Beach trip Aug 2024 (long)

We took a trip to Pacific City. Hanging out with the brother-in-law, his wife, and the three nieces. 6th, 9th, 11th grades, three amazing different flavors of sass and joy. The sort of tridirectional female relationships that I as the older of two boys would never understand, nor would my only son.

The boy's joy in the water. Shrieking with delight when a wave would come and swamp his entirely beach-inappropriate western-shirt-and-sweatpants ensemble.

Night walk in Pacific City to get some sleep medicine after a rough night before. Various off-road yahoos whistling their diesels off the beach** back to their respective rentals. A very bored grocery clerk at closing time. Walking past a noisy party, I hear Cher's "Believe" start up. A woman's voice singing "Believe." A woman says "They always give me this song!" It pauses and another woman's voice continues to sing "Believe" while someone fumbles to get Pandora to play a different song.

(The previous night, I had been repeating the phrase BLING WOLF over again for some reason, thinking of different words that begun with those letters, trying to get to sleep.) 

The cool flat river. Insect sounds louder than the surf. A deer with a limp in its back leg. The Pere Ubu lyric "My baby says/We can live in the empty spaces of this life."

**Don't get me started

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8/26/24: We drove down the always awe-inspiring Oregon coast to North Bend. It is crazy that we live a couple hours from this. Magnificent vistas at every turn. Places we marked to return to someday.

We're in an Airbeeandbee near the delightfully named Pony Village Mall, near the Pony Slough. I mean how cute is that. Said slough is totally beautiful - and - totally obscured from view by dumb things like car washes, defunct restaurants, an airport. Million dollar views with a roaring highway in the way and no real way to see the magnificent vista of the bridge short of sneaking into an urgent care parking lot.

The typography on the sign for this funeral home:

It feels like only crazy people walk here (NB: I've done a lot of walking). A guy with wild hair walked past me in a restaurant parking lot next to Pony Slough.
Guy: (raises fist and says "woo woo"). I miss when people used to do that.
Me: (raises fist and says "woop woop")
Guy: No, "woop woop" is so cringe.

The family went out to Coquille to do a rail bike ride through Joy Rails and - free plug - there was indeed much joy to be had. I was happy to ride bikes. My kid was happy to be on the rails. And my wife was happy to look at hawks and deer and dragonflies, of which there were many. Totally great.  

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Lake Marie, in Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. Super peaceful even with the occasional roar of dune buggies over a distant hill.

Oh yeah, the boy found a cowboy hat in a coastal thrift store (going down the coast, that has historically been our thing) and basically kept it on his head the rest of the journey.

A dude with a p*rcupine followed us down the coast. Two blocks away from the house in Pacific City to two blocks from the house in North Bend at a traffic island near Pony Village. Not sure if his MO was to get spare change, find love, or just interact with other human beings. All valid, I guess. The p*rcupine seemed cool.

A day earlier I had seen someone playing wild fiddle on said traffic island with her case open. I appreciated the madness of this particular endeavor, playing an instrument against the roar of a thousand lifted trucks next to a moribund mall across the street from an unseen million dollar coastal vista. There's a weird beating heart like that in the Coos Bay area, the same beating heart that animates the quite good vegan restaurant, the hippies and wonderful earnest weirdos who haven't gone sour and jaded in this lumber town. 

I meant to put a dollar in her violin case, but doing so would have meant crossing a lot of unpredictable mall traffic lanes on foot. I walked on. She was gone half an hour later when I came back.

Big nerd moment/Whiz Kids

Yesterday I was using three computers at once - a Mac for general work stuff, a Linux laptop for making audio cassettes (for work?!), and Windows for running some scripts in Acrobat. I felt a bit like this - actually, I often feel like this:

I remember the TV show coming up substantially short of the nerdgasm promised by the intro, and sometimes I wonder how much better the show would have been if they just got rid of all the humans. The dog can stay though.

More U*2*, plus CD players

In the library used-CD sale I mentioned earlier, I also picked up U*2*'s album W@A@R@. Better than the previous album, though the bombast level of the big hits is hard to swallow. "The Refugee" is just fully cringe. I couldn't make it through more than a minute. They were young, I guess. I have no room to talk about creating cringe content, though, given my discography.

When they turn down the bombast knob on "Drowning Man," it actually approaches OK. I'm trying to imagine a version of the band in which people blew smoke up their A@S@S@E@S@ for doing things like this as compared to "Sun*ay Bloo*y Sun*ay," saying, come on boys, less chanting, less rock hero vocals, make things weirder and less direct, maybe listen to Odyshape and take some notes. I wonder what that band's career arc looked like. Maybe it could have been OK.

