April 25, 2021
Before finishing up The Ballad of Weaves #53, I'll just point out that I listened to the album Transmissions From the Satellite Heart by The Flaming Lips for the first time in awhile today. The semi-novelty hit from that record "She Don't Use Jelly" is not even in the top half of good songs from the album. I'm not such a fan of Mr. Coyne or the Lips anymore, but for awhile they were great.
The Ballad of Weaves #53: Part 4: Denouement
Someone I know would very vehemently complain that that problem with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was that the climax was the pod race scene, which is only the halfway part of the movie which threw off the whole emotional arc of the movie. Well, there's a lot about that movie you could choose to complain about, but I'm sort of a Phantom Menace apologist. It's the best of the prequels. That's not saying much. It's still got some very cringe-y parts, but at least I also remember it being sort of fun in parts. What am I talking about? This is not the hill to die on - I haven't watching any of the prequels since seeing the 3rd one in the theater - and I would consider myself a Star Wars fan.
(Also, lets never forget what happened to Ahmed Best. If you thought Kelly Marie Tran had it bad, imagine how much worse it would have been for Best if social media had existed in 1999. It actually lifts my spirits a bit every time a Gungan sneaks into a Star Wars shot because don't let the haters win, you know?)
The point being, the TL;DR version (is there any other version) of "The Ballad of Weaves" is:
- I used to be really into music, but enthusiasm has fades with age.
- I bought a digital copy of a song by a small indie group in an attempt to rage against the dying of the light.
- Occasionally, something would remind me of this song, but I could not remember the band or the song title.
- When Google Play Music shut down, I thought I had lost access to the song forever because I had forgotten to down a copy from the cloud and had no way to recover the library.
- I had, in fact, transferred my library to YouTube music, which is a terrible product - at least if your goal is to manage and listen to your own music library.
- After spending too much time combing through YouTube music (how hard can it be to make a product were you can scroll to 'W'?), I finally found the song. The band was Weaves and the song was #53.
That last bullet point is the climax of the story, so this entry is like the second half of Phantom Menace, i.e. of debatable merit. The denouement starts with the song being trapped in the cloud. How can I listen to it in foobar2000 with the rest of my music collection? How do I put it in playlists with songs from the rest of music collection? On principle, I'm not rebuying it. I realize that it's all just easily replicated 1's and 0's but I want the version that's mine. That I claim some ownership of and therefore have a strange attachment to. Is it possible? Or is it lost forever? You cannot download songs from YouTube music. Even songs you've uploaded yourself. All you can do is stream from the cloud with paying extra subscription money to avoid commercials.
But there is this service called Google Takeout. Basically, if you want to freak yourself out, you can use it to find out all the ways Google tracks you across all their products. Is Google better or worse than Facebook? I don't know, but I don't post this this blog on Facebook. It can also be used to download anycontent you've uploaded to a Google product, videos to YouTube, images to Photos/Picasa, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I can requested a download of my YouTube and Google Play Music data through Google Takeout. Silly me, I thought it would take an hour or two to prepare. Well, after three days of diligently combing through it's servers, where, apparently, no one ever really dies, Google Takeout tells me around 200 GB of compressed archives spread across 5 files are ready for download. After a couple more hours of downloading and decompressing, I'm finally able to get to the the sweet juice in the middle of this metaphorical coconut. Archive 1, nothing. Archive 2, nothing. Archive 3, nothing. Was it all in vain? A search of the extracted contents of archive 4 shows an mp3 containing the string "weaves" in the filename. Hallelujah! 4 minutes of 320 kbps indie pop (including embedded album art!) is finally mine to do with as I please.
Thus ends a long and maybe pointless story. I know I'm gonna cry about you again.
Next week, I'm probably doing Australian animals. On to the Power Rankings!
The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
We've got Teichner, we've got Cowan, we've got Smith, we've got Rocca, we've got Pogue, we've got Axelrod. In other words, almost all the heavy hitters came out for this week's episode. With such a stacked lineup, the to top spot naturally goes to...
