Remembering Patsy Cline on the 50th Anniversary of her Passing

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Ms. Patsy Cline.

Happy Birthday, KareBear

Today is my mother's birthday.

In her honor, here is Neil Diamond singing "America".  I welcome you to clap along slightly off beat with the song, knowing that, wherever she is, The KareBear will be doing the same.



and, because, it's her b-day, let us all enjoy the 1973 Hawaii performance of "Suspicious Minds" by King Elvis.



Dang, yo. There is nobody else like The King, is there?

Happy birthday, Ma!  We love you.

For Pope Benedict as he departs office

Apparently, in 2005, I welcomed Pope Benedict XVI to the job with this post...

So, so much has changed since 2005.

We lost Jackson, YouTube became a thing you could embed....

As Pope Ben leaves office, let's hear it one more time...



That's right, I've been blogging longer than a Pope's tenure in office.

Happy Birthday, Johnny Cash

Today would have been the 81st birthday of Johnny Cash.

On behalf of all tall people, if you don't like standing behind us at concerts: tough luck

I saw this comic strip thing today, and it's actually very good.  It's about the annoying things people do at concerts (ie: why I quit paying money to go to shows in my late 30's).

I'd point to number 5, "The Sun Blocking Giant" and I thought I'd clear something up.

The world was built for smaller people.  Most of you are those smaller people, and I appreciate that most of you attend shows and expect to basically be within a certain height range.  I know you think that there's some great advantage to being a bit taller, but in a world that mostly relies on your ability to be a jerk in a board room or your ability to manage java code to get ahead, being bred for being the lynchpin in a goon squad of some barbarian hoard doesn't really pay off so much.

I was 6'3" by the ninth grade, and somehow put on two more inches by the end of my freshman year of college.  I didn't measure myself in between.  Tall people don't really know nor really care about how tall they are.

Since I was a kid, I also like(d) live music and attending shows.  I live in Austin.  It's sort of a thing here.

The average bar in Austin that would host a show (let's say, Liberty Lunch or La Zona Rosa) had three zones:

1.  The area right by the stage with the cow-eyed fans pressing up against the stage because that made them bigger fans and let them sing the lyrics right back at the singer's face.

2.  The mid-range where most everyone else stood with elbow room enough to hold a beer and still lift it to their face without putting out someone else's eye.

3.  The place in the back where, for reasons that baffled me, people would huddle and shout over the music, like it was a huge inconvenience that there were all these speakers blaring music when they'd come out to this music venue for a quiet night of conversation.  Also, they're usually trashed.

The cartoon bemoans:

Taking the Night Off - The League is Your Valentine's Evening Co-Pilot

It's Valentine's Day. I had a hell of a day, and I'm not social media-ing at all tonight.

That doesn't mean I can't provide all you good people with the finest in Valentine's Day music, sure to brew up some romance.

Ladies and gentleman, the Reverend Al Green.



Mr Stevie Wonder



Ms. Minnie Riperton



and the killer app of romantic musicians:  Sade





and, more Sade

Here's a Random Thing I Did: Glenn Miller Orchestra in Austin

Lately a coffeehouse not so far from my house expanded into the next retail space over and opened the Strange Brew Lounge.  Jason pointed out the new venue to me, and a few weeks back I was driving to work and noticed they claimed they had the Glenn Miller Orchestra coming.

You might find yourself saying: "But, The League, Glenn Miller died in 1944!"
Indeed he did.

and thus, I payed to see an empty stage

But the orchestra played on!

The Glenn Miller Orchestra still plays around the country, with an all new line-up that probably refreshes quite frequently as they're on the road 48 weeks per year.

My pal Julia said she was interested, so we got us a pair of tickets, and we attended the 6:00 PM show.  (Seriously, they started promptly at 6:00.  It was crazy town.).

The venue is pretty great.  It's really intended for the singer/ songwriter scene Austin cultivates, but apparently the uncle of the owners of Strange Brew was once did arrangements for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and so they decided to take a risk and book the band.

The 2012 Not-a-List Rundown

author's note:  2012 is a year I have been looking to put behind me for quite a while for any number of reasons.  Obviously the events in my personal life marked a very sad end to the year for us at our house.  Perhaps we should declare 2012 Annus Horribilis and move on.

With recent events weighing so heavily on me right now (and with this post started a long, long time ago), I'm going to stick to pop culture and the original, intended tone of the post - and this blog - and take a look back instead at...  yeah, I guess comics and whatnot.

here we go.

The 2012 Not-a-List Rundown

My Totem for Everything About my Pop Culture Hobbies in 2012

My relationship fundamentally changed with my hobbies and past-times, and superhero comics have begun to dip below the horizon to the same place Star Wars went circa 2002.  Because of travelling and the fact I was sick a lot this year, I also didn't really make it out to the movies very often.

