What the hell, let’s do this again.
I’ve never been happier or more optimistic entering a year than I am today. Happy New Year to all of you, and I hope 2011 brings great things for you and yours.
I’ve been thinking more about the past lately – listening and buying a lot more vinyl and albums from the 1980s as well as some new stuff. Some of this is straight up wish fulfillment – I want to love music today as much as when I was a high school kid, discovering great music for the first time and sharing it with my friends. You get older, and busier, and music can get less personal and become just musical wallpaper. Funny thing is that I spend very little time talking about music with much of anybody, but I still spend a lot of time listening.
When I haunt the record stacks at Doc’s Records, Record Town, Forever Young or (more likely) an estate sale, part of it is a journey of discovery as well as an archeological mission. I’ll fork over money on new vinyl, adding new cuts to the soundtrack of my life, but I’ll also search out old records of the past. There’s the Clash album I passed on buying in high school or the X album I gave to a girlfriend in college and never got back. For some reason, it seems to matter.
Anyway, the more music I listen to, the more it seems I here music that reminds me of something else – the late Sixties and the mid-Eighties seem to still be going strong. As a result, 2010 was kind of a good year for music and a good year for memory. Below are some my favorite albums and songs. A couple probably date from late 2009, but I don’t get wound around the axle about stuff like that. You just gotta roll with it. Also, I lean toward live performance videos vs. official videos when possible. Just a preference.
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I am not an animal lover by nature, and I regard it as something of a character flaw. Were it not for the fact that I am married to a great animal lover with a kind heart, I would have no pets of my own choice. If I hadn’t been the father to a daughter, I certainly would never have bought a dog. But a kid needs a dog. And so here I am: Pet owner – Dog owner.
I bought Cassie for my daughter, Julia, in September 2001. We had been searching for a dog at the pound and spent a Sunday afternoon at Operation Kindness in Richardson, a fantastic no-kill shelter. We looked at dozens of dogs, but none were quite the right one. However, there was one more.
The vet introduced us to a black and tan cattle dog mix that they called Hassie after the the street where they found her, Haskell Street in Dallas near CityPlace. Hassie was living in a storm drain with five puppies. She would come out and beg for food from office workers on their lunch break. Dutifully, she would take the food back to her pups. Then one day, some kind soul called Operation Kindness, who called the City of Dallas to actually disassemble part of the storm drain and rescue the dogs. This is the central legend of Cassie – she was a woman of mystery and a hero.
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As a lifelong Rangers fan, I’ve mostly cured myself of the habit over the past decade. Cubs fans may lament their team’s waltz with disappointment, but Wrigley Field ain’t the old Arlington Stadium. The Cubbies struggles at least has a patina of ennui that had the feel of epic poetry. The Rangers’ woes had none of that. Much of the team’s history reads more like outtakes from a Bill Murray movie that never got made. Jim Kern notwithstanding, there wasn’t a lot to laugh about.
So after a couple of abbreviated trips to the playoffs in the late 1990s and the trainwreck known as the A-Rod Era, the beginning of football marked the end of baseball season for me. Was it possible to be mathematically eliminated from playoff contention in July? The Rangers seemed content to explore the possibility. I didn’t need to watch. I’d been experiencing the futility since 1975.
So here we are in October and suddenly we have an unusual thing to behold – a Rangers team with pitching and power. And I’ve been having a great time watching them. We also have two teams searching for their first-ever World Series championship – the Rangers and the San Francisco Baseball Giants. So what about the Giants?
I’ve always kind of liked them. My wife went to school in the Bay Area and she was in the big earthquake there back in ’89 when the Giants played the A’s. That’s almost a family connection, right? Besides, anywhere you can hit a home run into an ocean seems to be a bit of alright. That’s part of the reason I picked up that Tony Bennett album I’ve included above. The man is just class, and the Giants cap adds a nice touch. I figured I’d pop it in the mail to my man in San Francisco, PeteG, but I’ve been lazy and never got around to it. So, here it is Pete. Come and get it. (BTW, enjoy while it lasts. It may be the last nice thing I say about the Giants for the next two weeks.)