Related: My new CD player as of earlier this summer is a garage-sale Denon DCD-620. The Emotiva ERC-3 that I'd been listening to earlier probably sounds better*, but this one responds quicker, sounds fine, and, most importantly, has much more pleasant buttons, including ones that you can use to directly access tracks 1 through 10. I guess I could use a mouse or a touchscreen to do the same, but there's something more authoritative about pressing a button that's made for the purpose of playing track 5.

*Note: CD players all sound fine and my ears are old

A great line from Richard Thompson about money

Thanks to whoever donated their RT CDs to the library for sending me down this rabbit hole. From this Quietus interview:

I heard on the radio on the way here that Roger Taylor, the drummer of Queen, is worth eighty million pounds. Even if you’re not motivated by money, and even if you love Queen and especially the drummer, does that strike you as something of an injustice?

RT: Yes. I would think that for about ten seconds, accept that he’s done what he’s done and I’ve done what I’ve done and that I’d rather be me than him and never think about it again.

 

Conjunto Bernal

 I ended up here after a series of various searches at work. I feel like I end up landing on Conjunto Bernal fairly often for various reasons. Pretty awesome, right? That yodel, that light-as-cat-feet accordion, that perfectly spare arrangement?

Also, pretty awesome hand lettering:

Physical media adventures August 2024

Physical media buying adventures over the past couple weeks:

1) I stopped by My Vinyl Underground/Jigsaw Records last weekend to grab a gift certificate for a friend's birthday and picked up Corridor's Mimi and Family Fodder's best-of. Corridor are doing good, unpredictable things in a vaguely jangly direction, and their cover art is always delightful. The cover feline bears a bit of a resemblance to my father-in-law, and I love the two pink leaf blowers. I wish they'd include the (French) lyrics for us cheapskates who prefer the lower price and perfect sound of compact discs, though.

2) Polyvinyl was doing a "garage sale" thing, so I bought a Good Morning CD and t-shirt on deep clearance, then bought their newest album Good Morning Seven too. (Go for the CD - it's cheaper, and flipping records every 12 minutes for a 50-minute "double album" is no fun.) I like the song "One Night," particularly its dreamy arpeggiator B-section, and its "cloud vision" video:

3) After thirteen years of living in this house, my mailbox key was worn out to the point of no longer functioning. Not a problem I was familiar with after a decade of averaging two years per rental house!Anyway, East Portland Locksmith just happened to be across the street from Crossroads Music, so I bought Pere Ubu's mighty live album 390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo on vinyl at a relatively reasonable price and brought it home. Any version of "30 Seconds over Tokyo" inevitably gives me the chills, but this one is something else:

 

4) I went to pick up some holds for the kid at the library and stopped by their book sale, where they had a tranche of $1 Richard Thompson live CDs. Mr. Thompson shreds hard live (particularly on More Guitar) and I dig it.

 

They also had some Gen Xer's indie-rock collection from 1994 or so, so I picked up a few things that I had been too snooty for in the day but wanted to reconsider. Turns out my younger self's dismissal of Vel*city G*rl as "wack" appears to have been correct, as was my dismissal of U*2*'s Oct*ber as "boring." 

 

Kicking Giant's Alien I.D. holds up well, I think. The taut guitar-drum duo sound is a little of its era, but they change things up well. The CD design has aged much better than much other edgy 90s I-have-a-computer design, though the lyric sheet went all Raygun and ends up being an illegible blob of sans-serif. I guess the spoken-word bit "The Town Idiot" is good for what it is, but spoken-word bits are still a bad bet on rock albums (unless you are Captain Beefheart).

Aikagi

Japanese duo Aikagi put out a couple really charming records on the eternal Blackbean and Placenta Tape Club back in the day. Who can forget "Piggy Bank"? This magnificent, goofy, and surprisingly complex earworm gets stuck in my head every few months or so, and the video is pretty great too (maximum twee: dig the striped shirt, fake eyeglasses, and stuffed animals):

Actually, the "Sugar Paste" video takes the twee-AF-Japanese-apartment aesthetic even farther by setting the whole thing in the bathroom:

I had assumed that the "Piggy Bank" single and Waterproof Leaf were all they had done, but it turns out they also had an EP called Pigs Might Fly - thank you internet!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Kxrrgfu7vqUROhczAkISbd4KhDVaSgF

Anyway, this is my annual reminder that if the cards had fallen differently, I suppose I could have gone down the twee pop road instead of being a monster. It could have been all right. PS: That reminds me that I need to finally upload my all-ring-modulator album