Month: November 2003

Musical surprise of the week: The Jethro Tull Christmas Album.

/ J. Eric Smith / Leave a comment

As uncool as it is in certain circles to admit it, I’m a long-time, nearly life-time, fan of Jethro Tull. After Steely Dan, they were my first obsessive musical love in the mid-’70s, and one of the first musically-related pieces of journalism that I ever published was a Tull career retrospective article in the “Teen Corner” column that I wrote for the Mitchel Field weekly paper when I was 13 or 14 or so. I have seen Tull (or Ian Anderson, solo) in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, and enjoyed the experience each and every time.

I’ve found the current reasonably long-standing line-up (Anderson, Martin Barre, Andrew Giddings, Jonathan Noyce and Doane Perry) to be quite stupendous live (better, by far, than some of the ’80s line-ups I saw with chunks of Fairport Convention in the band), but their recorded output has been, methingks, a bit on the spotty side, and a bit too middle-of-the-road folk-flavored rock for my tastes.

Christmas Album, on the other hand, plays to their strengths in great ways: lots of spry acoustic numbers with Anderson’s flute and Barre’s guitar front and center where they belong, Anderson’s voice sounding better than it has in years, some strong new songs, some classic old songs given stellar new spins, and a few instrumental chestnuts of the season for good measure. All together, a fine holiday album, and one that you can listen to any time of the year.

Interestingly, the album was recorded from afar, with tapes going hither to yon and back for various members to record their various parts, and on no song does the full current quintet all appear at the same time. Old bassist Dave Pegg (of the Fairport Tull/Jethro Convention era) makes a couple of guest appearances, and James Duncan (who just happens to be Anderson’s son in his spare time) plays a lot of the drums in Perry’s stead. Still: it’s nice to get such a nice album so deep into these guys’ career, and it really reminds me why I have liked them so much for so long.

I’m bummed, though, that I replaced my vinyl with CDs a couple of years ago, only to have them reissuing remixed/restored copies of the classic albums now with lotsa bonus tracks. Dagnabbit.

Sensaround Surrealist Colorama

/ J. Eric Smith / Leave a comment

Some combination of extreme physical exhaustion, two tabs of Valerian, and the extra oxygen provided by one of those nasal strip thingies turned my brain into the Sensaround Surrealist Colorama last night, featuring a long, incredibly detailed dream with far more staying power (after waking up) than normal. In summary . . .

I was at an air show, and one of the events was airplane races, but the planes were racing people on the ground, flying incredibly low, their props and wing tips occasionally dipping into the crowd below them, that parted and surged on along the tree-lined dirt road, like an aviation version of the running of the bulls.

One group of runners managed to get a blanket tossed over a plane, and as the plane flew on, they were pulled behind it, laughing at their ingenuity, until the plane began to go too high, and they realized that when the props cut the blanket, they’d be toast, so they let it go.

Then I was elsewhere, watching a documentary about an assassination from long, long ago, and the widow of the fallen leader was shown tending his tomb, digging around the bottom of it to make sure that the grass and weeds didn’t grow over the inscriptions, but at the same time making sure that the soil was well tended so that the grass would grow green and lush.

Looking through trees, I realized the tomb was to my right, and it was looking a bit over-grown, so I began to dig around its edges as I’d seen the widow do, and after getting about six inches of dirt out in a little trench along the front of the large, square monument, I punched through into a hollow space, and it was filled with worms, one particularly large one slowly plowing through a mass of smaller ones. My reaction wasn’t one of revulsion: I realized that they were weren’t there eating the dead, they were there because the widow had put them there to make sure the soil was well aerated.

Looking right, I suddenly realized there was a window in the side of the tomb, and inside it I could see what appeared to be an iron lung kind of device, with two women inside it, only their heads visible, in some sort of kinky amorous embrace. One spotted me watching them, and they opened the door to the tomb and began to castigate me, with a very heavy militant/lesbian/feminist slant to the tirade: I was male, I was bad. But then they realized that I wasn’t there to voyeur them, it was only an accident that I was watching them, I was being respectful of the tomb.

They softened, and offers were made for the exchange of sexual favors, but then the two women left and were replaced by another, a brunette, who was more forceful in her amorous offers towards me, and then the sex began, and it was very intense, and as we got into it, I realized that I was on the floor of my room at the Naval Academy.

Just as things were reaching a peak, I heard my Naval Academy room-mates say “He’s being really loud, she must be giving him a real work out,” and I realized that I must have been dreaming and making noises in my sleep, and that they could hear them, and they knew what I was dreaming.

I didn’t want to wake before the payoff on the sex, so I was trying to be really quiet–both in the dream, and in my room, so my room-mates wouldn’t hear me. But they weren’t fooled, and one of them grabbed me off the bed and flung me bodily across the room, where I hit the wall and fell to the floor.

I laid there on the floor thinking “Damn, that sucks, getting woken up during the middle of a sex dream . . . ”

And then I REALLY woke up, and realized that I’d been having a dream within a dream . . . a meta-dream, and my first waking thoughts were: “Well . . . if it sucks to get woken up during a sex dream, does that mean it’s a good thing to get woken up from a dream where you’ve just been awakened in the middle of a sex dream?”

Analyze that, Doctor(s) Freud . . .

Basement Ball

/ J. Eric Smith / Leave a comment

The time has come, the walrus said, to follow up on my promise of a coupla days ago to write about Basement Ball, a really pointless, stupid game that helped keep me sane while I was on restriction for a good chunk of my junior year at the Naval Academy. (Why describe it? Because I think it’s another good example of how young males entertained themselves in an era before the Internet, and when we didn’t have TV’s, and there weren’t many women around). (Take heed, bored young males sitting in front of your computers, porn surfing and gaining weight).

Down in the basement of fourth wing in Bancroft Hall there was a long, thin hallway with doors at both ends (for those who know the Naval Academy, this hallway has since been consumed by the ever-sprawling Midshipmen Store). This was the Basement Ball stadium. Like Base Ball, there was a team at bat and a team in the field. You only got two outs per inning, to keep things moving briskly.

In the field there were two position: pitcher and outfielder. The outfielder was armed with a lacrosse stick, and stood in front of one of the doors at the end of the hall. The pitcher pitched a ball made of rolled up socks wrapped in masking tape, his “mound” a spot in the middle of the hallway.

The batters batted from in front of the door at the other end of the hallway. The bat was a raquetball racket. If the pitch got past the batter and hit the wall, it was a strike. The hallway floor and walls had zones that correlated to single, double, triple, based on where the ball fell. A home run was scored if the ball hit the back wall, behind the outfielder. If the pitcher caught the ball in his hands, it was one out. If the outfielder caught the ball with his lacrosse stick, it was two outs, so an inning could be over with one at bat. However, the ball was large, so this didn’t happen often, in general the lacrosse stick was there just to knock the ball down before it hit the back wall. No one actually ran bases; ghost runners were used, but they advanced when forced by subsequent hits. As long as a team won, they kept the court, with subsequent teams arriving to play the winner. A series of games could go on for a long, long time if there were enough people around to play.

And that was it, pretty much. Not much on paper, but on nights when we had lots of homework to do, more often than not we could we adjourn to the basement for a game or ten of Basement Ball, because it was more fun than homework, by a long shot. And besides, we could always cram at the last minute before a test, but an evening of Basement Ball missed was an evening of fun never to be recaptured.

Sad, on one plane, but noble on another: the pure pursuit of entertainment where none was readily available.

Or maybe it was just procrastination, I can’t quite remember, it’s been a while, y’know?