Halloween! "Frankenstein" and Edgar Winter!

If you finish listening to this all the way through, get yourself some Halloween candy as a reward.

Happy Halloween! Monster Mash!

You are now legally allowed to play this song until midnight, and then it needs to go back in the vault for another year.

So, Friday Marshall and I went to see David Byrne and St. Vincent

It is not a secret that I am a fan of the work of musician/ artist David Byrne.  I think I've written before about becoming a Talking Heads fan, and I have a hard time believing that over the years I haven't mentioned that I have avidly followed Byrne's career since the band dissolved and continue to be a fan.

I missed Byrne when he came through and played ACL Fest about two years ago with Brian Eno, but I've seen Byrne play a few times over the years, and I have a couple of concerts on DVD.  The man puts on a good show (ie: we recommend).

However, I knew far less about St. Vincent other than that in 2009, when I posted on Amanda Palmer, Marshall suggested I check her out.  Unfortunately, when I attempted to learn more about St. Vincent, I accidentally bought an album by someone else who also goes by the name of St. Vincent, and I never circled back to buying the St. Vincent I intended to listen to in the first place.

Opera Watch: Götterdämmerung - We Wrap It Up with Opera #4

People, let me start at the end and the advice I have for you:

If you see some gold at the bottom of The Rhine, just leave it.

Okay.

more or less how Jamie sends me off to work on Mondays

We broke up the fourth and final of The Ring Cycle Operas up into three separate viewings, one per act, as the opera stretched over roughly five hours of TV time. Götterdämmerung (in Ingles, The Twilight of the Gods) catches us up with our hero, Siegfried and his beloved bride, the fallen Brünnhilde as they make pronouncements of eternal love to one another. What we know, that they did not see in the previous scene, was that The Norns (basically, The Fates) have foreseen the end of The Gods and bad times for everyone associated.

Opera Watch: Siegfried from the Met (2011)

Again, I know absolutely nothing about opera, Germans, Norse/ Germanic mythology, etc...

But we did make it through four hours of Siegfried, the third in the four opera cycle by our good friend Wagner.

And, boy howdy, does a lot happen in this thing.

Siegfried is the child of the lovers/ twin siblings (I KNOW) from Die Walküre, the preceding episode.   He has grown to manhood under the watchful eye of Mime, the brother of the Nibelung, Alberich, from Das Rheingold. Our hero is both preternaturally brave and oddly unworldly, having had grown up in the woods among bears and wolves.

Singing AND Dragon Slaying!

I'll leave it to you to Google the plot, but in this installment the use of the rotating arms of the set and integrated visuals reached a new level of sophistication, with interactive digital leaves, a singing, 3D bird and imaginative use of the shifting set.

Amanda Palmer at Stubb's BBQ in Austin, Texas

Wednesday evening I hit Stubb's BBQ here in sunny Austin, Texas with Jason's finance, Amy, to see Amanda Palmer and The Grand Theft Orchestra.

Much has been made of Palmer in recent months as she released yet another album not just independent of any label, but by asking her fanbase for about $100,000 via Kickstarter and came up with $1.2 million.  As Palmer mounted her tour, her usual routine of recruiting local talent to help out in what's always a pretty raucous stage show, was met with a sudden and vociferous bit of controversy.  Apparently a lot of musicians who were in no way involved got mad that Palmer was asking for volunteers, and, anyway...  it got ugly.

Keep in mind, Palmer is far from the only artist who has folks sit in, includes local marching bands, choirs, whatever...  But because these were horn and string musicians, somehow it became a big deal.  Anyhow, it all ends happily with Palmer shuffling her budget, not doing a music video or something, and coughing up cash so people would get the @#$% over it.

I tend to think of rock and roll as having far less whining associated than what folks were tossing Palmer's way, and as many people I personally know (this is Austin) who play for free all the time, I couldn't really wrap my head around it.  It's a rock and roll show, and, no, you're not going to convince me otherwise when it comes to Palmer somehow undermining the payment of musicians when she's inviting collaboration with locals.  You psycho.

By the way, while you're getting mad at Amanda Palmer, you can download the new album for whatever you can or feel like paying.  Here you go.

Fast forward to today, and Palmer's album, Theater is Evil, has debuted on the Billboard top 200 at position #10.  Not bad for a record by an artist that has no TV coverage, no label support and has never had it's featured artist on American Idol.