Hartman segments are not usually strongly considered for the top spot, so what makes this week's dose of feel-goodery a little different than usual? He did a story about my hometown. OK, not exactly my hometown, but one Northern Kentucky suburb is pretty indistinguishable from the next. I guess three are named after forts thanks to the Civil War (or fend off river pirates) so that's something.
Cincinnati suburbs are so indistinguishable...
(How indistinguishable are they?)
Cincinnati suburbs are so indistinguishable that if you cool them to near 0 Kelvin, they'll all collapse to the same wavefunction.
(Heh, just some quantum mechanics humor... anyone? anyone?)
Walker Smallwood, who was not nicknamed Bootsie as a child, and I have some things in common.
- We both grew up in Northern Kentucky. (It's not called South Cincinnati as some obscure movie would have you believe.)
- We both played high school baseball in the same league... separated by 20 years.
- We both had cancer. Him in high school, which interrupted his ability to play baseball. Me as a grad student long after my baseball career ended.
- We both threw a no hitter in high school. Mine came when I played on the Freshman team, which hardly counts. Walker did it for his varsity team. After recovering from cancer treatments that left him unable to play contact sports.
Cancer-wise, Walker had a much rougher go it than I, but as I've mentioned before, it's probably not a healthy thing to focus on who had what and turn cancer stories into a pissing contest over who suffered more. Baseball-wise, Walker looks tall, lanky pitcher with a mid 80's fastball that might have made him a prospect at a low D-I or D-II college. Truthfully, I find the ratio of parents who push their kids along in sports insisting that they are a sure thing to get a college scholarship troublesome. For most, it's a longshot.
When I first saw the story in the local newspaper, the part-time cynic residing within me first checked to see what team Walker threw the no hitter against. Not that anyone should care, but it did come against one of the weakest teams in the region. Walker can't not be aware of this, that the whole thing was setup for him to have an easy go of it. To have his first and last varsity appearance be a success. Maybe the home plate umpire was calling a generous strike zone - this isn't uncommon in high school baseball. Still he was only ever meant to throw more than an inning. Does the fact that Walker's accomplishment may have come against the a weak team mean anything?
Everyone in Cincinnati (and some parts beyond) is familiar with the story of Lauren Hill. Not that Lauryn Hill. This Lauren was an outstanding high school athlete who tragically died at a young age from brain cancer. A lot of ink and airtime was devoted to her story, locally and nationally. Her story got to me. It got to everyone. How could it not. But with me the story hit me with just an added dash of survivors guilt, because, you know, brain cancer.
Anyway, the point is that no one said, "They weren't even playing defense," when she scored a layup in her one and only collegiate appearance because, my goodness, would that miss the point entirely.
You've probably heard the story about the dancing bear in the Russian circus. Somebody comes to see the circus and complains that bear doesn't dance very well. The response is that the trick is just that the bear dances at all - is that not enough? Sometimes it's a miracle that someone or something simply exists and survives. Hunter went out there flipping fastballs in the low to mid 80's. His no-hitter was not just the bear learning to dance, but the bear learning to waltz.
Godspeed in your future endeavors, Walker.
My no hitter? I never really wanted to mention to anyone that I threw a no hitter. I
wasn't actually a good pitcher and it came against the worst team in the
league. It was kind of a fluke. It felt like undeserved credit.
There are two kinds of Teichner segments. There is the Teichner recap segment and then there is the rest which encompasses food, art, literature, etc. I am excited any time there is a Teichner segment, but the excitement comes down by a half step any time it ends up being a recap segment. Make no mistake, Sunday Morning would be hard pressed to turn to someone else with more gravitas to step back, take stock of events and write the history of the present. Unless its politics in which case you let John Dickerson do it.
