Archive for the ‘Ephemera’ Category

Remembering Harry Chapin

Saturday, July 16, 2011

I can tell you exactly where I was on July 16, 1981: stuck in a ghastly traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway. I was heading out to my boyfriend’s house, when all came to an absolute standstill. Reports came in over the radio of multi-lane closures, due to what sounded like a horrific accident involving a small car and large truck. Those of you who are fans of a certain type of 1970s music know where this story ends. Harry Chapin was the driver of that small car, and he died thirty years ago today.

I spent much of my life hiding my love for the easy listening folk rock of the 1970s.  As a genre, it gets little respect. Disco has gone from cultural joke to being considered the iconic music of a gay sub-culture that was unknowingly dancing on the edge of an apocalypse. Bruce Springsteen and the like will always get respect. Punk and new wave, with their angry anarchy, became the music of leftwing intellectuals everywhere as the Free to Be … You and Me era ended in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Folk rock, on the other hand, is marked by an earnestness and sincerity that plays as hokey in our more ironic age. It’s often about failure, which might also be why it gets little respect since we are, after all, a society that’s uncomfortable with anything but tales of triumphant progress. Much of folk rock describes how things did not work out. And no one got all that better than Chapin, a man who, despite the love of family, friends and fans, understood loneliness and despair. Read on »

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This One’s for George

Thursday, June 18, 2009

As many of my friends know, I have a definite thing for the Armageddon types. I suspect I am one of those people who needs to know how much worse things can be before I appreciate what I have in the here and now (Yeah, my health insurance bites! But hey, in five years, things will be so bad we will all be living in tent cities and the plague will come and we will be weeping with nostalgia for the days when we argued over the phone for hours with Betty Jean in Bangalore about our benefits…).

So credit where credit it due. The wonderful George Ure makes predictions based on wave theory and a method in which he tracks word usage on the Internet. I’m not sure I really understand this, but it makes for entertaining, if depressing, reading. Well, a few weeks ago George predicted about 50 bodies would be recovered from the Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Guess how many bodies have been recovered?

As for his predictions for the rest of the year … Mercifully, his track record is not so great, at least according to this list helpfully provided by the folks at Coast to Coast AM. On the other hand, timing one’s predictions can be a tricky thing, so if we experience hyper-inflation, inner city unrest or hear from a NASA whistleblower before the end of 2009, you can credit George for letting you know the news first.

Posted in Culture, Ephemera, Finance, Politics | No Comments »

On Leaving Los Angeles …

Monday, June 30, 2008

I’m not sure you can call this week’s Lives essay by Rachel Cline in the back of The New York Times magazine brilliant. Critiques of Los Angeles always seem hackneyed and trite to those who never lived there. Cline, however, captures the gothic feel of Los Angeles, how time slips away and one month becomes ten years overnight, leaving you with nothing but a few fragmented memories:

I lived in Los Angeles for almost 10 years, but it all runs together. I can never remember what happened when. In memory, I’m always driving down a sunny stretch of road, listening to National Public Radio, trying not to spill my latte. Sometimes I have a splitting headache, which must mean I am on the east side or in the valley, and sometimes the ocean is glittering nearby. Occasionally I can remember the jacarandas being in bloom, which means, what? May? But that still doesn’t tell me the year. It’s just an odd lot of incidents, a memory salad.

I was in Los Angeles last month.  One afternoon, I decided to drive to a favorite shop in Pico-Robertson. I parked my car on a side street, in front of a 1930s Spanish four-plex with an “Apartment For Rent” sign in front. I sat in the car staring at it, fighting the urge to jot down the posted telephone number or ring the bell. On the radio I heard “This is KPCC: Pasadena, Los Angeles, Orange County,” and the light came down crystal white, highlighting the just-over-the-peak purple jacaranda blossoms.

I couldn’t imagine what I was thinking and, after a minute, I forced myself to go on my way. But I suspect Cline would have known right away what was motivating me, because I realized what it was while reading her piece. I saw myself ringing the bell and walking into the house. It’s the fall of 1995, and my husband and I are preparing to move to LA from New York, and we are looking at homes and apartments for rent in West Hollywood and the adjacent areas. I thought I would walk into that four-plex just off of Robertson and find me, and I would get a chance to start all over again.

Los Angeles is a city where you see ghosts walking in daylight.  Sometimes, the ghosts are you.

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Nicest Thing Ever Said About Me

Friday, June 13, 2008

Liza Was Here compared my voice in my recently published essay “The Mean Moms” to that of Anne Lamott. Thank you, fellow Smith College grad! And thanks to the magic of Google alerts, I now know of another great blog worth reading.

As for “The Mean Moms,” it’s in the recently published anthology The Maternal is Political. Check out the book. It’s great.

Posted in Culture, Ephemera, Parenthood, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Best Comment of the Week

Friday, April 4, 2008

This gets handed out to a fellow mom at my younger son’s nursery school who must remain anonymous. We were sitting next to one another last night at the annual fundraising auction for our forever financially challenged play program. The item up for a bid was an evening with an extremely connected media personage who covers the world of celebrities. Our auctioneer (a fellow dad)  was making promises that the person who ponied up for this fantastic item would get the latest gossip about “the people we always talk about.” My fellow mom looked up with a very quizzical expression and asked with pitch perfect faux bemusement, “Who? My neighbors?”

Posted in Ephemera, Finance, Parenthood | No Comments »

Updates

Sunday, February 24, 2008

I realize it has been a week since I posted here but I’ve not been silent. Slightly edited versions of It’s Yesterday No More and Wouldn’t It Be Nice? were featured on the Huffington Post and Girl With Pen blogs respectively. In addition, I wrote original post for Huffington on John McCain’s travails, which got noted by BuzzTracker and a few other places.  

 I also need to send a shout-out to Nadira Hira at Fortune, who wrote what must be my favorite post or article ever about workplace romance. It’s on her blog, The Gig. Please check it out, and not just because she wrote about Office Mate. She’s an amazing writer, a thoughtful and provocative analyst who takes her readers to places they don’t expect. 

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Conversations, Part II

Friday, February 8, 2008

It’s only fair to include a conversation between my younger son and one of his best friends I had the good fortune to overhear last week. Both parties in the conversation are four years old.

Best friend: I don’t want to get old.

Luke: You know what? My grandma — my grandma isn’t old, but my grandpa? My grandpa is old.

Best friend: We’re going to be a grandpa when we grow up.

Luke: A grandpa. I’m going to be  a grandpa.

Luke and Best Friend (almost simultaneously): I’m going to be old.

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Conversations

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Today, I decided to tell Jake, who was home sick from school, what life was like in the distant past when mommy was eight years old.

Me: Televisions only had thirteen channels. There was no remote. You had to get off the couch and change the channel.

Jake: That’s horrible.

Me: And if you called someone on the telephone and they weren’t home, the phone would just ring and ring. And if they were home, they had no way of knowing who was calling. We didn’t have caller ID.

Jake: No caller ID?

Me: No caller ID.  We had to pick up the phone to find out who was calling.

Jake: Weren’t you scared? How did you know it wasn’t a robber calling?

Me: No, we knew they were our friends.  

I decided to not tell him that he had just fingered the plot of more horror movies than I can list here. 

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California Dreamin’

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

It was 65 and sunny today in New York.

Driving in my car with the windows down, I suffered from geographic dislocation. I kept thinking I was driving east down Beverly Blvd, toward La Brea. But then I would look up and see the Hudson River and the Palisades, not the snow capped hills surrounding the L.A. basin. And not a swaying palm or jacaranda tree in sight.

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