Brian Presents:

Offering

2012-01-15T14:16:00.000-05:00

I recently have been thinking a lot about a piece of music that I had not previously thought about in years: the "Offertorio" movement from Verdi's Requiem. When I was a voice major at the University of Utah I was involved in a concert where this piece was sung by a few of my colleagues, so I got to hear it dozens and dozens of times throughout the rehearsal process. In my opinion this movement is one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of music that has ever been written.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it (and/or don't speak Latin), let me talk you through it a little bit. It begins with a soaring cello line before the mezzo-soprano and tenor (sung here by a beardless-and-so-young-you-can't-even-recognize-him Pavarotti) enter together, invoking the name of "Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory," as what follows during the whole rest of the movement is essentially one long prayer.

The bass enters at 1:16 delivering this text, which the mezzo and tenor echo:

Deliver the souls of all the faithful dead from the pains of hell and from the deep pit; Deliver them from the mouth of the lion;
That hell may not swallow them, and that they may not fall into darkness.

That trio is followed by one of the most glorious moments in all of classical music at 2:38, when the soprano (sung here by the great Leontyne Price, sounding spectacular as always) enters like an angel descending from on high. She holds a single note that magically floats above the violins before the note deliciously melts downward at 2:50. I'll pause for a second until your goosebumps pass. Ready? On that divine entrance she is holding out a single word: "but."

But may the holy standard-bearer Michael show them the holy light.

At 3:52, the bass states that the holy light mentioned above has been "promised to Abraham and his descendants." This develops into a lively quartet, which dies down at about 4:44 to prepare us for the tenor's delicate and moving offering (hence the Italian title of the movement, "Offertorio"):

We offer to you, O Lord, sacrifices and prayers.
Receive them on behalf of those souls whom we commemorate today.
Grant, O Lord, that they might pass from death into that life

Like almost everything in the piece, this develops into a quartet and the other parts echo and add to what the tenor has said. The music from 3:52 returns again at 8:08, as the bass once again reminds us of the promises that the Lord has made to Abraham and his descendants.

At 9:15 the four soloists come together in unison to express the final plea of the prayer:

Deliver the souls of all the faithful dead from the pains of hell;
Grant that they might pass from death into that life.

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Back when my Grandpa Tanner died in August, I wrote about how a section from the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius was often on my mind in the wake of his death. His death was peaceful and came without any protracted illness or build-up, and it seemed that he had been released from this life in order to, in the words of Gerontius, "go forth upon thy journey" back to "the Omnipotent Father who created thee." Although it was sudden, it was his time to go and our whole family was grateful that he did not have to suffer.

However, his death has left Grandma Tanner, 95 years old and married to my grandpa for 70 years, alone, and it has been very hard for her. She has continually asked, "Merlynn, why don't you come get me?" She had to move out of the home she and her husband built together in Payson, Utah to an assisted living facility in Bountiful, closer to several of her children. She enjoyed good health up until Christmas, but since then she has been rapidly declining. She spent a while in the hospital and has since been released into hospice care. She has been getting progressively weaker and weaker, and those around her feel that she is very close to death. She is in a lot of discomfort, and she has told several visitors in the past few days, "I never know that it took so long to die."

Like I said of Grandpa Tanner earlier, Grandma Tanner has lived a long, fulfilling, righteous life and has left a tremendous legacy of faith for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. I am so grateful that I have had so many opportunities to spend time with her throughout my life. I know that she is in Heavenly Father's hands now, and at the right moment He will bring her home to be with her husband and family again.

So like before, another piece of music that has been floating around in my mind as I process another grandparent's death and mortality in general. There is something about music that helps me connect to my feelings in a much more direct way than words, and when I listen to the "Offertorio" my heart echoes the same prayer for my Grandmother in her final moments on earth:

Grant, O Lord, that [she] might pass from death into that life
Which you once promised to Abraham and his descendants.
Deliver [her] faithful soul from the pains of hell;
Grant that [she] might pass from death into that life.