And the history of the present this week is the guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial. Martha and her three background Emmy interview some academics and authors to provide "the big picture". I remember 11 months ago, killing time by checking the news on the BBC's website and there was short blurb about a Minnesota police officer being filmed killing a black man. The immediate, understated thought I had was, "This isn't good." Without any further context, I foresaw some of the protests and knew there would be some rioting. Cincinnati went threw this when I was in high school. Clean. Rinse. Repeat. There was no conviction that time. Cell phone cameras did not exist 20 years ago.
Full disclosure, I never watched the full video of George Floyd dying. I don't have the constitution to watch the life drain out of another human. I feel like it sucks a little of your soul away to watch something like that. The tragedy of racial inequality is that some people don't have the option to turn away from scenes like that. They are omnipresent. And we wonder why there is anger. While the parts of the video I saw on TV made my blood boil, I didn't march or protest. I am not activist, but maybe I need to be. This may be my big shortcoming. I don't know what I'm willing to fight for, if anything.
I wonder what my reaction would have been if I had been a bystander. Would I have felt the anger I felt watching clips of the video or would I have been scared and avoided the situation? Would I have helplessly pleaded with the police to try and save George Floyd? Would I have done more than that or less than that? I honestly don't know and I likely never will. That is the privileged life I am allowed to have.
Maybe it is because of that privilege that I was not surprised by a guilty verdict. When deliberations only took a day, there was no doubt it would be guilty. We all saw what we saw as the prosecution pointed out over and over. Did the trial need to be 2 weeks long? The only question was did they opt for a lesser count.
I won't begrudge people who celebrated the verdict. But there is a still a looming sadness to it all. I'm a proponent of the idea of restorative justice. I don't know what justice looks like to George Floyd's family, but I hope they will feel like that gotten something close to it. It may sound strange, but I'd also hope they could find a way to forgive Chauvin. What he did was awful, but carrying around bitterness for the rest of your life can't be healthy. I'd also like to hope that Derek Chauvin is not an irredeemable person. He's been branded a murderer for life. Although truth be told, the trial is largely irrelevant in that respect. A segment of the population was always going to call him a murderer. And another segment never will because he was a cop. There is no doubt that he killed George Floyd. I don't know what was going through his head while it was happening, if that even matters. I don't know think he intended to kill George Floyd. I suspect something snapped in him during the interaction, if it did not snap well before then, and he just did not see George Floyd as a person.
There is a lot more I could cover, but I'm sure you can read hundreds of thousands if not millions of think pieces about the death of George Floyd out there. I just want to end by saying I wish it was easier to take responsibility and say I'm sorry. I wish Derek Chauvin could say he's sorry for what he did. To take somebody's life and act as if you were in the right, I cannot comprehend. I don't know that I could live with myself if I were responsible for someone dying. I've never heard an accused cop or an FOP president every say they're sorry for mistakes police have made. (I realize that "mistake" is a very generous way of describing what happened to George Floyd.) As a white person, this is what gets to me. They say policing is a hard job (granted) and that worrying about making a mistake can cost lives - I am deeply saddened when I see a news story about a police officer dying in the line duty. But when the mistakes cost people their lives, let's not wonder why some people feel angry that their lives are seen as being worth less.
3) Mo Rocca
Let's shake off the drama an introspection with a very Mo Rocca segment about Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn the tumbler made his way into movies in the 1950's dancing with feats of acrobatics like dancing on shovels. Even though Russ Tamblyn is more an acrobat than a tumbler, the clips from old movies remind me of watching old movies like West Side Story (in which Tamblyn starred) and Singing In the Rain that contained legitimate dance showcases. Or even a more modern take like Chicago. The John Wick movies are great and people talk about the amazing fight choreography involved, but lets also hear it for movies with actual choreography. They can equal the spectacle of an Marvel movie.
The most Mo part of this very Mo segment was Mo and Russ reading lines from the cult classic High School Confidential, in which Russ starred. Why do I feel like this was the fulfillment of a longtime dream for Mo?
