Sunset, Tuesday, 28 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

In Which iPod Exposes Music Theft

No, not illegal downloads – songwriters stealing from each other. I’ll say at the outset I think the song that contains the arguably stolen material is probably even better, overall, than its model.

(Which I think is pretty unusual. For example, was Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” really worth rummaging through Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto?) (That’s O.K., Eric, we’ll always have The Raspberries.)

So, anyway, you know of course how iPod shuffle can get spooky – supposedly random orders producing weirdly synchronous sequences. And sometimes if you have a live track from a CD, at the end of that track you may hear the intro to the next song on the disk – but of course, because you’re on shuffle, that is almost never the next song you’ll hear from the iPod.

So I’m editing client work today, and playing music because the work is fairly low-intensity and it’s after lunch and I’m trying to keep from crashing face-first onto the desk. The song playing is from Concert For George – “That’s The Way It Goes,” done by Joe Brown. Song ends and after much applause for Brown’s fine performance, Eric Clapton announces, “TOM PETTY ... and THE HEARTBREAKERS!”

O.K., place goes slightly ape, but – that’s the end of that track.

To my confusion and surprise, the next song is – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – except I knew (in the very first instants) that not only was this song not on Concert For George, I did not even have this song.

Then I realized – of course! It’s not “American Girl” – this is the other song with this intro and rhythm track! –  “Last Nite” by The Strokes.

(I realize that not just one but possibly both of these songs will seem ancient to some people. Oh, well. To put things in perspective, today I also heard “Lonely Blue Boy” by Conway Twitty ... and remembered when it came out.)

In Which Bill Saves the Planet ... Slightly

I was leaving the produce section of the grocery store today with a two-pound container of Michigan blueberries, on sale, when I suddenly realized – Wait a minute, I’m supposed to go looking for wild blackberries today!

Back go the trucked-in or flown-in Michigan blueberries, and, later, out into the briar patches go I. WHAT a hero. Off the grid!

In Which Bill Wakes Up ... At Least for a Moment

So I’m walking down the fields toward blackberries, and you know how it is some days, your mind is more or less filled with a whole lot of things you’re working on, many of which are a long long way from working out right, and there’s just a sort of jammed-up, cloudy mix of things, large and small, to think about. Well, maybe you don’t know how that is, but that’s how it sometimes is for me. And it’s a hot, steamy, not very comfortable summer day, I guess you could call it a very average Virginia summer day, more than half cloudy, the sun beating down through three or four shifting layers of thin white and dull blue and soft gray and – just not what you call a stellar, striking sort of day.

And then I stop, or actually I keep walking but I do a sort of tight but goofy-stumbly 360 while I’m walking down the field. And I realize, Man, are you crazy? Look at this! I’m walking outside at four in the afternoon, in a huge green bowl of grasses, the sky’s enormous, everywhere there are gallant stands of oak, there’s the spring and the pear tree, big hot steel blue clouds in the west ... Look at this. This is IT.