SST: Fuzzy and Blue

2012-01-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Guess what my sister gave me for Christmas - I'll give you a hint:

You're right - a University of Michigan snuggie! I had my first chance to show off my fuzzy blue snuggie tonight at the Sugar Bowl party hosted by The Thirsty Lion pub in downtown Portland. I wish I had a better picture of it, but it was pretty dark in the pub, so the shot on the right will have to suffice. I blogged once before about the uniting power of Michigan football, and once again tonight I sat down at a table full of strangers and we instantly formed a bond due to our shared University of Michigan experience (except for the kid on the far left, who was an Michigan State fan - boo!).

I got a nice round of applause for the snuggie as I made my way to the front of the bar to pick up my prize from the halftime drawing - a $25 gift certificate to the selfsame bar. Between that and the waitress forgetting about my order and then comping my food and giving me a gift card for a free future appetizer, I made out like a bandit tonight.

This was a continuation of my recent winning streak, which is mostly connected to events at Yahoo!, some of which I have blogged about before. At the beginning of December we had our Yahoo! year-end party, which had a "Casino Night" theme. Poker chips were awarded for playing the various games, which could be redeemed for raffle tickets. I showed up near the beginning of the night and left before people had a chance to get too drunk, so I only ended up with four measly tickets (others told me they had accumulated twenty or thirty tickets).

After I got home from the party I got a text from a Brazilian coworker: "You just won the ipod touch!!!" I was really excited, but less than a minute later she sent me a second text: "sucker :-)"

I thought that was a pretty good prank, so I texted back: "hahaha" To which she responded: "sortudo" (Portuguese for "lucky"). At this point she had me confused, so I asked her in a text if I had really won, but she didn't respond that night.

The party fell on a Saturday night and I didn't happen to pass by the cubicle of the lady who organized the raffle until Tuesday. She stopped me and asked why I hadn't come by to pick up my prize earlier. She then handed me a shiny new iPod Touch.

I was totally surprised because I thought my Brazilian friend was just messing with me, so I went and asked her why she had texted me the word "sucker." "Because you suck. I wanted to win the iPod!" she said. I told her that in English the word "sucker" has the connotation of "I fooled you," and she said that she was not aware of that. She just thought it meant "one who sucks." Seems logical enough.

For most of my life I have never been the type to ever win anything, so this winning streak has been a welcome change. Even Michigan won tonight even though they played like crap. Maybe my winning streak rubbed off on them. Or maybe it was just the power of my snuggie.

Year of Songs: It's Hard to Hold a Candle

2011-12-30T12:28:00.000-05:00

Whew - last post of the Year of Songs. Let's work our way backwards through the last two months:

Year of Songs by Lemmy Sportsinterviews on Grooveshark

December:

Gold Soundz - Pavement
The Air Near My Fingers - The White Stripes

Both these lyricists go for the classic "remember"/"month ending in -ember" rhyme (best exemplified by "Try to Remember (The Kind of September)" from a previous playlist in the series). I love "Gold Soundz," but I found it to be a rather out-of-left-field choice for Pitchfork's #1 song of the '90s. But then again, the folks at Pitchfork sure love them some Pavement.

Horchata - Vampire Weekend

Speaking of obvious rhymes, I'm so tired of all these songs that rhyme "horchata" with "balaclava." Sheesh.

Back to December - Taylor Swift

My friend Peter: "There's a great Taylor Swift song from her latest studio album Speak Now called 'Back to December.' I dare you to use it." Game on, Peter!

Love Her Madly - The Doors

Also from Peter: "I just realized that 'Love Her Madly' by the Doors has a Carol of the Bells reference in the keyboard solo." So it does.

