peace train

both BC and hellboy have started camp this week. so far, the only casualty involved would be hellboy’s swim trunks and rash guard, which he lost the very first day and which are not present in any of the lost and found bins. i’ll chalk it up to his inexperience and try to not fret, considering he was growing out of that set anyway.

hellboy lucked out. his best girlfriend from kindergarten, M, is in his group at camp. on the first day, i hid behind a tree, stalker-helicopter mom that i am, watching the group get organized. hellboy had a deathgrip on M’s hand, which another little girl didn’t like very much. the other little girl, who i found out later was M’s friend from preschool, was very much interested in tearing this couple asunder. ultimately, though, they’ve all apparently settled their differences. besides, hellboy has made friends with one very nice-sounding little boy and another little boy, who curiously started out their friendship by kicking hellboy in the nuts while in the post-pool shower portion of the day. (i have had friendships start in even odder ways, so i guess i will take a deep breath and see where this one goes.)

madame, as is typical, knew no one in her group when she started. [how wonderful for the moms (and dads!) who get themselves organized enough in january to get their kids together with other children at camp. this was not a year like that in this house.] fortunately, you could drop BC in a crowd of millions and she would make a life-long friend (if not several) by day’s end. (this of course would be thanks to my gene pool contributions.) so i don’t usually worry about BC in new situations. she goes through the same motions i do — she frets that she knows no one, then she just finds someone who looks like they could do with a friend, and voila! instant social scene.

this year, BC has already made her friend for the session. per usual, i asked BC which local school her new friend A is from. mommy, she replied, A is from saudi arabia. we have lots and lots of people from all over the world in these here parts, so i figured, sure, she’s from there, but where does she live now?

she lives in saudi arabia, girlfriend replied, getting irritated. her family is here for the summer and they sent her to camp.

alrighty. well, that’s got to be interesting, huh? has she told you anything about saudi arabia? i asked.

yes, she was born in philadelphia, but her family is from saudi arabia. that makes her american because she was born here, right?

i replied, yep. how lovely — you might make a new penpal, i replied, hopefully. where is this going?

she’s muslim. i helped her out today and told her that she shouldn’t eat the pepperoni on the pizza they gave us for lunch. she can’t eat pork, either, but i don’t think she knew what pepperoni was. so i helped her. i remembered DiDi (BC’s beloved friend from daycare, who is really named kareem and who is apparently still the man she wants to marry) can’t eat pork because he’s muslim. so i figured she couldn’t, either.

i scratched my head a little. my parents never had to navigate these sorts of situations. well, that’s a mitzvah that you helped her keep with her beliefs, honey. and besides, her beliefs aren’t that much different than yours are. does she know you’re jewish?

sure, BC replied, i told her. but she doesn’t know what jewish means.

should i chalk it up to youth? should i chalk it up to purposeful omission? i don’t know. but i believe that peace happens, one person at a time. i have to be positive and hopeful and not make assumptions, not jump to any stupid or misguided conclusions. because peace no longer just starts with me.

it starts with my kids.

guilty pleasure monday: the man with the child in his eyes (kate bush)

in honor of my beloved friend karin, who is stuck inside of casper with the jersey blues again.

i attended a womens college in the mid 1980s. that should be sufficient enough an explanation for why i love kate bush and her glinda the good witch voice.

but for those of you who a) didn’t attend a womens college in the mid 1980s or b) don’t grasp the talent that is kate bush, think of this: she was signed at 16, thanks to the recommendation of pink floyd’s david gilmour. she wrote this song, as well as her single wuthering heights (later made more famous, and perhaps more sonically palatable, by pat benatar) sometime before she was 19.  sure, she sometimes sounds like a bag of cats being tortured. but she writes some of the most moving music and lyrics. i think her to be quite a pioneer, actually.

anyway, back to the man with the child in his eyes. bush wrote this one when she was 13 years old. when i was 13, i was writing songs, but nothing even remotely close to this.  it’s such a beautiful song with compelling lyrics. (my lyrics were far simpler, with romantic images of acid rain. no lie.) of course, it didn’t do much on the US charts in 1979; everyone here was still caught in the throes of crap like roller boogie, i’m sure.

but she persists. she has been lauded many times. and i don’t care if you laugh at me: i lurve her.

