More May Milestones

My babies are now one month old and I must say I'm more deeply in love with them than ever. We're sleeping through the night for the most part and I'm getting in the ballpark six hours or more of sleep a night. Can't tell with the terrible grammar, though. Anyway, life's been pretty good.
School ends in just six work days. I'm really looking forward to sloughing off this skin and growing a new one. I think I can confidently say that this year was the worst year of my professional career, problems with my work site and all. I guess I am tooting my own horn in saying, though, that last week, I was voted by this year's senior class as the most influential teacher of their high school careers. That was rewarding, until an administrator told me that during dead week I was to take a day off of school to create a pacing guide that's already been written. Anywho...
I've been trying, trying TRYING to be a good boy when it comes to penny pinching. I'm really concerned for my family's financial health now that it's nearly twice as big as it was just a month ago. However, how to handle:

Bruce's new double live album and DVD
Wilco's new Sky Blue Sky
Traveling Wilburys' two cds with a DVD to boot (next month)
Joshua Redman's new stellar disc
anything from My Morning Jacket
The Dirty South by the Drive-by Truckers
The upcoming Susan Tedeschi/Derek Trucks dual headliner concert next month
impending E St Band tour in the fall...

We'll see.

Summer plans. I need to make them. What to listen to, what to read, what to fix or change around the house, what to see, where to travel. I always get such high hopes up and then drop the ball. This summer I'm being smart and creating a list of two things. I want to take my oldest son to the Jamestown Train museum with his cousin and go camping in our tent with him. He's really growing up and trying to handle being a big brother. I give him go much loving that I think he's beginning to understand that he's my number one even though the babies are getting such attention. I wanted to take him to see the wayward whales this Memorial Day weekend but they decided to swim down river and almost to the ocean. Shoot!
Loving Lefty's Circle of Friends May disk. Those Beasties...

The Week That Was

How fitting - Jerry Falwell died the week George Bush's presidency was officially declared finished. 43, with all of his spent political capital, watched as his friends and knees were taken out beneath him. Tony Blair declared the end of his ten-year reign as P.M. of Britain; Paul Wolfowitz bowed out as head of the World Bank and Alberto Gonzales's house of cards received a wolf-sized blow to his Attorney General position. The Democrats, for better or worse, have assumed the upper hand in handling the Iraq debacle, as former generals, current low-ranking officers and international think tanks have all but declared Bush's war of choice a failure. It's only now that in desperation that Bush has created an energy policy that doesn't depend on foreign oil (note the irony) and an immigration policy that's rallied both liberals and conservatives. Liberals are happy because there's something that can be toted in 2008 and yet conservatives are rallying because they believe the plan is too liberal. Looking back at the conservative plan from the last six years...exactly. Conservatives can only play fear on the foreign policy front so long but always know that immigration is a third-rail issue on the domestic front. Want to lose all those states with all those damned voting minorities, press the INS issue. Now, Bush has all but lost credibility on the home front with both liberals and his own party. What's he going to do next, allow those imbicilic tax cuts expire next year?
The Reverend Jerry Falwell passed away this week, leaving a legacy of division and hate in the name of Christ. While he can't be solely named for fathering today's caustic conservative-driven "culture wars" seen on cable t.v. and heard on AM radio, Falwell fanned the flames of bigotry and myopic religion-as-patriotism. As seen by the in- and out-of-context quotes in his obituaries, Falwell often confused or blended devotion to Christ and country, race, region, political party, political leader or national hegemony. Falwell, if nothing else, exuded a regional and historical myopia of worldview that, unfortunately, drove countless millions to the polls, the battlefields, political office or self-appointed cultural messiah/pariah role. Falwell's positions on cartoons, liberals, Democrats, blacks, minorities, free-thinkers, the educated, Northerners and those who chose not to agree with neoconservativism make him, in the light of history, out to be a cultural and national buffoon, someone who no one would want to claim as friend but often as someone who performed the dirty work you'd like to have done. It was Falwell and people of his ilk that helped produce Ronald Reagan, an extension of "white flight", intelligent design, fundamentalism, push neoconservatism and a religious white-Protestant-Southern-fundamentalist-anti-intellectual fascist movement that holds (or claims to) quite a stronghold in the cultural/political arena. Sad and frightening.

