on the guy by selling books and TV shows and movies–I get all that.

But what no one seems to want to deal with is that the party that he worked for has moved so far to the Left since he was alive, that the OTHER party can now use JFK’s speeches in their marketing! The Republicans, in fact, did just this in the 2000 election as Bush was running on a platform of a  tax-cut-for-the-middle-class. That’s the same thing JFK ran on, and fought for: an economy-stimulating, middle class tax cut.  And championed by the Democrats!

And when the Republicans used the sound bites from 1960, of a Democrat recommending the same thing, the Democrats just wigged out. “You can’t use our guy!”. And the media has made him this bigger than life icon and the Democrats never get tired of using the icon–but they want to rewrite the script that went with it. They don’t want people to realize that what was a Democrat in 1960 is basically a Republican now because that might remind people just how far left the whole Democratic party has gone in the meantime.  Seriously, if JFK came back to life right now, he’d have to be a Republican (and he’d HAVE to be embarrassed by his brother Teddy).

And that’s really my problem with the Democrats. They had a lot of nice ideas. Really, I’m not kidding. But those nice ideas were long ago turned into LAWS. But a party has too much momentum (and too many people deriving power from it) to simply say, “…hey, we nailed all of our objectives, let’s just call it a day”. No chance. They simply move the first down marker 10 yards to the political left and try for another, and another, and another and bigger and bigger government (socialism) and higher and higher taxes, meanwhile our paycheck and our freedoms shrink and if we beef about it, we are called rascist, white, greedy, insensitive, rich, homophobes (etc) for wanting less of our money squandered in Washington and more of the decision making kept local.

Give the Democrats what they want today, and by God, they will be back at your door tomorrow, insisting that more people are victims and that more money needs to be bled from the producing base to address their “victimness”.  Help us JFK!  –fog

McGraw of the Giants and the OTB

With baseball right around the corner I thought we could use a blast of baseball past. I recently reread John McGraw’s bio by Charles Alexander and at the end, they give the street address of McGraw’s palatial home, where he spends his last days dying of prostate cancer. The address was right around the corner from the Bronx office where I work. In fact, I passed it every day while going for pizza or the garlic eggplant at Number One Chinese in Pelham.

So one day, I had the digital camera and swung down his street and took this photo.

Not a big deal really but I couldn’t help but think that Casey Stengel and Bill Terry and Mel Ott all walked up that path. And in the 1920′s, that was a big mansion. And it’s just so absurdly close to the Bronx now that it makes you laugh. Pelham was THE place for the rich New Yorkers to settle but it’s proximity to the Bronx would unsettle me now.

In fact, just a half mile down the road from McGraw’s is the Bronx OTB, where I placed my last bet on Barbaro (an Exacta Box with the eventual winner)

I think that McGraw would have liked the proximity to the OTB as he was a big horse player and all around gambler.  In fact, in his early days with the Giants in the early oughts, it was not uncommon for him to leave the team in a coach’s hands and go to Belmont Park to the races.  In fact, Giants’ owner John T. Brush had to discipline him for doing just that.

In the 1905 World Series against Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, McGraw could be seen openly betting with A’s fans down the first and third base lines.  The Giants won a classic series (the second ever as McGraw refused to play in 1904) and McGraw cleaned up on his bets.

A few things struck me while reading the book.  One, was the preponderance of Irish-American ballplayers.  Back then in the 1900-1910′s, you could probably still find signs in windows saying “NINA” or “No Irish Need Apply”.  Baseball was considered fairly lowly work and this image was only starting to be flipped by the rare college educated players like Eddie Plank and Christy Mathewson.  Otherwise, some hotels wouldn’t take “ballplayers and actors”. There were Italian immigrants pouring in at that time as well, but the names on the rosters were mostlsy Irish.  The Italians don’t get into it until more like the 1920′s and 1930′s. 

The other thing that is amazing about the era is the number of times that guys like McGraw and McGinnity and Bresnahan would get into these near riots and fistfights.  It’s a wonder they could play the games.  They’d have to dress at the hotel and ride to the park in wagons sometimes, while the home town fans threw things at them, often as big as bricks.  It was a whiskey-soaked, rough-and-tumble time for sure. 

He managed the Giants from 1902 to 1932 and with the dead ball and lively ball.  Between he and Connie Mack, you have 80 years of major league managing experience.  An interesing character in American History. –fog 

Little Jeters Running Around…

You know, Mrs. Pinetar’s point on Barbaro’s “legacy” makes me wonder: What if Derek Jeter, you know, offered some future Jeter stardust, out for sale?  Certainly, women would line up around the block for that, no?  And be willing to pay a fortune, right?  You wonder when bigtime athletes will arrive at this “business” opportunity?

Straw pretty much tried it (But he was bad  at marketing himself).  Steve Garvey actually DID it (remember the bumper stickers in San Diego: “Steve Garvey is my Padre”).  OJ wouldn’t be above it (but his marketing department is worse than Straw’s).  Canseco?  Charlie Sheen?  Who knows? –fog

Barbaro Was My Last Bet

I don’t know much about horse racing but each year, I take the office bets down to the Bronx OTB (an adventure in itself) for the triple crown races. It’s great, everyone is an expert and no one knows diddly.

I try to Exacta box the favorites with some reasonable long shots. This year, for the Preakness, I had the winner (forgot who already) and Barbaro boxed. The message for me here, is clear: When your horse breaks down, it’s time to quit.

On the business side of this, they spent more money keeping this horse alive than it probably ever would have earned in stud fees. Does anyone have any numbers on that? Would, if he had lived (we all hoped, it’s sad), the owner have had any chance of recouping and then going into the black on him? Before you all razz me, let’s not forget that it IS a business you know. And it’s sure a business to the young Jamaican guys and the old Italian guys standing in the stink of the Bronx OTB, muttering the F word every two and half minutes.  Whoever called it “the sport of Kings”, hasn’t been to the Bronx OTB.

All in all, it’s a shame. You wonder if coming out of the gate early was any indicator. With that kind of dough on his back, they certainly weren’t going to scratch him. –fog

Mrs. Pinetar reminds me that they were, er, ah, you know, “harvesting” Barbaro’s stuff, so maybe they’ve banked up quite a bit of that by now and will still make money on him. Forgot about that aspect. Hmm, who might know this? Well, this fellow

http://salemslots.wordpress.com/

is a very knowledgeable guy from Kentucky (horse country) so perhaps he can weigh in on this?

I was also wondering: if you do that sort of work as a profession (Vet tech?), how does that get listed on your resume/CV? Or am I just an uptight city/burb slicker?