(and as for you karin, here’s a kate bush extra. love you.)

embraceable you

oh, adolescence is going to be fun.

the kids and i just returned from a trip to what passes as an army-navy type store in our little upscale enclave of nirvana. (this being arlington, it’s more of an outdoorsy, camping, indy REI-like thing. no soldier of fortune mags here.) while at the army-navy store, BC saw a preppy little girlfriend from school who i’ve not yet met. they smiled at each other, and then BC did what she does with all her other girlfriends: she hugged her.

the other girl loudly announced: that was weird, rolled her eyes, and then stalked away.

BC looked at me a little puzzled.

that was rude, i retorted. who is that girl?

a girl i know from school, BC replied.

perhaps she doesn’t like to be hugged? i asked.

no, we hug at school.

a puzzlement.

BC and i are huggers. we are affectionate people. part of it may be cultural mixed with gender; but i suspect we is who we is. i remember the first time i met my father in law, a very shy and quiet man. he held out his hand to me; i took it and i hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. he was taken aback, i’m sure; i remember him stiffening up. i of course thought i had made the Blunder To End All Blunders.

but from then on until the day he passed twenty-one years later, that man always had a hug and a kiss for me. what’s more — he started to hug and kiss my husband, too.

i realize that some people are really nervous about their personal space. they fear getting close to people in both the literal as well as the figurative sense. i just don’t have that fear. maybe i’m stupid because of it, but there are very few people i genuinely dislike. and not one that i hate, not matter how crappy he or she might have treated me. (i let karma take care of things like that. i don’t waste my time plotting any sort of revenge scenario.)

but the hippie in me believes that love is contagious. and so even though there are people in the world who don’t care for me, i still greet them with a hug and a smile.  you never know how you might change someone’s day, someone’s year, someone’s life.

so i thought: how sad. this child is going to make my BC feel self-conscious about embracing the world and all the people in it.

not on my watch.

BC, i said to her as we drove away, there are some people in the world who just don’t deserve a hug from you. but there are lots of people who will always welcome those things.

like me.

guilty pleasure monday: homosapien (pete shelley)

oh, naughty pete shelley. call a song homosapien and think you can pull a fast one, huh? no. one. fools. the. BBC!

i often wonder who at the Beeb is responsible for banning music. what his/her day must be like:

hmmm, let’s ban this one because of its political overtones. let’s ban this one because it sounds like an advertisement. let’s ban this one because he drops the f-bomb.

being the modern-day bowdler must be wildly rewarding.

[i laugh, especially since the aforementioned example dinged for political overtones (thanks to the falklands conflict) was eventually covered by aussie kiddy group the wiggles:]

(i’m a mom. that’s how i know.)

so pete shelley, esteemed founder of hugely influential punk band the buzzcocks, pretty much trips through the BBC’s wires with this little dance gem. was this your coming out song, pete? i imagine it was, though there was certainly an element of sexual intrigue in lots of the buzzcock classics: ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn’t've) took on a whole new meaning after i first contemplated shelley’s world.

so i often wonder: did the Beeb ban homosapien because of it’s overt sexual references — or did it ban homosapien because of it’s overt references to gay sex?

who cares. banning a song almost guarantees that people will clamor to hear it. and gay, straight, or otherwise gendered, anyone can dance to this song.

