brainsplotch

Way back on December 22, 2022, I wrote a nostalgic post about becoming a full-blown Jimi Hendrix convert via the 1984 compilation, Kiss the Sky . I lamented jettisoning my cassette of the album decades ago. Well, guess what? I found the comp on CD at my local record shop and, after some wavering and hemming and hawing, I bought it. The icing on the cake is that it's what is known in CD collector geekitude as a "target CD," as in the design of the CD surface resembles a target. I can't tell you how exciting it was to pop that CD in my car's disc player and hear that Hendrix collection for the first time in at least 24 years (probably longer than that). It's not as if Kiss the Sky is that earth-shattering--with the exception of the live "I Don't Live Today," I have all of these songs on other albums--but listening to those songs in that order was like taking the Wayback Machine to 1987, when I was playing the hell out of t...

It's looking increasingly like there will be a "snowpocalypse" starting on December 23 and extending at least until December 24, and this throws older son's travel plans into doubt and uncertainty. I guess we'll just have to see what happens. I hope it's not as bad as predicted, but I'm definitely worried he will fly into Dulles and be stuck there for who knows how long. Today, we had a fire alarm at work. We have fire alarms at least once a month, or so it seems. It's usually caused by a library patron lighting up in the restroom. Our fire alarm is so loud that it could wake the dead. It's so loud that one of these days, one of us will keel over from a heart attack, and then immediately come back to life because the damned fire alarm....you guessed it...wakes the dead.  We all grabbed our coats, phones, keys, and whatever else we wanted to take and snaked our way down the stairwell and outside. There, we waited for the fire department to arrive, p...

 As soon as I get on my laptop, the cat is immediately fascinated with what I'm doing and must rub my face and claw at me. And as soon as I finish that sentence, she jumps down and finds something else to occupy her time.  I also find myself "refereeing disagreements" between the dog and cat(s). The dog becomes very possessive of his little Greenie bones, which he always thinks the cats have designs on stealing. I don't think they give a damn about his Greenies. Still, he insists on barking at them, which they casually dismiss. Sometimes, he will leap off the couch and get in their faces, and their response is a cross between mild annoyance and mystification.  We seem to be at peace for the moment. This morning, we watched the World Cup final between Argentina and France. I really did not care who won. Maybe I was kinda sorta rooting for France? However, seeing as how Argentina had not won the Cup since 1986, I was happy for them. Regardless, it was an incredibly exci...

I can't listen to Jimi Hendrix without thinking about college, which is the time and place when Hendrix's music first entered my musical life.  Of all places, it was at a David Bowie concert in 1987 that I first thought, "hmm, Jimi Hendrix is pretty cool." This was when Bowie's guitarist on that tour, Carlos Alomar, broke into a snippet of "Purple Haze" that was mind-blowingly awesome. In fact, it was the clear highlight of that concert. (I love, love, love David Bowie--and I am grateful that I saw him perform live--but that Glass Spider Tour was subpar). Fast forward a few months into my sophomore year in college. A bunch of us from Ground Floor/Shaw Hall had piled into a car and driven out to the Meijer store in Okemos. I can't remember why, exactly. Some kind of grocery run? a beer run? (Probably a beer/alcohol run, primarily). On the drive to and from, various cassettes were rotating in the car's sound system. On the way back to campus, on Gr...

I am easily led into unexpected directions by whatever podcast I happened to listen to or whatever book I'm reading. But lately, it's really been podcasts that have had the power to sway me in directions involving movies to watch or music to listen to. A few days ago, I listened to an episode of The Classic Rock Album-By-Album podcast that was all about the Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced album. The guest host was Tim Riley, who is a music commentator who has been around for a long time and wrote two books about The Beatles and Bob Dylan that I have enjoyed for decades, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary and Hard Rain: A Bob Dylan Commentary.  I remember haunting the old   Community Newscenter bookstore on Grand River Avenue across from the MSU campus when I was a college student and had little-to-no money. One of the books on the shelf was the hardcover edition of  Tell Me Why. The book was published in 1988, so this would have likely been sometime that yea...