April 11, 2021
Before we get to the CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS, we're going to do this. I give you the oft delayed, yet not forgotten:
The Ballad of Weaves #53: Part 3: The Conclusion (?)
For those who have been following, this all started the week of Grammy's. Part 1 focused on the quaint charm of the small music venue. Part 2 was a reflection on growing old and losing touch. This week's conclusion (?) focuses on music and nostalgia.
Despite not being the indie music aficionado I once was, I still try drop by the local record shop a few times a year and drop some money on some CDs. Vinyl is too cumbersome and I just don't own the equipment for it. I like having a digital copy and CDs are easily rippable into a variety of formats. Because I am crazy, I keep my digital library in triplicate FLAC (lossless!), Ogg Vorbis (open!), and MP3 (compatible!). I like being able too look at the album artwork and whatever else comes in the packaging, whether it is the traditional jewel case or the more modern (and ecofriendly?) sleeve design. As a younger man, before I was able to hear the whole album before buying it at the store, I might put on a newly purchased album and read through the lyrics booklet as the songs I was hearing for the first time played. (But not Radiohead. Thom Yorke intentionally mumbles his lyrics and never divulges his lyrics, demanding that you interpret them yourself, which is how I constructed a concept album narrative around Kid A.)
It's a simple formula. The music of your youth = nostalgia. I'm fascinated at how music can short circuit your memory. Hearing just a few notes can immediately transport you a different time and place and the associated sights, sounds, and smells come flooding back to your mind's eye, ear, and nose. Call me a Luddite, but streaming services cannot replace music ownership to me.
Does the algorithm know that The Go! Team reminds me of Pittsburgh?
Does it know what Killers song was playing when I almost died on a Texas freeway? (Hint: It was a bit on the nose.)
Does it know which Beach House song turns into a transcendental meditation when played on repeat while driving through a Florida swamp?
Does it know what Beastie Boys best accompanies a sunrise while riding in a van to a high school drama competition?
Does it know what Radiohead song always woke me after when I fell asleep listening to OK Computer?
Does it know that I was listening to Wolf Parade on a cold winter's day when I got lost on the way to take the GRE?
Does it know that Prince became one of my favorite artists after I started ironically watching Purple Rain on VH1 only to finish it unironically?
Does it know what Andrew WK song I needed to stay awake while driving on a lonely road from Houston to Austin after midnight?
Does it know how mind-blowing hearing the White Stripes on the radio for the first (or 2nd or 10th...) time was?
As you can probably tell, I could go on and on, but you probably get the point. For whatever reason, music literally becomes the soundtrack of our lives. Actually owning the music is important to me because at some point, it stops being something that is pleasant to listen to and forms an inextricable attachment to some very personal life experience. It's not the money as much as the attachment. If Spotify or Amazon or Google has studied my adolescence and early adult life and knows these things, good-bye, I'll be living in a bunker from now on. Also, I'm anti the whole "if you liked (blank), you may also like (blank)" suggestion thing and not just because of the algorithm. As a peruser of album notes, it was tremendously exciting to find out that bands or artists I enjoyed were interconnected without prior knowledge. "Hey look who wrote/produced/did vocals for this song!?" It was just a little bit of an extra bonus. In the world of the algorithm, nothing even pretends to be a surprise. So, yes, also the algorithm kind of sucks.
We pause here to again ask the question, where is this going?
Sometimes it happens in reverse. You're walking or folding laundry or something, and you start humming something. It's a song you know but you can't quite place it. Some combination of synapses fire and the letter 'W' comes to you. Was the band named Wavves, maybe? No, but for an inexplicable reason, it is definitely a 'W' band. You never bought the album, but you heard it on All Songs Considered and liked it and used some Google Play store credit to buy a digital copy because you like owning things and a digital copy is better than nothing lest you forget that you had ever heard the song in the first place, which is now starting to drive you a little mad like the tapping at the door in The Raven because you can only half remember it and the only thing you can remember is the letter 'W'.
It's an easy enough problem to fix, right? You sort your music collection by band, scroll down to W and it should be there, right? But it's not. It was in the cloud and it got stuck there when Google Play Music shut down!
Enough of this 2nd person nonsense. I'm obviously talking about myself and using it as a cheap ploy to make it seem more experiential for the reader. I had transferred my collection to YouTube, so it should be there. But I kid you not that it took me around an hour to figure out how to sort my collection of uploaded music by artist name. (WinAmp only managed to crack this useful "sorting" feature about 20 years ago.) But because of infinite scrolling on YouTube (evil...), it could literally take me 10 minutes to scroll through all artists in my library until I got to 'W'. Thank god you can also sort "Z to A"...
So after flipping and reversing it, I get to the W's much quicker...
... AND THE 'W' BAND IS WEAVES!!!!!!!!! (CANADIAN!!!!) THE SONG IS #53!!!!!!!!!!
