Flying into 2020

Have an awesome New Year’s Eve ...

and an even better 2020!

2019 Best-Ofs!

Ah, that time of year again, when a semi-portly Hopper reclines with a glass of port and relaxes and reflects on the past twelvenmonthe. The highs! The lows! The smashes and the, er, trashes. An overall review of what made life worth living in the Hopperverse.

So, dim the lights, crank the Dolby stereo, open the curtains and obey the APPLAUSE signs –

It’s the 2019 Best-Ofs!!!!

… without further ado …

Best fiction, re-read: Weaveworld (1987) by Clive Barker

Best fiction, first-time read: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953) by James A. Michener

Best nonfiction: Lincoln and His Generals (1952) by T. Harry Williams

Best Short Story: “The Mouse” (1969) by Howard Fast (I dare you to read this and not weep...)

Best TV: Still gotta be The Office. Chronologically binge-watching the seasons with the girls, currently up to mid-season 6.

Most Disappointing TV: The reboot of In Search Of with Zachary Quinto attempting to replace the irreplaceable Leonard Nimoy in yet another genre. That and the bad editing and silly writing doomed this new version.

Best movie: Joker

   Runner-up: Crawl

Worst movie: Godzilla, King of the Monsters

   Runner-up: Zombie Tidal Wave

Best song: “Long, Long, Long” by the Beatles (a Harrison tune)

   Runners-Up: Just about any Lennon song off the White Album or Revolver

Phases:

   Beatles

   Under the Dome and 24 marathons with the girls

   George Armstrong Custer research

   VSI – Very Short Introduction – books

   The Spraining of the Ankle, November 9

   Bundesliga soccer

   Re-reads (The Eye of the World, Weaveworld, False Dawn, The Face of the Waters)

Best phase: Becoming a Beatles archaeologist

   Runner-up: Under the Dome, for the bellylaughs with the little ones.

Least fun phase: The sprained ankle, or that time I slipped on a baby pumpkin and thought I shattered my ankle and that’d need to be amputated and it painfully swelled up and turned all shades of purple gold and green while I hobbled about on crutches while my girls said I was “milking it.”

Funnest Day: (tie) Leisurely strolling round Cape May all day with the Mrs. April 26; biking all over Hilton Head Island with the little ones August 8.

Best Decision: To take off Tax Season ’20. Now I get my nights and weekends back.

Worst Mistake: Choosing, through inaction, to remain a wage slave.

Biggest Life Change: Listening to multiple podcasts/video shows on a daily basis – Ann Barnhart, Red Letter Media, Dr. Taylor Marshall, Steven Crowder, Jocko Willink, Critical Drinker, Uberboyo and Jimmy Boyo. Can I get them in the car so I don’t have to listen to Talk Radio? Also, I was upgraded at work to an office with a window back in April. Nice.

Best Experience I Thought I’d Hate but Didn’t: That wedding in September, dammit! Don’t comment to say “I told ya so” or invite me to another wedding!

Proudest Moment: Watching and listening to high-school aged Little One perform in her concert band back in May and again just last week. It’s phenomenal how great this band now sounds, and next year she’ll be First Chair Clarinet! Plus they did a Sergeant Pepper medley that I absolutely loved. If she only played as much as I strum my guitar she’d be a shoe-in for the Philharmonic in half a decade.

All right … here’s to 2020, just around the corner!

Hmmmm

I came across in some spiritual reading that to some people “life is a ten-speed bicycle with gears we never use.”

Interesting; I like that metaphor.

Seems better than mine: “Life is a research problem in need of a solution.”

Anyway, such are my thoughts as the year, and the decade, comes to a close.

Christmas 2019

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

Ah, Santa must’ve known Hopper was thinking about a Tolkien Silmarillion – Hobbit – Lord of the Rings reread. After all, it’s been four years, and I’ve been restless in my readings of late. That’s why, out of all the clothes that were desperately needed and deeply appreciated, this was my favorite Christmas gift:

Thank you ladies!

The girls made out as well, as did the Mrs. and the even the dog. We’ve had our ups and downs over the past twelve months, but we’re grateful to have each other and to be where we are at this point in time.

Merry Christmas, y’all!

Beatles Breakdown

The Beatles were Hopper’s longest running continuous phase of 2019. Way, way back in January, almost at random, wanting to get away from tomes on war, religion, and science, I picked up a hefty Beatles biography and read it all the way through in six weeks. I somewhat surprisingly enjoyed it. This led to further reading of a half-dozen more books on the band. Over the summer and fall I must have spent a hundred hours listening to all their albums in depth from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. (Not a big fan of early Beatlemania Beatles, but I did listen to a lot of stuff off Anthology 1, primarily to check out original drummer Pete Best.)

