Your 7th Grade Hit Parade (part one)!

This Christmas, my wife got me a boombox so that I could listen to my old cassette tapes again.  We have boxes and boxes of tapes in our garage, but haven't had a working tape deck since my Sony Walkman gave up the ghost.

Rather than unpacking everything all at once, I opened one box, and dug for mix tapes.  One particularly scary find is simply labeled Rock Vol. II, a Memorex D-60 compilation of 7" singles circa 1981-2.  Why did I feel I had to assert that this was "rock"?  What's with the Roman numerals?  Where did Rock Vol. I go, and is there a Rock Vol. III somewhere?  Washing dishes tonight, I was pleasantly surprised to find that several b-sides had made their way onto the mix--they tend to age better than the a-sides, I kid you not.

Play along at home: here are the big pop hits from Vail Junior High in 7th grade, or at least for this post-Kiss / pre-Numan 7th grader.  We'll count them down, from least to most embarassing....

10.  "Rapture" b/w "Walk Like Me," Blondie--My only real regret about "Rapture" is that it's the single mix--it's so short compared to the ten-minute 12" mix I found a few years back.  After an ill-fated "Blondie Awareness Party" in college where all we had to play was the ten-track Best of Blondie over and over, I started working on completing my Blondie back-catalogue on vinyl in the mid-1990s.  Now watching the video, I find myself gasping, "Wait--is that Fab 5 Freddy?!"  "Walk Like Me" is kind of B-52's-ish in a good way.  I realized tonight that Missing Persons was basically a (noble but failed) West Coast attempt at filling the void that Blondie left after this album....

9.  "Start Me Up," Rolling Stones--The video has so many funny takes of Charlie Watts' bemusement, while the other guys elbow each other for lens time.  I think this was their last good single, save "Undercover."  I came to really resent classic rock for a number years starting in 8th grade, but you see this was 7th grade.....

8. "I Love Rock-n-Roll," Joan Jett & the Blackhearts--This was a favorite at dances well into early high school--the rockers loved it, the pop kids loved it, and it still sounds good.  Dig a bit to hear her do "Bad Reputation" live on the Urgh! A Music War soundtrack--now that is good eating.  You can hear the end of the studio version at the beginning of the video--can't say I remember that at all....Indicative of 1981 that her lyrics kept her four-square in the closet, so that is a little wince-worthy....

7. "Freeze-Frame" b/w "Flamethrower,"  The J. Geils Band--The first of two J. Geils singles on the tape; add the b-sides and four of the 14 songs on here are from them.  At this point in my life, the hits are time-encased novelties, while (at least in my own mind) the flipsides are still worthy of a listen.  If you've never heard it, check out the b--tasty solos.

6.  "Shake it Up" b/w "Cruiser," The Cars--By the time I got into the Cars, they were on a slow but steady decline.  At least, that's what I think now.  Then, I found this great band, starting with this single, then the full album, then the three before the Shake it Up LP.  By the time I saw them in Phoenix supporting Heartbeat City, they were one of my favorite bands.  Come to think of it, though, I believe I was asserting at the time that the opening act, Wang Chung, was now my favorite band of the moment--but 9th/10th grade is a whole other list.

Next time, we'll hit the mother-lode of embarrassment.  I'll give you a taste: Olivia Newton-John doesn't even make it to #1.  

We are the agents of change that we have been waiting for

As I made breakfast this morning, hundreds of miles from DC, preliminary NPR coverage of folks gathering for inauguration festivities this afternoon started to make me a little fizzy.  In fact, I popped upstairs to turn on CNN to see live images of people collected near the Capitol, on the Mall, and along the parade route.  The sea of humanity was impressive--like what we experienced at the Thanksgiving parade off Times Square in November, but with that extra....fizz?  This triggered a recurring conversation my wife and I have had about our hopes (or lack thereof) for change with the Obama administration.

My wife L identifies herself variously as an optimistic pessimist, a pessimistic optimist, and a realist--I'm pretty much a manic optimist, but prone to crashing into sullen pessimism on occasion.  We were both excited to move to an ostensibly liberal Massachusetts in 2006, only to find ourselves in a pretty conservative pocket of the state (libraries?!  we don't need no stinking libraries!).  Further, Obama's yes we can echoes our Gov. Patrick's together we can--yet we still can't manage to keep professors from working without a contract this year, with no end in sight (and scant hope any retroactive COLA increases).

After my verbalized, coffee-induced daydream about driving to DC this morning, L noted that she wished she was more excited, but after the rise and fall of hopes under Patrick, she's just not on fire like folks you hear interviewed on the Mall.  I understand her--today is symbolic, but it's not merely symbolic.  (In fact, as my semiotic-grappling COMM 229 students will attest, nothing is merely symbolic.)  Symbols matter, and the swearing-in ceremony for our nation's first first black president is an important symbol for our country.  Hearing an NPR report from Montgomery, AL, where a convention center blocks away from where water cannons were used on civil rights protesters in the 1960s is set to host thousands of people for the inauguration, brought that home again this morning.

Another way in which this symbolism matters is in terms of the peaceful transferral of power from one party to another.  This is something that as Americans we might take for granted--but we shouldn't.  Consider the recent Russian elections, where Medvedev is now president, but it's pretty clearly understood that Putin is running the show.  (Of ourse, we had Cheney behind Bush, which only underscores the importance of today's symbolic moment all the more, right?)

Further, for the last decade, internal opposition in Russia, much less any attempt at providing an objective (journalistic) voice within the country, has been literally shot dead in its tracks.

The latest proof: today's New York Times article about another political assassination in Russia.  This time it was a human rights lawyer and a journalist.  The lawyer, Stanislav Markelov (34), described by the Times as having "spent the better part of a decade pursuing contentious human rights and social justice cases," had been fighting the early release of a Russian tank commander accused of murdering a young Georgian woman.  The journalist, Anastasia Baburova (25), wrote for the government-critical Novaya Gazeta newspaper, and is the fourth journalist from the paper to have been killed since 2000.  The most notable of those four, of course, was Anna Politkovskaya (murdered on Putin's birthday in 2006), whose last book Putin's Russia is a heartbreaking and alarming must-read.

So let us give thanks.  Today is an important day.  We should rejoice for any number of reasons.  But we should also be ready to roll up our sleeves tomorrow.  In reading Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big Life, L came across a quote from Ghandi this weekend that was particularly poignant to us, and that I leave you with:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Don't call it a comeback!

(With all apologies to LL Cool J, who you can hear at the end of the blog entry, if you are so inclined...)

New calendar year + new semester w/ 60 students blogging for those elusive points = new resolve to regularly blog myself. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before....

But really: where there's a will there's a way. (And of course, when you're in Stratford-upon-Avon, where there's a Will there's a play.)

What can I say, my friends, it was either post-syllabus induced punning, or YouTube clips of Scandinavian death metal. The latter, for those of you keeping score with the Sons of Norway, will have to wait for another entry...hold me to that, yeah?

Enjoy inauguration day, and stay tuned!