Category Archives: favorite

Photo courtesy of wrestlingentropy. This isn’t even from the tour we saw. There were a bazillion people taking photos last night and nothing CC on flickr. Boo.

That Elvis Costello show was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. And this from a person who is a great Elvis admirer but not a hardcore fan.

All day I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about the Elvis show and all I can think of is: It was awesome.

Here’s the review from the local paper. And even though the website is a near-abomination, it’s worth a click to see Elvis in his plaid suit. Not many men can carry off that look and he looked amazing.

Regular readers are going to laugh when I say that one of the things that made the show so great was the audience.

You know how I’m always complaining about the people by us who talk during the whole show? Those people did not come last night and if they did, they did not talk. This was one of the most reverent crowds I’ve ever been in.

The show involves this giant wheel-of-fortune with and people from the audience some up and spin to pick what he will play. The people would spin the wheel and then they hung out onstage. And the people were all totally into it without being obnoxious. They danced in the go-go booth or danced with Elvis. They took photos. It was one girl’s birthday and Elvis led the audience singing “Happy Birthday” and she had the exact look on her face that you would have if Elvis Freaking Costello led a packed concert hall in “Happy Birthday” in your honor.

He sang every great song. At the end he did a bit where he stepped away from the microphone and sang.

No one made a peep.

It was an amazing show from start to finish and once again I had to thank my sweetheart for dragging me to something I thought I didn’t want to do.

Have you ever been in a situation that felt wrong, but because the person you are with doesn’t question it, you don’t question it either? Then later you end up having this conversation that goes something like, “Omigod, I thought the crabcakes tasted funny, too, but you were eating them so I figured it was just me.”

This story is like that although it doesn’t involved crabcakes.

Bob and I went to see Leonard Cohen on Thursday night in Seattle. A couple months ago Bob called me at work and said, “You know I never do anything like this, but this is the last musical icon on my list that I must see.” We took time off of work and made the trek.

It was spectacular. I’m sort-of glad I went in not knowing what I was getting into. It was like three hours of church, but I mean church in the sense of people gathering together to have their spirits refreshed. This is yet another wonderful experience my husband has brought to me that I never would have discovered on my own. Poor Bob. The concert he got to discover because of his wife was Ratt.

I will link to Bob’s review as soon as it’s up. (Leonard, not Ratt.)

We used the trip as an excuse to visit friends and relatives that we haven’t seen in long time. For the first night we stayed in a nice chain hotel in the Capitol Hill area. (I don’t know Seattle very well so geographic things are approximate.) This is the kind of hotel that asks you to join their frequent user plan and has a giant wall sized display in the elevator telling you about all their local hotels.

When we checked out we asked if we could make a reservation for one of their other hotels that was more convenient to our plans. The guy said their system didn’t work that way but he could write down the phone number for us. The events that follow are clearly this man’s fault.

Actual postcard from lobby with slight photoshopping by me.

As we headed out to one of our visits, we decided screw that hotel chain, we’d just stay at some generic motel on Aurora. As we drove I wrote down a couple of places that looked okay and we saw that there were tons and didn’t worry about it.

Our visit ended in the late afternoon so we got caught up in clusterfukage traffic and we puttered down Aurora and finally saw one of the places that was strategically located and seemed to look okay when we drove by the first time.

Here’s where the story is going to strain reader credibility, but you know, when you’re in the middle of the story things are not always obvious. It’s only later when you start adding it all up that you see how you were steered wrong and should have done it differently.

It looked sort-of shabby but we went in and it was cheap and we were tired and just wanted to sit quietly for a bit and the traffic was stacked up out front and I saw this lovely postcard and I thought how bad can it be? So when Bob said what do you think? I said, I guess it will be fine.

But as we’re standing there I’m reading these signs posted everywhere about no guests and no loitering and no refunds (has there ever been a bigger red flag anywhere in the history of red flags?) my heart is telling me RUN! but my head is telling me to get over it, it was just one night and that seemed okay until we saw the inside of the room which is my top two grimmest hotel rooms of all time. Please let that not be “so far.” Stained carpet, patched walls, tiny bed and smelled like smoker heaven.

