Rain Out!

As much as I enjoy playing on my Thursday night golf league, it's always a pleasure when something your required to do on a regular basis is cancelled. That was the case tonight, golf was cancelled due to rain. Golf is never any fun in the rain, & there's nothing worse than when something that supposed to be fun becomes a chore. It always reminds me of that Jerry Seinfeld bit when he talks about struggling to stay awake at night in order to watch a television show. I'm kind of excited about the league being over with for another year, that means a free evening. Those seem to be fewer & farther between these days. Golf is more fun when you can play whenever & with whoever you choose, especially in the fall, when the courses are less crowded, the weather is cooler & the colors are in full effect. The ideal Saturday in the fall involves getting up early in the morning, going out to breakfast, playing nine holes of golf & then watching a Michigan game. It's coming soon!

Here's a blog I've been reading lately. This fella commented on one of my blogs so I decided to check out his. It's good.

Five Favorite Songs of the Day

Peaceable Kingdom/Radio Baghdad-Patti Smith, Trampin'

This is, in my not so humble opinion, one of the finest musical works of art to come out of the 21st century, & it's not a song you can stumble upon casually, or listen to as background music. It will jar your senses like very few songs can, on par with "Heroin" from the Velvet Underground or Patti's own "Birdland" from her seminal album "Horses" from 1975. It paints a bleak picture of her view of the war in Iraq, & she's careful to point out the irony of the president's Christian leanings pitted against the destruction of the area where the Garden of Eden was. Patti Smith is all at once overbearing, angry, sympathetic, ironic, preachy & poetic. I prefer to mess up the order & listen to Peaceable Kingdom after Radio Baghdad, maybe it has to do with restoring a little bit of hope, I don't know.

It Ain't Me, Babe-Bob Dylan, Detroit March 16, 2004

What an impassioned performance this was. I'd never been as close to the stage as I was during this concert, & Bob delivered one of his finer performances of the last five years. I love the way Bob sneaks his harmonica solo in behind Freddie Koella's guitar solo as the band builds to an incredible crescendo.

Feel Free-Jay Farrar, Sebastopol

All Along the Watchtower-Jimi Hendrix

There She Goes My Beautiful World-Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues

I don't know of any other singer who can pull off a verse like this without coming off sounding clumsy or too wordy...

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing das kapital
and Gaugin, he buggered off, man
and went all tropical,
while Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
and Dylan Thomas he died drunk
in St Vincent's hospital

He rewards himself later in the song, with a much more lyrical, much easier, more fun verse to sing...

So, if you got a trumpet, get on your feet
brother and blow it,
and if you got a field, that don't yield
well get up & hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse
but then I weren't much of a poet

Happy Thursday, friends, I hope all your prior engagements are cancelled!

andrew