I swear I had been stuck on this for days if not weeks:
So what d'ya think? Was all this worth it? The guitar riff reminds me stellastarr*, but stellastarr* were nothing if not derivative themselves so who knows what the original antecedent is. There's elements of other stuff in there. Name the influence and you win a prize!
This is essentially where the story should end, and where it will end for today.
There will be one last denouement. I have found the song, but do I truly own it? Not in the "can anyone truly own art" sense, but in the "can I listen to it when and where I want" sense. Currently, it is still stuck in the cloud...
To the important stuff:
The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
The week had fewer and longer segments than usual. No art. Mostly news of the day and a celeb interview. So not the most Sunday Morning-y of Sunday Morning episodes. The preview of next week's special episode on travel now that the pandemic seems to be abating looks like it could be the Sunday Morning we've all been waiting for. It also points to needing to pad out this episode a bit. However, we shan't denigrate those who contributed this week by getting ahead of ourselves. I'm just putting it out there because
Form Face the Nation and CBS This Morning host and current 60 Minutes contributor John Dickerson seems like the nicest man on the planet. If I could pass a law, it would be to banish all 24 hour cable news networks. You can either get your political coverage from PBS Newshour, the pets of PBS Newshour, or from John Dickerson. (Lisa Desjardins's cat's name is Rocky.) Aside from the lift I get just from listening to Dickerson speak about our country's political messes in calm measured tones, can we talk about the cover of John Boehner's book?
Total. Baller. Move. I think he's self-aware enough that the cover is intended to be funny, right? If that wine glass were any bigger, I'd be doubting his commitment to Sparkle Motion. Normally, I try not to curse as Sunday Morning is a family show, but Boehner uses some salty language in his book, so I feel it is only appropriate to respond in kind. You've been warned.
I try not to get overly political here, but I don't exactly hide my views. Having said that, Boehner stopped giving any fucks years ago. After the insurrection, he's in negative fucks territory. The GOP owes him fucks. He's gone full scorched earth on them and it could not be more entertaining. He also reads the audiobook. I'm not going to listen to it, but it sounds like he had a few bottles of Cabernet (my particular wine of choice!) while recording it so please sneak in as many excerpts on the news as possible because I can't say I'm not entertained.
Boehner's from my neck of the woods and represented a heavily gerrymandered district in southwest Ohio that somehow manages to loop around Cincinnati and Dayton. (Gerrymandering is a problem everywhere, but especially in Ohio.) He resigned right when I moved back to the area, so I never got a chance to vote for or against him. I probably would have voted against, but Democrats essentially ran a burnt grilled cheese sandwich against him every 2 years, so what's the point. That doesn't mean I don't like him. I disagree with him on positions and Dickerson does gently ding him, and rightly so, for helping to get all the folks he is now lobbing bombs at get elected back in the first place, but I admire that he actually tried to get stuff in congress in age where trying is political suicide and will only cause you to catch shit from both sides.
He's definitely entered drunk uncle territory, but he's the one who mellowed out over time instead of the one who became overtly racist. He is now on the board of a medical cannabis company. Despite opposing legalization of marijuana as a politician, he now concedes it is no more dangerous than alcohol and considering that he seems to drink half to a full bottle of wine a day, who is he to judge? It would seem his opposition was probably only ever due to politics. Disappointing. Have the courage of your convictions man.
This is how it ends:
Dickerson: Have you done any first hand research?
Boehner: Uh no. I'm not... I'm not a cannabis user.
Dickerson: But you're not ruling it out for yourself?
Boehner: Hey, tomorrow's tomorrow. Who knows?
Dickerson: (chuckles)
That's how you grab #1.
Michelle Miller was not on my radar when I started the blog. Today she comes within a stone's throw of the top spot. Her reactions are unmatched on CBS Sunday Morning:
I'm not one to critique fashion. I am genuinely confused as to whether I think her look is brilliant or a step too far. I just know that she's not not trying to be noticed, so bully for her. I set no trends so Corinne 1, Random Blogger 0.
3) Lee Cowan
Jane was off again, so Lee, the Commander Will Riker of CBS Sunday Morning, filled in. Lee didn't have a story to present so last week's theory about who fills got shot down. Lee is obviously 2nd in command at Sunday Morning. I don't know of Teichner is next in the line of succession or if it is just a grab bag of who wants to do it if Lee isn't available.
I gotta say, I'm still a little hurt that Lee abandoned terrestrial broadcast to do the Woody Allen interview for Paramount+. Less because it was an interview of an alleged predator (whose movies I can't enjoying) mostly because it was still branded as CBS Sunday Morning content. I thought we were friends, and now I've got to pay for the OTT service? Those are drug dealer tactics. I kid, but it might be in poor taste considering what comes in the 4-spot.