“I’m certain someone has been murdered in this room,” I said. But we laughed and convinced ourselves it wasn’t so bad. We put our stuff down and went to visit our friends.

When we returned, the room was worse than we remembered. No hangers for our coats. The lamp didn’t work. One towel. Bob went to get a new lightbulb and when he returned, I had my bags in my hands, “Let’s just cut our losses and go to Travel Lodge.”

He talked me out of it but he was upset that I was upset and he sat down in a Thinker pose if The Thinker was wearing a baggy sweater and looking completely demoralized.

“I can’t figure out how this happened,” he said.

I crawled under a bedspread that I’m certain was a table cloth for a smoking convention and tried to fall asleep and my digestive system went ornery. We ate a big lunch and dinner and both with rich foods and it was just enough for that gross indigestion-y nausea that makes it impossible to relax when you’re trying to sleep, even in a nice hotel room. I finally drifted off for an hour or so and when I woke up Bob was up reading. I felt even worse and finally confessed to Bob and he went and found a cup in the lobby (free coffee station) because we didn’t have one in the room and I drank some alka seltzer. Bob said, “Do you want to leave?”

And I said, “Of course not, we have plans tomorrow. Our friends will hate us and never invite us to anything ever again. Who drives for three hours in the middle of the night? We can live through one night in a shitbag hotel.” (The conversation actually went on a lot longer and had lots of colorful parts to it.)

I still couldn’t settle and I tried to read my book. I noticed a giant gap in the curtains and because it was one of the least sexy moment you can imagine, I turned to Bob and said, “You wanna have wild sex?” and he, who has never answered that question this way, even when offered in jest, said, “NO! I want to go home.”

Then the room phone rang.

And there was no one there.

We got up and started packing. It rang again and I unplugged it from the wall. By 2:30am we were zooming through downtown Seattle and we were home and in bed by 5:30am.

We just washed our hair with gasoline and now I’m preparing to burn our clothes. What a weekend!

I got my first grown-up record player when I was 13. My first two albums were: Frampton Comes Alive and Wings Over America.

I loved music when I was in my teens and twenties. Insanely loved. Every time I moved the last thing I did at the old place was dismantle the stereo and the first thing I did at the new place was set the stereo up. I needed my music.

I loved to buy 45’s. I loved records. I loved discovering new bands. I loved concerts. I loved to read and write about bands. I read all kinds of magazines like Creem, Spin and occasionally bought a NME plus never missed a free issue of any weekly, BAM and so on.

I spent hours making mix tapes. I also taped my albums for my car and spent intense amounts of time creating the labels, custom decorating, giving them special names. I had a whole math system so there wouldn’t be a giant empty gap at the end of the tape. In Rob’s book, they just threw stuff at the end of a tape to have music at the end and I sometimes did that but it completely violated my sense of logic and order and plus when listening to the tape I’d suffer an internal cringe when I knew the song was going to cut off abruptly.

Most of these tapes are long gone. I made a dance tape freshman year in the dorms that I’m pretty sure is in the basement and I should dig it out because if it still works, I bet it would be hilarious. The only bands I remember for sure are on it are Talk Talk and Flock of Seagulls. One drawback of cassettes is my last boombox died so the only cassette player I have is in the car.

My best mix tapes were the series I made in the late 80’s with hairbands. These were the Cathouse tapes in honor of my favorite club and featured songs from bands like Guns N’Roses,, Faster Pussycat and Warrant. I gave them names like “Cathouse Strikes Back” “The Return of Cathouse” and “Cathouse Steak and Pita Hut.” I think the original Cathouse tape is in the basement but all the others are gone. Heidi says she still has some of them.

I have no recollection of making or receiving mix tapes as any part of mating rituals which is a central theme of Rob’s book. The person I remember exchanging tapes with the most is my sister. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember a single friend who was as fanatical about music as I am. Of course, I made up for that later with my choice in spouse and he is the king of all things music in this lifetime and the next 10.

The reason for this long introduction is that I am the exact opposite now. How can that even be possible?

