Category Archives: Nostalgia

Shatner puts the “ham” in “Hamlet,” and yet…

I assume you’re already familiar with The Transformed Man. If not (or even if so), read on.

Tonight I did something I don’t do very often… certainly, not often enough. I put my entire iTunes library on shuffle: over 13,000 songs from which the computer will select the evening’s soundtrack. After a few real dogs (seriously, don’t bother listening to the 2002 Yes shit sandwich known as Magnification), it unearthed a track I haven’t listened to in ages, William Shatner’s dramatic reading (with even more dramatic musical accompaniment) of the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet, juxtaposed with “It Was a Very Good Year.”

The reading of Hamlet is as overwrought as it gets — vintage Shatner. And yet, the truth must be told: Shakespeare’s words were never imbued with such clear and resonant meaning in my brain as they are with Captain Kirk’s over-the-top performance. I’m not well-versed in the theater, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the various Shakespeare productions I’ve seen over the years (mostly at the Guthrie back in high school and college), I find the language, while melodically poetic, often bewilderingly oblique in meaning. In other words, it sounds nice, but I just don’t get it. And this was just such a case. “To be or not to be…” etc. It never made much sense to me until I heard The Transformed Man, but suddenly I understood what it really meant. Thanks, Bill!

And now, thanks as well to the limitless wonders of YouTube, you can see a live performance of the piece from The Mike Douglas Show. How friggin’ awesome is that? Well, it could be a little more awesome — the sound is way off in this video clip, and it’s not because he’s lip-syncing. He’s not. And I think the performance on the album is much better. Still, it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than the groovy title cards and stage set, which I vaguely remember from the very earliest days of my youth.

And finally, in case you’re scratching your head over my enthusiasm here, you may want to consider my judgment in entertainment options by the fact that I also enjoy this. And for anyone who is not terrified by it within 10 seconds (in other words, you’re also a Magma fan), I have to ask: do you also think the “Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik” part that starts at 4:46 sounds like some of the incidental music that used to be in the Road Runner cartoons? I’ve always thought that.

Even I have limits though. This Magma-inspired Japanese band goes too far (but I do own one of their albums) and even Christian Vander himself can go too far, especially when he steps out from behind the kit.

P.S. What’s up with the collar?

“Stairway to Heaven”: A Reconsideration

It’s so cliched that it barely even registers anymore. In fact, even though I consider myself a Led Zeppelin fan (I own all of their albums except In Through the Out Door), I have generally spurned “Stairway to Heaven” as decent, but overrated and definitely overplayed (on classic rock radio). So great has been my disdain that I have not actually listened to the song in years, and come to think of it I’ve generally avoided the entire fourth album as a result, tending to prefer Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti instead, and I usually think of “No Quarter” as “Stairway to Heaven” done right.

Well, last week I was at a Joe Satriani concert, and his monster bassist, Stu Hamm, played a familiar snippet of a tune in his crazed, unaccompanied bass solo. I couldn’t place it but my companion identified it as “Going to California.” At that point, I realized I had shunned this album for too long. So anyway, tonight I am sitting here listening to some music on my headphones and I decided, “What the heck, let’s listen to ‘Stairway to Heaven.'” I guess the fourth album has just been on my mind lately. So… yeah. I’m kind of hearing the song with fresh ears for the first time since probably high school, when I actually did hear the song for the first time. And wow, it’s actually a really good song. Great compositional structure; I love how it builds up dynamically from beginning to end. Great guitar playing from Jimmy Page (even if a bit out-of-tune but, come on, how can you possibly sound in-tune when you’re playing along with a recorder trio?), unusually delicate singing from Robert Plant, John Bonham is is usual inimitable self, and John Paul Jones provides excellent bass and keyboard support, as always.

If you haven’t listened to it in a while, give it another chance. I’m glad I did. And now I’m listening to “Going to California.”

Vintage Google

I learned this morning from Daring Fireball that Google has temporarily restored their earliest available index from 2001, allowing you to see what was available back then for your searches.

Kind of cool. But a little depressing for me personally, to see that back then my site was the first result you’d get when searching for John Coltrane. Now it’s 7th, but I suppose I should be glad it’s still on the front page, given my lack of attention to SEO. (Of course, I think SEO is at least 75% snake oil anyway.)

Beep for Breakfast!

A package was waiting for me in the mailbox today. It was from someone I don’t know — at least, someone I don’t think I know (and if I do know you, sorry!) — sent from a city I’ve never visited. I opened it with some trepidation, though the anthrax scare and my own quasi-cyberstalker are distant enough memories that I wasn’t too worried. I assumed it was my Obama car magnet, though I wondered a bit why they’d roll up the magnet to send in a roughly 3×3×8 inch box, instead of just a flat envelope.

I was totally, utterly shocked when I opened it and discovered what was actually inside. It was none other than — well, OK, the surprise has already been ruined by the accompanying photo — a Beep for Breakfast cup, just like the one I remembered my grandfather keeping on the edge of his basement sink, so many years ago!

About three months ago, I put out a call to help me locate just such a cup, but I had mostly put it out of my mind, and certainly never expected one to randomly appear at my doorstep one day!

I’m still a bit perplexed as to how the sender obtained my address. (Well, not too perplexed, because I know how I’d have gone about finding it, and it probably wouldn’t have been terribly difficult.) But I’m glad they did!

To the sender (whose identity I will keep to myself), thanks!

Pure ’80s goodness (what ’80s goodness?)

Despite the fact that it was the decade of my youth, for which I am often nostalgic, I don’t often look back on the ’80s decade itself with a great deal of fondness. Sure, there was Pac-Man, The Breakfast Club, Duran Duran, various other things in popular culture that I liked. But that’s offset with Ronald Reagan (no I do not consider his presidency a positive, and I could catalog the ways if I cared to, but I don’t), hair bands, this version of Pac-Man, hideous fashion (yes, it was a reaction to the ’70s and its own hideousness, but as bad as it was, ’70s fashion never produced the likes of these fashion nightmares), etc. etc.

And yet, thanks once again to the brilliant musical programming of MPR’s The Current, I’ve become drawn to the unabashed nostalgia for that dark decade served up dripping in digital synth excess courtesy of M83‘s latest album, Saturdays = Youth. After contemplating it for weeks, I finally bought the album on Amazon MP3 this morning, and have been listening to it nonstop (currently on my fourth time through).