Pete’s actually one of the great baseball fans I know. He’s passionate about his team. We should all care about something that much. And when you love a team that much – through good times and bad – you can learn a little bit about what it means to believe. It’s like the good book says, faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Who knows how this October surprise will turn out? Let’s just enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Some people are joiners, some aren’t. I fall in the latter category. Ask me to join an organization, I’ll say no. Back me into a corner and force me to join an organization, prepare to watch me break out in hives.
When I ended up as an accidental member of
Fort Worth Sister Cities International because my daughter became involved in their summer program, I gotta say I was dreading it. Then, the next thing I knew, I was taking a picture of a Japanese exchange student riding a longhorn — and having a great time.
What happened?
Well, simply put, our visitor from Nagaoka, Japan, is one of the sweetest kids I have ever met. Shiyomi stayed with my family, and it’s like my wife and I have another daughter now. Shiyomi introduces my daughter as her sister.
Watching kids from all over the world from Europe to Asia to Africa really is kind of an eye-opener. Maybe they can fix some of the mess we leave them if they get together and get to know each other. It’s a little glimmer of hope for the future.That was the idea when the Sister Cities program was started in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He thought that creating formal partnerships and relationships with foreign cities made it far less likely that we’d annihilate ourselves. I know, sounds a little corny, huggy and kum-bi-yah. But there it is.
Saying good-bye to my Japanese daughter yesterday was very emotional. Lots of tears were shed, but she knows that she always has a home in Fort Worth, Texas.
I’m on a listserv for my old American Studies professor from the University of Texas, Bill Stott. Bill is retired from academia now, living now as an expatriate in Chile, where he works as a journalist for an English-language newspaper and continues to keep his prostate cancer in check. His listserv is a sort of online literary salon that allows participants to meet some of many interesting people Bill has come across over the years.
Bill’s most recent post was about his friend, Fred Close, a filmmaker and historian who has just completed a biography of the woman known as Tokyo Rose. While the book itself looks interesting, I was more interested in a fragment of Fred’s writing that Bill included. Fred was writing about a bit of film from the epic television documentary, Victory at Sea. You can watch the clip referenced below on YouTube. The scene in question begins about the 2:30 mark.
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A man must know his limitations, that’s why last year I just said screw it to 10 best lists for a variety of reasons. Below is a little bit of my soundtrack from this year. Are they the best songs of the year? I don’t know, but I like them. Please feel free to listen, discuss, argue, comment. Let’s start off with a few albums and move on to some individual songs.
Albums
“Know Better Learn Faster” by Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Caught these guys at Lola’s Sixth Street this fall and they rocked the house. This is a great album from start to finish, and “Cool Yourself” is my favorite song therein.
One of life’s great ironies is my love of music despite having no musical ability of my own. Thanks to Fort Worth Opera for turning this negative into a positive. Help save culture and high art from me. Support the Fort Worth Opera today. Happy Holidays!
I was enjoying a mezzatini on the patio at Chadra the other day with my friend, June Naylor, when I had to confide in her that I just don’t really understand how to write about food and dining. I’m not sure which I’m more embarrassed to admit — that I was sipping a pink cocktail or that I can’t write about a subject that it seems so many can do so well.
The mezzatini is a great local cocktail, and June, of course, is a fantastic food writer who I am happy to say is finally blogging. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the best blogs in Fort Worth are food-related, including Food and Fort Worth, Fort Worth Hole in the Wall, Eat This Fort Worth and Fort Worth Foodie. People love reading about food almost as much as they do eating it. After all, everyone has to eat and everyone has an opinion.
However, writing about food as it’s own art form is a much more elusive discipline in my opinion. In an effort to improve, I read a lot about food. And one of my favorites is A.J. Liebling. I just finished reading Between Meals, a compilation of his food writing called that I picked up at a recent estate sale. I can whole-heartedly recommend this book to anyone who loves good food and good writing.
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What do you think about Generation Y in the workplace?
A friend of mine asked me that question the other day. I’ve just finished up a project about generations in the workplace and I’ve done a lot of reading and writing about that question. I also know that question is a prelude to Gen Y bashing. And, if you believed everything you read in the media about them — they’re entitled, they’re rude, they don’t want to pay they’re dues — you’d probably have a pretty dim view of them, too. However, I beg to differ. I’m actually optimistic about them and their future. Why?
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