Other items of note:
Russ is the father of actress Amber Tamblyn, who for some reason I sometimes confuse with Thora Birch, making me think she's done more movies than she actually has. That or CBS used to run a lot of adds for Joan of Arcadia back in the day. I mean a lot.
Also, after moving away from acting, Russ pursued the visual arts, essentially living as a hippie in Topanga Canyon. Strangely enough, I was listening to the Lana Del Rey song "The Next Best American Record" which references Topanga, so I recently discovered Topanga is a place and not a person. You see, to everyone of my generation not from Southern California, Topanga is Danielle Fishel's character from Boy Meets World. I couldn't name another actor or character from that show, because, well, her name was Topanga. If I remember correctly Boy Meets World was the last successful show to come out of ABC's TGIF lineup. The TGIF rankings go Perferct Strangers, Family Matters, then everything else. I guess Boy Meets World was a legit #3, but honestly I didn't watch it that often. I was growing out of TGIF as Boy Meets World got started. But getting back to the Lana Del Rey song, the lyric "Topanga's hot tonight‚ I'm taking off my bathing suit" takes on a completely different meaning when you lack the context of Southern California geography.
4) Lee Cowan
I did not previously know that Merry Clayton spelled her Merry and not Mary. I think that is delightful. It suits her well. As someone who purports to like music, it's damn near unforgivable that I've never gotten around to watching 20 Feet From Stardom. If you want to know about all the great music that Merry Clayton had a hand in, well, watch the documentary or Google. You probably know the story of her getting called at 3 AM to provide vocals for "Gimme Shelter" while she was pregnant and suffering through a miscarriage shortly thereafter. I think I've only heard it every time someone talks about give me shelter. It's such an astounding performance, but a profoundly sad story.
The story focuses on Merry's return to recording gospel music after having both her legs amputated after suffering injuries in a car accident shortly after 20 Feet From Stardom elevated her profile 8 years ago. You usually don't think of the cinematography of an interview, but there is a brilliant shot where Lee and Ms. Clayton are shot from overhead so you can see a setup of the interview and get a full picture of Merry in her mobility chair, legs conspicuously absent.
She's been through a lot. She's still got a voice. She's upbeat and gives thanks to God for all that she has. Merry Clayton is aptly named. Which makes her yelling "Rape! Murder!" on "Gimme Shelter" all the more jarring.
5) South Dakota Prairie Chickens
I didn't know that wild prairie chickens were a thing. But since the nature segment was about birds again, it is, of course, brought to you by Audubon Florida.
Also, we either have too many states or too few states. If you want to expand, break up Texas and California and give Washington D.C. statehood. To contract, combine Vermont and New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island, North and South Dakota, as well as Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Or expand a little there and contract a little here. Just a modest proposal.
6) Jane Pauley
We at the power rankings love our host and the occasional neck scarf. Disappointingly, in recent memory, her roll has been strictly confined to introduction. The last time she's done more than introduce segments as host was to note the passing of Hank Aaron. It's been awhile since she's contributed her own segment, but I understand that is a Haley's comet of Sunday Morning occurrences.
I know I said I'd drop it, but reviving the Sunday Almanac would be a great way to give Jane a little bit of extra screen (voice?) time. I don't know if there's some COVID limitation preventing it or what. Give the people what they want!
7) Jim Axelrod
Seventh place in the POWER RANKINGS always seems to shake out and go to someone who I really think should be ranked higher, but due to the machinations of the committee always seems to find their seeding slide too low. Axelrod talks to journalist Jim Campbell, who has a book out about Bernie Madoff. A man with Trumpian levels of narcissism. If you ever wondered why Trump bothered to talk to Bob Woodward, this story explains. The narcissist believes their own lies because that's what they use to construct their universe. So naturally, it is logical that others will believe them once they lay out all the facts. I'm not even sure you can call it hubris, which implies that you think you will get away with something. The narcissist could never believe they've done anything wrong in the first place.