(and some can copy it, too — tell me this doesn’t remind you of shelley’s song!)

guilty pleasure monday: pictures of matchstick men (camper van beethoven)

hey, at least i didn’t choose take the skinheads bowling.

yeah, i know. i’ve ranted for years about inadequate song covers. and i would be remiss if i didn’t point out that this is a cover of an excellent psychedelic single by a still-extant UK band called status quo. to be sure,  camper van’s critically acclaimed album from 1989 key lime pie could stand all on it’s own merits without this cover ((i was born in a) laundromat is classic) — but to me, pictures of matchstick men just puts it over the top. the quivering violin removes the psychedelia from the song, to be sure, but it adds a certain earthy grittiness that was absolutely of its time. i regularly drive BS insane by randomly breaking into that riff — with my voice imitating the violin in what must be the sound equivalent of seinfeld’s elaine’s dance.

and then, of course, there’s david lowery, who founded camper van and cracker — two bands i’ve adored for a long, long time. (besides the famous teen angst, which smells WAY better than teen spirit, cracker performed an excellent cover of jerry garcia’s loser (bringing the latter into a doldrom-laden territory where i wondered whether it was recorded in a meth lab.)) there’s something about his voice that seems more approachable and unpolished — in a very good way.

i understand that cracker and camper van play around from time to time. i only saw cracker once (in the early ’90s, pre-kids, of course), which is one more time than i ever saw camper van.  it looks like they have a weekend fest in california in some place called pioneertown. gee whiz, i wonder whether we could just bring the kids

now that i’ve pinched myself and woken up from that thought… i can always hope that they come back to our area someday.

at least i still have the CDs…

guilty pleasure monday: i’ll be there (jackson 5)

you and i must make a pack… a pack?

when i was young, i knew it wasn’t cool to like the osmonds (even though i watched their cartoon series every saturday morning.) however, i had no such fear of being uncool when it came to the jackson 5 (whose saturday morning cartoon i also watched. i often wondered whether the people at rankin/bass just altered the cartoon osmond’s faces and tweaked the storylines a little bit. no matter to me. i watched anyway.) in retrospect, i often wonder whether the older kids in both families felt screwed because their respective little brothers got all the attention. it’s 40 years later, and while i still know the names of the other brothers from both families, i couldn’t tell you who was who. i bet marie. la toya, and janet thank their lucky stars they were born girls.

but back to michael, michael, i LOVE you michael (a phrase i continue to hear in my dreams, decades after a particular concert.) somehow, the song i’ve always connected with, the song i’ve always cherished from their repertoire is i’ll be there. sure, there are moments when the pronunciations of certain words mystified me (as i alluded earlier, i could never figure out what michael meant when he sang  you and i could make a pack — we could bring salvation back. what the hell kind of pack did he mean, i wondered — a bag full of hope? a pack of lies? oh, if only the child could include a t at the end of that word.)

ah well. the song tugs at the heartstrings; and while i know there are many of my friends who think it incredibly uncool of me, i have loved this song for decades. this may change, now that an insurance company has taken it over and made it the center of their latest commercial campaign. i just don’t want to have to associate this song with state farm.

(once again, they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. gah.)

i guess michael needs cash now that he’s gone belly-up. and, true to form, this song is there to help.

knife and fork

welcome to today’s edition of boot camp bottom feeder!

(or why i refuse to let a knife and fork dig my grave.)

in a moment of insanity fit of hysteria second when i was inspired to just do something about my weight and health, i committed myself to an asylum a month-long bootcamp. a bootcamp that i can continue with until the end of september if i so desire. a bootcamp that is both land-based AND amphibious. (as in we run AND we swim, somewhere in between squats and other excruciating moments with our instructor, a triathlete.) a bootcamp for which i must awake at 5 am every morning (and which also means BS must awake at 5 am, causing him much unanticipated happiness, as you might imagine. who loves you, BS? the most wonderful, supportive husband on the planet i have, you know.)

today was day three of the saga that you’ll hear about already in progress; and i’m here to tell you that i am, in fact, the class bottom feeder. because of the bionic knee (and the zillion pounds atop it), i ran/walked a timed mile today (where others did two. yes. there were people who lapped me. they did two miles in less time than i did one.) yesterday, i swam a timed 150 meters where others did 200. (and also lapped me.)