At some point I'll get Paramount+ for a week or two to watch the Star Trek shows. After all, I did just make a Riker reference. More links to Riker compilation videos on YouTube.
The nominal "48 Hours" correspondent gives us over 13 minutes on the Sackler family this week. I say nominal because she's becoming semi-regular on Sunday Morning. Two weeks ago, there was a commentary on artists, both present and historical, that are problematic in the #MeToo era. And there have been a few others this year. I think that's more than Teichner's been appearing... I wonder if the regulars have all been busy traveling to get stories ready for next week's episode. Not that Erin isn't a regular. It just seems like some people have been on spring break.
Erin tends to the journalism-y side of the show. I have no problem with this. Well, maybe I do. Not with Erin. I just tend to have the following reaction to, uh, actual news sometimes.
It's not the first time this story has been covered by Sunday Morning (a Cowan of course). And the definitive Sackler family story was done on Last Week Tonight, which also has run multiple stories on opioids. It's hard to top Last Week Tonight any time they want to dig their teeth into something. It's also depressing that you can basically run the same opioid story years apart and it's still relevant. Is time a flat circle or a hamster wheel? I think the first time I heard someone joke about snorting OxyContin was in the eighth grade, so basically since the drug first came to exist 25 years ago.
I've been prescribed opioids before. One time was after I had brain surgery. With the headaches, I would take one before going to bed to help fall asleep. After maybe a week of that, someone pointed out that probably wasn't a great idea and I was like, "Ohhh yeaahhh..." So I understand how you can get hooked without quite realizing it. I'm lucky to not have any chronic pain, but I come from a family of bad backs, so fingers crossed on that one. There are other factors that probably make me low risk for addiction - no family history, no extreme stress or poverty, etc. but it can happen to anyone. I know I poked a little fun at Hunter Biden last week. Right or wrongly, it seems more socially acceptable to joke about cocaine, but my hope for any addict is that they can find their way to sobriety.
5) Cherry Blossom Mountain / DMX
Sunday Morning films
a cherry blossom mountain.
A serene ending.
Somehow Sunday Morning was the first place I heard that DMX died. Not that I was a big fan, but it's always sad and a little shocking when someone dies young. I'll always remember him fondly for this:
It was the greatest contribution to holiday hip-hop since Christmas in Hollis. RIP X.
Our man in Britain provides the Sunday Morning obit for Prince Phillip. So Phillips on Phillip. Ha. I'm a bit royaled out after so much coverage of Harry and Meghan. Phillip seemed like an OK bloke, maybe rough around the edges. He lived to be 99 so that's impressive. The highlight? The Queen's first cousin, Margaret Rhodes, called him "the most utterly good looking Viking god." Who am I to disagree? I've never been able to pull of a beard.
I like Mark Whitaker and someday he's going to do a Sunday Morning that really excites me. As an aspiring writer, maybe I should be more inspired by Hemingway way than I am, but all I can think about when Hemingway comes up are his polydactyl cats in Key West. Any cat fancier should check it out. Key West is a pretty cool place in general. I vaguely remember reading The Old Man and the Sea in high school. Chances are I didn't latch on to symbolism at the time. I remember enough of it to give a cursory summary, but it's not really a plot driven book, so who cares. More importantly, it was at the center of the great "The Young Man and the Beach" bit from Arrested Development.
There's also some talk about if/when Hemingway should be canceled and also that he was just kind of a weird dude.
Poll 1: Should I read some Hemingway?
Poll 2: Should I watch the Ken Burns doc? I've seen The Civil War, Baseball, The Vietnam War, and Country Music. I'm not really sure how man 4-20 hour documentaries one person is supposed to watch, much less direct in 1 lifetime.
I'll never dislike a Hartman segment because I'm not a monster. But I don't like camping. Some of my friends might think that makes me a monster, but I've never had a good experience camping. All 3 times I've tried it, it rained. I remember sleeping in a tent in my backyard a few times as a kid, and nothing against 13 year old William Olmstead, but it's not the same thing. Even if you do it for a full year through rain and cold. Sorry. But if he had, then William's parents are the monsters and this is an Erin Moriarty story on 48 Hours, not a Steve Hartman story on Sunday Morning.
9) Leslie Stahl
Leslie Stahl, like Michelle Miller, appears for a second straight week. When I first saw there was going to be a story about Nancy Reagan, I thought, "Oh cool, Mo's doing a story." It combined the two things he loves most. Presidential history and old TV.
Nothing against Stahl and Reagan's problematic war on drugs aside, it was just a different segment than I was expecting when I assumed it was a Mo segment. No funny reactions to quips made by Stahl this week.
10) Martha Teichner
Hacky sports writers like to say that the best ability is availability. Nuts them. Teichner's always in the starting lineup regardless of whether she decides to show up or not. In the metaphorical sports areana that is this CBS Sunday Morning themed blog, we're building a statue of Martha.
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