Anyway, I discovered a handful of really, really good tunes. Not so much of a shock there, but I reveled the delight, as I always do, of a new artistic experience. Like you, I’m probably aware of 20, 25 songs that are played fairly regularly via classic rock stations and popular media such as TV and movies. But the following are some songs I heard for the first time in 2019 that I truly enjoyed:

I’m Only Sleeping (Lennon)

And Your Bird Can Sing (Lennon)

For No One (McCartney)

Doctor Robert (Lennon)

Tomorrow Never Knows (Lennon)

Flying (instrumental; credited to all four Beatles)

I’m So Tired (Lennon)

Piggies (Harrison)

Julia (Lennon)

Yer Blues (Lennon)

Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey (Lennon)

Sexy Sadie (Lennon)

Long, Long, Long (Harrison)

Savoy Truffle (Harrison)

Cry Baby Cry (Lennon)

Some of those Lennon songs are phenomenal, sonic sculptures of perfection of two or three minutes length. And George Harrison’s ethereal and sublime “Long, Long, Long” still sends goosebumps up and down my arms six months after I first heard it. It’s perhaps the best of those new tunes I got exposed to over the summer.

I recommend them all, but I guess overall I like the stuff off The Beatles, a.k.a., the “White Album”, the best.

All in all, a great musical year for me, great especially since I haven’t really been able to get into anything new classical-wise or jazz-wise. Which has me now thinking of what other supergroups I’ve been unconsciously hearing over the years that I kinda know nothing about and would like to explore. I have some ideas, but nothing has grabbed me yet. Maybe in the new year I’ll head over to one of the big book stores and peruse the entertainment section and see what band bio leaps out at me.

Book Review: False Dawn

© 1979 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Look at this book cover. Take a long, close look at it.

Now imagine you’re Hopper, age 12. Is this book cover not the awesomest thing you’ve ever seen in your life??!!??!!

So back in those halcyon days of the late 70s, those dark days of Jimmy Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, what better way to escape the televised miasma than to read dystopian fiction? Aye, that is what I did. But mainly I did it because of that cool book cover.

False Dawn is basically a tale of the zombie apocalypse without the zombie. And Ms. Quinn keeps it all hidden, which I liked. We don’t know what caused this particular apocalypse, the societal breakdown, though it has to do somehow with chemicals. Animals have mutated. Foliage has mutated. And human beings have mutated too, to varying, sometimes disgustingly graphic degrees. Great fodder for the adolescent male brain. Our heroine, for example, has membranes that cover her eyes during times of extreme stress. Our hero has an arm cut off that regrows during the first third of the novel.

Thea and Evan, our aforementioned mutant heroes, are trekking cross the harsh brutal landscape of what was once Midwest America, carefully avoiding rabid wolves, lethal water spiders, cannibals, and Negan’s Saviors – ah, the Pirates, I mean, ruthless gangs of thugs terrorizing those who want to create better lives for themselves. Big secret revealed early on is that Evan was once the leader of the Pirates, a Negan-gone-good, and he grows a fondness for scarred loner Thea as they both make headway for a fabled town called Gold Lake, a land of milk and honey where there’s no big bad chemicals.

I kid, but I dug it, both back then and now during a quick re-read forty years later. Thought about lending it to Patch but there are a couple of sexually delicate scenes which should have barred young me from reading the book, but will bar her. Overall, though, a nice decent semi-science fiction read.

Grade: A-minus.

A Riddle

Q: How many gender activists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny!

N.B. From a recent Rod Dreher post over at The American Conservative.

Hector Savage, ex-Boxer

Lt. Frank Drebin: Hector Savage. From Detroit. Ex-boxer. His real name was Joey Chicago.

Ed Hocken: Oh, yeah. He fought under the name of Kid Minneapolis.

Nordberg: I saw Kid Minneapolis fight once. In Cincinnati.

Lt. Frank Drebin: No you're thinking of Kid New York. He fought out of Philly.

Ed Hocken: He was killed in the ring in Houston. By Tex Colorado. You know, the Arizona Assassin.

Nordberg: Yeah, from Dakota. I don't remember it was North or South.

Lt. Frank Drebin: North. South Dakota was his brother. From West Virginia.

Ed Hocken: You sure know your boxing, Frank.

Lt. Frank Drebin: All I know is never bet on the white guy.

Astroturf

That was the first word that popped into my mind when I first saw this picture. If you can’t catch my drift, google the urban dictionary definition of the word.

When did Time magazine become a joke? I remember, in the 70s as a kid, eagerly waiting for the weekly issue to arrive in our family mailbox, and I would read it cover to cover. Now, since at least 2000 I suppose, everything is partisan. Newsweek’s gone under (or was going under, last I heard and last I paid attention to it, a few years back), and Time has surpassed partisanship and slid full force into goofy self-parody land.

Time’s Man of the Year was once a respectable honorary. But when did that slide into irrelevancy? It was supposed to denote the figure in the news who, for better or worse, influenced the world the greatest in that year. In my lifetime Reagan graced the cover, as did Soviet dictators Andropov and Gorbachev. Heck, even “the computer,” a silly but accurate choice for 1982, represented not a man but a thing that influenced the world the greatest that year. I think it must have been 1988, when the editors tried to be cute again, and hailed “The Endangered Earth” as planet of the year that the title became obsolete.

Oh well. Rest in Peace, Time Man of the Year. Join such irrelevancies as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Academy Award for Best Picture.

