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.

guilty pleasure monday: summer breeze (seals and crofts)

yesterday was my big brother’s birthday. he is 21. again. for him, a song.

in truth, i would have featured we may never pass this way again in my brother’s honor; he played the hell out of that song his senior year in high school, and it does make me tear up from time to time when i hear it in some public place like the grocery store.  (highly embarrassing, i’m sure.) but in truth, the only videos available for that song include a very rotund man singing it off-key at a karaoke contest (prompting one commenter to point out that the boats in the video are moving quickly away to get the hell out of earshot) and some poor woman who filmed herself singing the song while driving around her parents’ home, waiting for the ambulance to come and pick her mother up and take mom to the nursing home. (i couldn’t make this stuff up if i tried.)

(happy birthday, big brother. have an earache.)

so i’ll stick with seals and crofts’ hit summer breeze, a pretty song i’m sure he’d agree is a good one (and also one prone to being heard in places like elevators.) i don’t believe they tour anymore; and even if they did, i would probably skip a show since i read once that the two, both members of the  Bahá’í faith, talk about their faith after shows. (i have nothing against anyone’s faith; but i don’t want to get lectured after a show about anything. not judaism, not christianity, not the flying spaghetti monster. nada.)

but this song conjures up powerful images of a hot july evening; of the scent of  jasmine floathing in the air; and the arms that reach out to hold me in the evening when the day is through. it is simply beautiful.

so i’ll shut my mouth and say no more. that, in and of itself, is perhaps the best gift i can give to my brother.

i’m sure he’d agree.

guilty pleasure monday: ain’t wasting time no more (allman brothers)

what’s a nice jewish girl like me doing with a bunch of rednecks? getting inspiration, that’s what.

i think i had a mid-life crisis when i was 28. (i know, i know. i had it a lot earlier than i was supposed to. i’m an overachiever.) all my life, i had worked toward a goal, a goal which turned out to be someone else’s goal for me. i’d become a lawyer, i’d go into politics, i’d help to save the world.

after a month in a law school where people stole the books you needed to do your work, i decided that law school was really not for me. i had argued endlessly with the torts professor; and while i’m sure he knew his stuff cold and i was misguided, in my little bear brain, i knew that if what he was saying was correct, i didn’t want to be a part of it. i quit (and it became perhaps the most expensive lesson of my life), worked awhile, and earned a fellowship to graduate school. i loved my graduate school experience, especially the fact that my school’s mission was to prepare us not for a life of contemplating our respective navels but rather to get tools to actually make change in the real world.

however, washington probably hardly qualifies as the real world.

after stints in government relations, which is the non profit way of saying lobbyist, i realized that i didn’t care for the people who did the work i was doing; further, i didn’t want to become one of them. (case in point: one asked me where i went to school. when i told her rutgers, she literally turned away from me as if  i had poisoned the air by my very being. sorry honey, i wanted to say to her back, but not all of us have a keen desire to carry student loans into the next millenium. especially since i was still carrying that one loan for my ill-fated law career.)

so i went into the world of government work.

i loved the people i met in government work. my original boss is still my mentor; he still considers me one of his daughters (along with the other two ladies with whom i started.) i would be honored to be a government employee again in my career. however, at 28, i realized that i was not even close to a life i had envisioned. (i was going to already be in congress by 28, doncha know.) i was not satisfied, and i didn’t even know what the hell i wanted.

You don’t need no gypsy to tell you why
You can’t let one precious day slip by
Look inside yourself
And if you don’t see what you want
Maybe sometimes then you don’t

this was around the time i started listening to the allman brothers album eat a peach. i was quite sure i would one day have a daughter i would name after the song melissa; and i listened incessantly to ain’t wasting time no more as if it were a call to action. sometimes, i would listen to it on my little walkman on my way to work and wonder what the hell the song was saying to me. was there a message in there somewhere? (duh.)

there was. and one day, i got off my ass and took action. i saw a career counselor who told me i was in the wrong line of work in terms of what i actually enjoy doing: you need to be doing more creative work.

and that’s just what i ended up doing.

We’ll raise our children
In the peaceful way we can
It’s up to you and me brother
To try and try again
Well, hear us now, we ain’t wastin’ time no more
‘Cause time goes by like hurricanes
Runnin’ after subway trains
Don’t forget the pouring rain