The thing is that people suspected/knew what Madoff was up to as early as 1999, but his downfall did not come until the end of 2008 when he became a handcuffed avatar for the avarice that had led to the Great Recession. Nobody wanted to pay attention because rich people were getting richer until they weren't. There were probably a lot of other people who deserved it, but none moreso than Bernie.
The fact that Madoff's sons turned him in and he outlived them both (one committed suicide, and the other died from cancer) is the devastating kicker to it all.
8) Tracy Smith
Tracy's big scoop - people will go back to the movies as we emerge from the pandemic.
I do like going to the movies. One of the coolest experiences in recent memory was going to see A Quiet Place and having everyone in the theater keep silent throughout. The lady sitting next to me even tried to chew her popcorn silently so as not to disturb the atmosphere of the taut film. I don't know if Kransinski's sequel will be as good (Honestly, how can it?), but it was the right call to wait until theaters reopened because watching streaming a moving like that alone misses half the point. Some things were meant to be communal. But man is the price tag steep these days. Then again, what else have we been spending money on in the past year.
I also kind of miss having friends to talk movies with. I still feel the need to hash out the ending of Promising Young Woman. If you're up for it, hit me on in the comments or on Twitter. Like and subscribe.
9) David Pogue
Five Weeks ago, Pogue did a story on Masterclass, which I snarkily called Cameo meets a TED Talk. The inevitability on a future story on Cameo should have been apparent from the moment I typed it. It hits all the same beats Masterclass story - namely finding a way to monetize celebrity during the pandemic. However, I wasn't really expecting it to be as Kenny G-centric as it ended up being. Coincidentally, earlier today was the first time I had thought about the world's foremost smooth jazz soprano saxophonist in a long time. Prior to watching Sunday Morning, I had been reading Joe Posnanski's book about Buck O'Neil, The Soul of Baseball. There is a line in it about smooth jazz being an oxymoron.
Also, Gilbert Gottfried always makes me laugh. He does the bluest of blue comedy, but whether it's a PG-13 reading of dirty limericks on Letterman, or a hard R best-ever rendition of The Aristocrats, or an appearance on Last Week tonight, I just have to hear his voice to start laughing. While he does have a funny voice, he backs it up with solid jokes.
Two weeks in a row for Pogue - he's starting another streak.
10) Charles M. Blow / Jon Wertheim / (tie)
I was going to going to make Jon Wertheim an honorary Sunday Morning correspondent because of his 60 Minutes segment on Prince. I may just be saying this as a big Prince fan and a big Sunday Morning fan, but this spiritually felt more like a Sunday Morning piece than a 60 Minutes piece. And also because as one of America's preeminent sportswriters, it's somewhat amazing that his beat is tennis, my favorite sport and a sport which has little traction in America. I always keep an eye on what Wertheim is up to. I would wholeheartedly support him sliding into Sunday Morning now and again.
However, even though I'm not necessary up for revisiting George Floyd and a racism again, I cannot leave off Curtis M. Blow. It's probably shameful that I don't know the story of Emmett Till better than I do. I had never actually seen the pictures his body before. It may have happened 30 years before I was born, but that image juxtaposed with the photograph of the murderers and their wives smiling stirred up a lot of anger. I didn't look into it, but I wonder if any of their descendants ever expressed the remorse that they did not. The two facile counterarguments against reparations are 1) I'm not racist and 2) it was a long time ago so all the people who were responsible are dead. 1) Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to assign complicity. 2) It really really has not been so long. I suspect, for many, it's a resentment that some people would get money while they wouldn't. It's a very "All lives matter" argument.
Geh. I really didn't want to end on a downer. Luckily I totally forgot about the Jon Voigt segment until now, so I'm lazily tacking it on. I maybe had something to say about Voigt being a pro-Trump and tying it to Catholicism or something, but really all you need to know, is that Ben got it right. He remembered to use the clip:
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