and in between it all are pushups and squats and all sorts of torture designed to make your muscles wake up and realize that they have a purpose other than waving at the french fries as they pass by on their way to the tummy. damn – every time i rolled over in bed last night, i woke up in pain — my stomach muscles are probably in complete and utter shock, having been on vacation since 2003. our instructor is cruel but fair.  she’s a late-20s lady who probably does all of these things and more before she comes to our class. but bless her heart, she does the job.

okay, okay. so the only reason i didn’t come in dead last today in the run was because a 50-something guy who is a runner had knee surgery, so he has to walk. (his wife is also a triathlete. what is UP with these people. they do this FOR FUN?) but here’s the good part:

i finished.

and i figure, if i keep this up and i watch my food intake, i might lose a few pounds like my pal leifer, who is slimming down, too.

it’s funny — i’ve been working out on ellipticals and treadmills and such, and yet none of that seemed hard, like this is. i think i have a tendency to coast when i  am on an exercise machine. (hell, i sing and dance on the elliptical when a great song comes on, much to the laughter of the people at the community center who pass me by. like i care.) so for now, i’m trying exercise the old fashioned way.

yeah, it would be more fun if i were playing a sport. but i figure i’ll do this. i need to think up a reward system: finish a week, do X. finish 2 weeks, do Y. finish a month?

achieve nirvana?

guilty pleasure monday: sour milk sea (jackie lomax)

i know what you’re thinking, and i’m thinking it too: a sour milk sea? gross.

george harrison wrote this lovely ode to spoiled dairy during the white album time period.  ah, that magical, prolific time when there were so many songs and only two albums to hold them. this, like a number of other lovely songs ended up on the cutting room floor (or ended up on other lps.) however, sour milk sea was recorded by harrison’s friend and apple recording artist jackie lomax.

and what a lineup you get when you’re an apple records artist in 1968: george harrison and eric clapton on guitars, paul mccartney on bass, ringo starr on drums, and nicky hopkins on keyboards (the latter played on an amazing array of works in the 1960s-80s and got screwed out of royalties on just about every single one of the works, thanks to his status as a session man.) not too shabby.

sadly for lomax, a great song and a great lineup does not guarantee fame and fortune, especially when you’re depending on the clunky money hemorrhage that was apple corps  in the late 1960s.  a fascinating (and now sadly out of print) account of the time by the “house hippie” recounts the mismanagement and utter insanity that took place in the house that john, paul, george and ringo built. in short, the single did okay but did not propel him to worldwide renown. (hell, apple floundered james taylor’s early career; if james taylor couldn’t get big while there in the early 1970s with songs like carolina in my mind and something in the way she moves, no one could.)

too bad, too. it’s a great song, and lomax provides a fine delivery, a loopy cross between george and marc bolan meets old musichall. the instrumentation is what sells it to me, especially hopkin’s wild piano.

but considering what happened to his career, i wouldn’t be surprised if lomax had a few moments of sour grapes.

guilty pleasure monday: goodnight saigon (billy joel)

and we were sharp. as sharp as knives. and we were so gung ho to lay down our lives.

it’s difficult for people my age to truly remember vietnam as anything more than a piece of the country’s history. we remember the nightly news, the pictures, the horror; but i don’t think we truly grasp the turmoil and the polarization that this nation experienced.  one of the earliest memories i have is of this young girl running away from her accidentally-napalmed village. she was about my age; and the photo riveted me, making me wonder whether i would possess her strength and courage if the tables were turned.

in the early 1980s, newsweek published an incredibly eloquent story about charlie company in vietnam.  we had subscribed to newsweek as far back as i could remember; it was my number one news source  as a child because unlike the new york times (which i also read, as well as the asbury park press), it had the most vivid photos. (and i would read this at breakfast, which was probably not the smartest thing to do; i thought i was going to be sick many times, especially after photos of victims of ugandan despot idi amin and after the whole jim jones guyana episode.) when i read the article about charlie company, it brought it all home to me. yes, i knew my family had been against the vietnam war; i knew we hadn’t agreed with nixon or any of his policies.