I rarely listen to music except when I drive. And even then it’s mostly just the radio and I switch around stations until I find a song that I like. I get maybe 2 new cds a year and listen to them once or twice and usually it’s a project. As in, “Oh, I should take that new CD out of the case and give it a listen.” Darren sent me a CD a week or two ago and I said, “Great, I can’t wait to listen to it.” Then I set it next to my computer and totally forgot about it until he asked me what I thought.

If, in my 20’s I had digital music and the Internet, it would have completely changed my life. Burning CDs and making playlists – that would have been awesome. Now it seems like a lot of trouble. My only playlists are the albums except for one called “current faves” that I’ve never updated. I don’t like “shuffle” because I don’t like hearing a random track from “Attack of the Clones” (yes, I’m a total nerd and have all 6 Star Wars soundtracks on my iPod) and then Replacements and then some cheezy Top 40-ish dance track from a compilation and then some mellow mind-numbing music that I keep on there if I get anxious on a plane. If I’m going to listen to a mixed bag, there has to be thin thread of logic why the songs are together.

I don’t take the time to find new bands although I’m always happy to discover a new song I like. But I hardly ever buy stuff because I figure I’ll never listen to it. I love the idea of the Apple Store and buying singles songs I like, but refuse to buy anything with DRM. The last music I heard that really rocked my world was Camper Van Beethoven an album that I’ve had in my collection for 20 years.

I know it’s not age because I know tons of people my age who are music fanatics. I still like the idea of music. I love Pandora but I don’t think I’ve logged on in a month.

When I was in college I had a woman friend who told me as I got older I’d enjoy the quiet more and get used to the sound of my own thoughts. I think she was right.

This afternoon the exterminator came. When I was a kid there was an exterminator company that had a guy holding a giant hammer he was going to use to smash the bug. I always wished we could have that at our house.

The guy that came to our house didn’t have a giant hammer but he was cool and had a good sense of humor and obviously knew what he was doing and took the time to explain it to me which I really appreciated. Who doesn’t like learning about bugs?

The first thing he did was ask me about the carpenter ants. I said they were huge and black and some had wings and that they apparently liked to eat each other because I saw one crawling around waving half the body of another. He said, yes, if you’re having ants over for dinner, damp wood and ants are their favorite. Then he asked where they were.

I was a tad embarrassed and I told my sister this story earlier and made her promise not to tell our father but now I’m going to tell you all here. About one hour before we were scheduled to leave for the airport for New York, I opened the shade in my room because I was looking for stuff and couldn’t see very well and natural light seemed like a great solution.

Instead what I saw were giant winged ants boiling out of a crack in the windowsill. Bob and I looked at it together and being the proactive and competent homeowners that we are, we killed the ants that we could reach (and some with wings flew away!) and slapped a big old piece of tape over the crack and then went on vacation and never gave it another thought.

About a week after our return I thought maybe I should revisit this because it would sure be embarrassing if our house fell down because we were too lame to deal with it, but the tape was working great and as long as I kept the blind closed I didn’t even think about the ants slowly devouring our home. But I finally called and made the appointment and now I had to show the guy that I was holding the ants at bay with tape.

He said that this kind of problem solving was not uncommon. He told me all about ants and how they like railroad ties (part of the landscaping) and how they like to hang out in the nice warm walls when its cold and pointed out a bush I could cut back so they couldn’t hop on and eat some aphids and then jump into my room. I couldn’t help think how popular he must be on his kids’ show and tell day, standing in front of the room talking about bugs.

I asked him if I had to leave the house while he filled it with poison and if there was any danger of me growing a second head and he pointed to his 2nd-head-free shoulder and said not to worry about it.

Another problem, apparently solved.

My sister found this letter in my Grandma’s stuff and sent it to me. You can click on it for a larger view.

I wrote this when I was 7 years old. Even then I knew about the concrete detail (four dollars, ballerina on the cake, yellow room-although I use the passive voice and I knew my Dad was painting it.). I also love that I signed it “Pamela” because back then I was Pammy. I must have thought I was being very grown-up.

But what really kills me about this letter is that my Grandma saved it all this time.