Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

 Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah.  That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that."   With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning.  And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time.   I understand a lot about this caged and managed river.  Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read.  That's not a genre I usually read. ...

And then we reach 1980.  It's been a decade since they broke up, and as the decade progressed there were more and more opportunities for them to collaborate.  Ringo seemed to be the impetus for a lot of those collaborations including at least 3 songs that would've been released on his Stop And Smell The Roses release had Mark David Chapman not chosen to close off this chapter by murdering John Lennon .   With the exception of the songs from McCartney II, the albums these songs were pulled from were released after Lennon's death ( Somewhere in England  in May, Ringo's Stop And Smell the Roses in October, and Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984).   Lennon was clearly settling into a new happy direction in his life and writing beautiful and personal songs that further highlight the tragedy of his death.  John Lennon had always been the most direct and upfront in his songs, and the songs on Milk and Honey , with about half being Yoko Ono...

 With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars , Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle.  He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.   Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue.  Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on   London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else. I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass."   In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Materi...

Band on the Run was an extremely successful Wings release from Paul McCartney and easily eclipsed Lennon's Mind Games (still a gold record).  Released in December of 1973, Band on the Run took some 4 months before it would take its place as the the number one album and then trade that spot for the next 2 months with John Denver, Chicago, the soundtrack to The Sting, and Gordon Lightfoot before descending from the lofty perch for good that year.  Though when the year end charts were compiled, it popped up as the best selling album of the year.    Sandwiched between Band on the Run and 1975's  Venus and Mars , John Lennon  and George Harrison released Walls and Bridges and Dark Horse respectively.   Both are really good releases and result in Volume 5 not including anything from Paul McCartney ( Band On The Run , was released late in '73, so it pretty much belongs on '74 chronologically), or Ringo Starr. Volume 5-41 Minutes Albums: Walls and Br...

Do you remember 1972-73?  I don't.  I know we were still embroiled in Vietnam.  I was 7-8 years old, which meant when the year started I was living in Amarillo, TX and getting the nickname of "Motormouth" from my 2nd grade teacher. By the Fall we'd relocated to Clarendon, TX where I started 3rd grade with Mrs. Lincoln (don't kinow why I remember her name).   But in Beatles lore, you have John Lennon and Paul McCartney putting out very mediocre if not actually bad releases in Sometime In New York City and Red Rose Speedway respectively while George Harrison and Ringo Starr produced what many people argue is their best work in Living In The Material World and Ringo respectively.  Also though not included on the album Paul McCartney and Wings actually recorded the first James Bond title song to go to number one and the first "rock" James Bond song for a movie by the same name:  "Live and Let Die," which I do include in Volume 3. Volume 3-44 Min...

Everyday Chemistry S o, a friend asked if I'd ever heard  Everyday Chemistry.   I hadn't and dived into the story and read the article posted about it in  Consequence of Sound ,   Basically it's a mashup that the "creator" claims is a released Beatles album from another dimension; a dimension where the Beatles never broke up.  It's worth a listen. But it is not what I am doing. It's a mash-up of an album worth of songs that are mixed together. You'll recognize some of the bits but they aren't really songs in my opinion and certainly wouldn't claim much space on the chart in any dimension while the volumes as I'm constructing them certainly had many songs that historically did just that. What if the Beatles never broke up? The last studio release from the Beatles is the entirely under appreciated Let It Be, which was released in May of 1970. Prior to that John Lennon had 3 different releases: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Unfini...

 So here's the game: Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically by "The White Album," they were really just a brand.  Each member was working on their own songs, sometimes even recording all the parts (I'm looking at you Paul), but often just asking another band member to come in and play the guitar parts (for example). It made for a less cohesive album than "Abbey Road" or "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," but it still made for a really great album (some people actually think it's the best).   The problem, as I see it, is that their solo work (post break-up) is just too much of one voice.  So what if the Beatles never broke?  What if they continued to work but in the fashion that produced "The Beatles" aka "The White Album?" What would that look like?  Below is a table that roughly groups their solo releases by year.  Some years they produced multiple albums, and some years one of them didn't produce any albu...

Father and Son Another gray hair springs up on my head: a dandelion in a suburban lawn. I’m getting old. I now strategize how I am going to pull myself off the floor, which result in pushing, but not too hard, cause then my bum left wrist will act up, sending pain messages: "This is a test of the Emergency Alert System. Sometime in the distant past you fucked up your wrist. We don't know why, but it hurts so don't put much pressure on it. This is only a test." Oh, my, I’m getting old. Taking a shit is now a sort of study session, where two hours later I reappear after finishing the latest double issue of Rolling Stone . I'm debating moving a book shelf into the bathroom, so I'm never forced to abort because I finished what was at hand. Yet, I'm peeing every 20 minutes as if my prostate has swelled and now presses up against my bladder like dancing with a drunk cowboy at a Country & Western Bar. Oh, my God! I'm getti...

The Proximity Detector I. For the last year, my smart phone has a dumb, if not annoying, malfunction. The malfunctioning part darkens the phone while the phone is next to my ear But doesn’t lighten it when I pull it away to hang up, access the speaker, or use the keypad. It’s broken. The “proximity detector” is broken. I didn’t even know that was thing when I started researching this problem, And found that my particular brand seemed prone to this malfunction. Oh well, I thought, as I researched work arounds. I can’t hang up, so one workaround was to leave messages, which I almost always have to do, that tells people: “Hi, long message, but the proximity detector on my phone is broken so there is probably going to be a bit of silence on the end of this message.   I’ll tell you when I’m officially done leaving the message, so you don’t have listen to a lot of silence.” And then go on with the actual message. Eventually, the voice mail will fig...

Part 1: "Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found." Long complicated read...but from what I gathered  most of it concerns Manafort's relationship with Putin ally, Yanukovitch, and his subsequent joining of the Trump campaign. They indeed helped Clinton, but they, from what I've read, didn't stoop to the same level as the Russians (trolling, bots, compromised accounts, false narratives), rather they just backed the wrong horse. Here's the full article:  Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire Part 2:  : And what happens after that Politico article (see prior post) gets pic...

The Map Let's get this out there. It's cold tonight, but despite that we ventured out into the cold to check out A.R.T. I've been a vocal proponent of the project though critical of how the project was unrolled and implemented. But today was day one. So we decided to hop on the nearest stop (Central & University) and head west to Sharky's Tacos. If you've never been, go. Simply the best fish tacos in town. We waited about 5 minutes and got onto a very crowded bus that happened to be the bus that Councilor Ike Benton and Mayor Keller were riding. We said, "Hi." And rode through downtown without incident, and up to The Bluffs' station (Central & Yucca) on the westside. The tacos were great; the conversation was better. We didn't look at our phones because we'd managed to get caught up while we rode the bus. After dinner, we got back on the bus, not full so we could sit down. We wrote in our seats as the bus zoomed a...

A Burkean Analysis                 Act:     Just off the bridge that crosses I-25, Clear Channel’s electrical billboard cycles through 4 (?) advertisements in span of thirty seconds (?).   Visible from I-25 north bound it is visible to over 1.5 million cars per day .                   Scene:   As parts of the country still struggle to recover from the Great Recession, many scholars are noticing a downward trend in the number of births.   As indicated by this trend birth rates begin declining in 2008.   The billboard has a number of telling details:   a young white girl and a motto:   “Not what to think/How to think” that suggests a very specific audience. Agent:   Eleven years after the Great Recession, exclusive private schools are advertising to keep their enrollment co...