but these were just a few of the guys who didn’t have the luxury of agreeing or disagreeing with policies and politics. for whatever reason, whether they were true believers or whether they simply could not escape the draft, here they were, in southeast asia, fixing to kill or die. my heart was wrenched reading about those who made it and those who did not. and for the first time, vietnam became more than just a piece of history to me.

i suspect billy joel had read the same article, too.

anyway, it’s memorial day. and while i have ranted about the non-vets who take the opportunity to invade our nation’s capitol with their noisy motorcycles and often rude selves, i will think more on the people who did what they felt they had to do — or were forced to do — by a government that insisted upon it. if there’s only one thing we’ve learned since vietnam, we have learned that we appreciate the soldiers, even if we completely disagree with their mission.

and so it is with iraq.

so godspeed those serving in iraq. i’m appalled at how many soldiers have been lost for an operation that was misguided in its efforts to uproot terrorism. i’m ashamed at my country for putting them in harm’s way for the wrong reason. their lives are all precious; and no one should ever have to die because his or her president is trying to even the score for his father. i hope instead that we redouble our efforts to become safer in a world where the original culprits still linger and flourish.

i truly hope our current vets all come home. safely.

and soon.

guilty pleasure monday: chicago (graham nash)

yippee! a song about abbie hoffmann and a few of his pals. seven, to be precise.

the story is a lot more complicated than this, but in short: protesters went to chicago to protest the war during the democratic national convention in 1968.  things got violent. hilarity did not ensue. the eight ringleaders of the experience were arrested: one, black panther  bobby seale, was bound and gagged and tied up to a chair as nash alluded because he was protesting that his attorney could not represent him (his attorney required gallbladder surgery) and he wanted to wait so that he could be represented by his attorney.  the judge was enraged, severed him from the trial, and threw him in jail for four years for contempt (an absurdly long amount of time for that offense, in my humble opinion.)

and then there were seven.

former hollies and CSN/CSNY member graham nash tends to write best when he’s protesting, like the gem immigration man. but chicago is an incredible piece of music. released in 1971, it may very well be the last song that had any ounce of 1960s optimism in it before it was completely beaten out of everyone (and they all gave in to a bummer of a bad trip known as watergate.)  in it, nash pleads with wildly-talented (and wildly-egomaniacal) bandmates neil young and stephen stills to join him in chicago just to sing. if the group got together to perform there, magical things could happen:

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying – to get better

unfortunately, i believe they both turned him down. i believe any convictions that the seven had were eventually overturned anyway, sans musical fanfare.

for me, this song brings back an extremely optimistic point in my life.  it was 1996, and i was working for a major american online service, helping to develop online content in a variety of areas. i had already helped develop an online astrology site, an online moms site, and a matchmaking site (which was eventually bought out by match.com), and i was truly enjoying a creative work period. it was definitely not one of the easiest parts of my worklife for reasons i’ll keep to myself; but in general, it was an exciting time to be on the bleeding edge of the popularization of the internet.

one of my boss’ secretaries had a boxed set of crosby, stills, nash and young, a box set i still covet to this day. other versions of many classic chesnuts appear in this four disc set — jerry garcia shows up with his slide guitar for a few numbers, for example. this wonderful woman let me borrow this set for what seemed like months; i listened to discs in my car on the way to work for a lot of that summer. and as i drove, thinking about all the novel ways that the internet was revolutionizing the world, the words had a particular resonance.

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying – if you believe in justice
It’s dying – and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying – let a man live his own life
It’s dying – rules and regulations, who needs them
Open up the door
We can change the world

sure, i was being absurdly idealistic; the next year, my job disappeared and only thanks to the deus ex machina known as my original company boss did i get another job in the company.

but for one brief shining moment, i really thought i was a tiny, tiny piece of a revolution.