EDIT: While speaking with my wife this morning about this post, she managed to sum it up succinctly in a way which I wish I had: “Time’s Man of the Year is really the Liberal Hero of the Year.” I heartily agreed, and added, “If the Time editorial board had an ounce of intellectual honesty they’d have to have named Trump – and I’m no fan of Trump – Man of the Year every year since 2015.” But as both the Mrs. and me have pointed out, in our direct and indirect ways, that old school definition of “Man of the Year” no longer exists, and hasn’t since some point in the mid-80s.

John Lennon

I first became aware of John Lennon on December 9, 1980. He had been murdered the night before by a mentally ill man with a handgun.

Now, I was peripherally aware of the Beatles, but only peripherally. I was thirteen, and was more familiar with the band ELO, who were played incessantly at my house. At the time I was busy devouring science fiction paperbacks and banging away on my monstrous metallic typewriter, composing bad stories on a daily basis. As far as the Beatles went, I think I knew “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from a transistor radio and I vaguely recall Paul McCartney’s vocals over a car 8-track, possibly while driving with one of my uncles.

Anyway, at school the next morning, December 9, we all sat silent in a weird, unfamiliar and uncomfortable atmosphere of my music class. The teacher, whose name I forget, was an eccentric middle-aged bearded hippie. Along all three walls, just below the ceiling, were large poster pictures of classical composers. These portraits fascinated me, more so than anything the teacher might have said. (Just writing that, I realize how approving John Lennon would be of such a statement.) In this class, which only ran one quarterly marking period, we practiced playing the instrument of our choosing – the acoustic guitar, the recorder, or the glockenspiel. I chose the guitar, and earned an A for the class performing John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” for the final exam.

But I digress. That drab Tuesday morning my teacher’s eyes were bloodshot, either from crying or staying up the night before watching the news or from self-medicating. Perhaps all three. He sat at his desk, a small lump, leaning down in his chair, mumbling for the next forty-five minutes about who the Beatles were and what they meant to him and, by extension, the world.

He got up twice to play two songs for us. The first was “I Saw Her Standing There,” the opening track on the band’s 1963 debut album. We listened to it mostly in silence, twittering and chuckling nervously with sidelong glances at the “OOOOOOH!”s prior to every sung “I saw her standing there.” Then the teacher played “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and, to be quite honest, I was never creeped out more by sung lyrics in a song before. That creepy feeling has always stuck with me, and I still get the same reaction whenever I hear cellophane flowers of yellow and green …

That night, or maybe it was the following weekend, all the TV news was talking about Lennon, his murder, and his legacy. My uncle and his girlfriend came over, and we overhead the announcers debating whether “Imagine” should become the new national anthem. They played it and my uncle stood up, hand over heart, for the duration of the song, then said, “Nah. Too long.”

Thirty-nine years later, on a whim, I checked out a biography on the Beatles. Over the summer I borrowed Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album, and enjoyed my time driving around, to work, to pick up the girls, to run errands, immensely. I also started listening to solo Lennon, particularly “Mind Games”, a tune I hated in my band days but which has grown on me, along with “#9 Dream” and stuff off Double Fantasy.

Can’t rightly explain my fascination with the man. As I tried to state before in a review of that Beatles book I read earlier this year, I don’t find him a sympathetic character. Actually feel sorry for him. Tremendously talented, yet still very childlike. A true wounded artist in a cliché-defying way. Or maybe I find him sympathetic, but unlikeable. But there is something there admirable. Or is there? I dunno … Perhaps I am overthinking something I should simply enjoy.

I wanted to post a Lennon song here, whether solo or with the Beatles, something that would kinda encapsulate what I’m trying to say very poorly, and I find I can’t do it. So much good stuff, so much remarkable stuff I only came across this past summer. I thought about “She Said She Said,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” (the song which changed the course of music more than any other, save, possibly, “Hound Dog” or “Jailhouse Rock”), “Mind Games,” “Beautiful Boy.” Couldn’t decide, so I thought to go a bit more obscure.

In preparation for The White Album, the band recorded demo takes of two dozen songs at George Harrison’s house in Esher; these became known as the Esher Demos. The following tune, “Cry Baby Cry,” is one such demo that features a descending chromatic riff I note in a lot of Lennon songs, as well as the F chord he liked to include. Plus, how many songs have you heard that could – just possibly – be about ghosts in a castle that don’t know they’re dead?

Unwelcome Visitor

So I first found this thing on my shelf the morning of December 1, and immediately an odd feeling halfway between dread and annoyance spread through me. Every morning I see it perched in a different spot in my living room, glaring down at me, accusing me, judging me, scolding me.

I’ve had it. I just can’t seem to get rid of the damn thing. I’ve tried running the AC on with the windows open. I tried jacking the thermostat up to 90. I leave all the lights on in the house, even during the day while I’m at work. Can’t tell you how many plastic straws I’ve thrown her way, then thrown out those open windows along with the air conditioned air.

[Image taken from the absolute funniest site on the web, The Babylon Bee, in an article “New Greta on the Shelf Doll Will Track Your Climate Sins”.]