Rushed Choices

With Rush's latest release, Snakes and Arrows, recently hitting the shelves, here are my faves with the band's back catalogue. The band's been going since the early '70s; I've been listening to them since the early '80s. Here goes:

Rush: Finding My Way
Fly By Night: By-Tor and the Snowdog
Caress of Steel: Bastille Day
2112: The Temples of Syrinx
A Farewell to Kings: Xanadu
Hemispheres: La Villa Strangiato
Permanent Waves: Free Will
Moving Pictures: Limelight
Signals: Subdivisions
Grace Under Pressure: Red Sector A
Power Windows: Manhattan Project
Hold Your Fire: Time Stand Still
Presto: Show Don't Tell
Roll the Bones: Ghost of a Chance
Counterparts: Animate
Test For Echo: Resist (hard to even think of one)
Vapor Trails: I'm going to have to take a pass; I can't remember a single song

What the "best" or most important songs are on each album, I've been a fan for too long to know that I've changed my mind so many times already. Circumstances or pt. II of Hemispheres? YYZ or Red Barchetta? What about the live albums and how many memories came with A Show of Hands?

Enough Rush. Tomorrow, politics and why God hates Republicans, the United States and George W. Bush.

Half A Month

It's understood why animals like cats sleep so many hours in a day. When always being startled, waking up to move with the sunbeams, avoiding predators, eating or being pounced on by other animals or toddlers, cats need their rest. I can now relate. Being woken up in the middle of your first REM does not bring good sleep. Having that happen several times a day means you don't sleep well for days. I haven't had more than three uninterrupted hours of sleep in fourteen days and I'm feeling it. Imagine being hungover, very hungover, Steve's New Year's Party hungover and then running a marathon. Adrenaline can only take one so far and eventually one runs out of gas.
I'm not sure what worries me more, the fact that the Bush Administration has successfully resurrected the Nixon Administration or that we still have another year and a half with this clown. The Middle East continues to unravel, Republicans who want political futures are deserting the WH and a position of obstinence has eroded any chance of Bush steering domestic policy. What a logjam and it's only the American populace whom will suffer. And the Iraqi populace. And...
Tony Blair's legacy will surely be written fairly by historians years and years from now. Until then, the young and at one time dynamic PM will have to see why so many people view him as a puppet of the Bush Administration. Domestic scandals aside, Blair's popularity among his own people will remain tenuous; I can only imagine the man from Crawford.

Paging Scott Johnson - hey, what's the new Rush album like? I've been waiting to read reviews but the record's been ignored. Too bad. I guess the fact that I'm waiting to read reviews before buying the cd is also sad. Rush was one of the first groups I remember ever hearing and learning about. The album cover to Exit...Stage Left indelibly etched in my mind. Those sci-fi-Ayn Rand concept albums from the late '70s and art/pop rock in the early 80s defined rock and roll for me for so long. 2112, Hemispheres, Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures, A Farewell To Kings; no other band of its caliber could touch Rush's output. I followed the band religiously from high school through my late twenties. I started to lose interest when the band's records in the mid-90s drifted in song quality and relevance to the overall music scene. I never wanted to see them, though, become a nostalgia act, touring every other year and releasing irrelevant albums while banging out their classic songs. I hope the band can release one dynamic and defining late-career album before calling it a day. Maybe I'll catch them this summer on their current tour - hopefully the defining and dynamic one, not the nostalgia one.

A Whole New World!!

I've been away from a while. For a reason. Two, actually. On April 27, at approximately 11:45 in the morning, my two children arrived happy and healthy!!! We've been home roughly a week and our "routine", if you could call it that, consists of a sitcomesque new parents thing of diapers, bottles, feeding, diapers and diapers. My daughter and son are wonderful. My older son, who's adjusting really well, is the family's new helper, older brother, example and playmate. Things have settled in quite nicely, though, in all honesty, I'm absolutely exhausted.

Family aside, I've been having this major '80s music jones. Not a stupid, nostalgia sixth grade dance thing but wanting to discover or rediscover music that has dated very well. So, with that, I've really found a great appreciation for R.E.M., a band I've always respected but sometimes was irritated by. Michael Stipe doesn't really impress me as a singer but song content and overall vibe make the songs. I'd like to explore more pre-Document stuff and I am a bit scared to move into the '90s. As a senior in high school, I was the newspaper editor and music critic. One of the albums I wrote about was Time Out of Mind, which I didn't give a great review. Shiny Happy People made Stand look like Flight of the Valkyries. Stipe's vocals on Everybody Hurts from the next album made Adam Duritz from the Counting Crows sound like Van Morrison. With all of that, I think R.E.M.'s the next band from "the past" i'd like to explore.

Another band I'm re-enjoying, though they're breaking new ground today is My Morning Jacket. Kokonos, the band's latest live double-disc from the Fillmore in San Francisco, captures a band with a timeless classic yet modern sound. Like R.E.M., I'd like to tap into the band's early releases. I have the three major-label records but want to hear the band's four or five albums that helped define their following. If any band makes you appreciate what rocked about the early 70s but is missing today, this band is it. If any band makes you thank goodness that good music is still being made, this band is it. Off to feed...