You'll have to forgive me re: the pictures.  I was using my iPhone.  I'm a lousy photographer to begin with, and the stage lighting and the limitations of the iPhone's digital zoom capability were wreaking a bit of havoc. For fun, though, let's pretend this was all intentional and I'm just a really un-self-aware but hilariously lousy artist.

Opera Watch: The Ring Cycle Parts 1 & 2

Again - I know absolutely nothing about opera.  Nothing.  I'm also not particularly up on my Germanic/ Norse mythology, my Wagner, or basically anything to do with what I've committed upwards of 18 hours to watching.  And, you know...  it's nice to try something outside of my 21st Century comfort zone, especially when I can do it from the comfort of my living room using the power of DVR, HD TV and state-of-the-art, semi-avante-garde (by opera standards) production.

Musically, the show is familiar in part because it's been endlessly repurposed over the 20th century for cartoons, movies, commercials and television.  Most famous is the "Ride of the Valkyries" theme from the second opera in the cycle, which everyone knows at least in part because of the helicopter scene in Coppola's Apocalypse, Now.  Hell, this cycle of operas provides the reason behind the common imagery of the zaftig broad in the viking helmet with a spear belting out the high notes.

@#$% is gettin' real in Valkyrie town

The production shown on PBS last week was not the one recommended to me a few months back.  That was the 1992 production, also recorded at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  While the production made it to DVD and the sound quality is excellent, the video suffers from the limitations of the time and an insistence by the videographers to shoot the opera more or less from an audience member's distant vantage.  I can't comment on the vocal performances knowledgeably, but the actual acting performances in this version are noticeably stronger and assisted by the camera's ability to get in much closer.

Gotter DAMN erung! We're taking a break from blogging.

Y'all, I'm kind of not going to be posting this week.

WHY?

Because Wagner's The Ring Cycle is going to be playing every night this week on PBS.

For some reason this opera keeps crossing my path of late, and I think it's all leading to something, man.

So I am going to take a break from blogging and I am going to get cultured.

Deborah Voigt in the role of Brünnhilde

Hey.  So.  Why not join in?  It's on all week!  It might be a nice break from the usual stuff on TV.

It's got mermaids and trolls and gods and valkyries and dragons and all kinds of crazy stuff.  It's the basis for half the fantasy, comics, sci-fi and bigger-than-life entertainment we enjoy today.

It's going to be a blast!

So, put on your viking helmet, dust off your love of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and we can all rock out to some old fashioned Wagner.

Watch Wagner's Ring Cycle Preview on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Patsy Cline's 80th Birthday

Patsy Cline was born on this day in Virginia in 1932.

Perhaps most famous for her performance of "Crazy" (written by a young Willie Nelson), Patsy's voice and mid-century country stylings are still very much in vogue and end up in more movies, TV shows and commercials than you want to think about.  She's very much a part of the American soundtrack.

She retains a following among Austinites in no small part thanks to the nigh-nightly tribute to Patsy that's done at Austin's own Esther's Follies, a sort of comedy/ variety show that's had the Patsy Cline bit going since it debuted.  Maybe.  I don't know.  Patsy's music seems to fit lazy, hot evenings pretty well, so maybe she's still this popular across the south.

Cline was part of a great era of American Country before "popular" Country music became watered down pop-rock in the 80's and settled there in the 90's when the big money rolled in.  She was a performed at the Grand Ole Opry and a major talent.  Had she not died in a plane crash in 1963, there's really no telling where she would have ended up.  I suspect she would have continued performing for a long, long time.

Happy Birthday, Patsy.

Rave On! It's Buddy Holly's Birthday!

Today in 1936, Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock, Texas.

At some point in 7th grade a Buddy Holly tape found it's way into my possession (I think KareBear gave it to me for Christmas) - and 23 two-and-half-minute songs later, I was a fan.  I still consider Rave On to be one of the best pop songs ever written.

Curiosity Mars Rover is Making Tracks!

Way to go, SCIENCE!!!!

We're making tracks on Mars.

Hello, Mars.  We R on U.

Here for many more pics

Go ahead and ask, David...

35 Years Gone By, Elvis Aron Presley Merged with The Infinite

Eat it, every single other performer who ever fancied they had stage presence

Elvis gone 35 years ago, August the 16th, 1977.

I don't remember the death of Elvis.  I was two.  However, I grew up in a house where my mother played Elvis music on the turntable and hummed Elvis tunes while driving me to soccer practice.  A great gift once received was a bottle of "Elvis White Wine" which nobody ever drank, and eventually it got gross and was tossed away in 2010ish.

Like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or Bogart, Elvis passed into the twilight realm of American Mythology, a demigod who didn't just sizzle in popularity for a short time after his death, but who attained legendary status once his life itself was no longer there to decry what could be and what could be believed.