Having gone through a major Doors phase in junior high, I still harbor a fondness for the Doors which was rekindled recently by Jimmy Fallon's spectacular interpretation of the Reading Rainbow theme in the guise of Jim Morrison. Unfortunately, the official video has expired, so the subpar video below is the best I can do:

Summersong - The Decemberists

Befitting a band with a month in their name, the Decemberists have made numerous appearances on this playlist in previous months. Lacking a song that actually has December in the lyrics (that I know of, at least), I thought we could use a nice song about summer to shake things up.

If We Make It Through December - Merle Haggard

Just discovered this one courtesy of the All Songs Considered podcast. Speaking of summer, this one features this sad little line in chorus:

If we make it through December
I got plans of being in a warmer town come summer time
Maybe even California...

And speaking of California...

Long December - Counting Crows

I love the classic Counting Crows song ending: repeating "yeah" over and over again with rapidly depleting energy until the whole thing just falls apart. Perfect way to send the Year of Songs project limping off at the end of its run.

November:

Young Pilgrims - The Shins

The album Chutes Too Narrow, named after a line from this song, was easily one of my favorite albums of the past decade. In case you haven't heard, after five years The Shins will finally release a new album in March.

Hard Candy - Counting Crows

After that Shins interlude, let's keep the Counting Crows rolling, shall we? This is one of the few post-"Long December" songs that I actually like (don't get me started on that Shrek song).

Allerseelen (All Souls' Day) - Richard Strauss

All Souls' Day, also known as the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, falls annually on November 2.

Today the graves are full of lights and flowers,
One day a year the dead shall hold their sway:
Spend on my heart again those lovely hours,
Like once in May.

Congrats to Richard Strauss for being the most represented German art song composer on the Year of Songs playlist (this and "September").

November - Andy Dwyer (from Parks & Recreation)

The character Andy from Parks & Rec wrote a song about a girl named November to try to win his girlfriend April back (makes sense if you know the character). How could any girl, regardless of the month of her namesake, resist a sensitive ballad with lines like "Let's spread our wings and flyyyyyyyy... on a date"? Grooveshark didn't have a copy, so watch the clip below:

On the Radio - Regina Spektor

The last song on this November list is so epic, we need this song just to preface it:

On the radio
We heard "November Rain"
That solo's really long
But it's a pretty song

November Rain - Guns N' Roses

This song came out when I was in 6th grade and it sparked the equivalent of the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob conflict at my elementary school. The popular kids, led by this girl named Kari, literally walked around the playground during recess asking people if they were Team "November Rain" or Team "Rumpshaker," another song that was popular at the time (I was going to link to it, but after listening to it for the first time in almost 20 years I was a little embarrassed - at the time I didn't understand how gross it was, though the title should have been a pretty good tip-off). The two groups got pretty chippy, and I remember making a case that it was possible to like both songs, but my musical eclecticism was too far ahead of its time.

****************************

For those of you who bothered to read these "Year of Songs" posts and listen to some of the music, thanks for indulging me. Special thanks to those who suggested songs for the project - I discovered some cool music thanks to you. Overall it was really fun to put this mega-playlist together month by month, and the final tally is a whooping 95 songs.

Let's go out on a song that mentions every month of the year: Neil Sedaka's 1961 "Calendar Girl." It's a major cheese-fest, but just close your eyes and picture it playing during party scene on Mad Men, and then it will be a whole lot cooler.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

SST: Don't Eat the Pictures

2011-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A few years ago my friend Jessica posted something on her blog about her trip to Mexico that really caught my attention: "The anthropology museum was great, mainly because I put on my iPod and walked around looking at ancient Mexican cultures while listening to Arcade Fire. I think the visual/audio juxtaposition made the visit all the better." At the time I read that it sounded heretical to me - how could you take in the gravity of a museum while listening to your iPod? However, on my next museum visit I decided to give it a try and I instantly fell in love with all the unexpected "visual/audio juxtapositions" that resulted.

This past week was exceptionally museum-y for me and my iPod's shuffle mode came up with some inspired pairings. For instance, hit play on the song below:

This song ("The Rainbow," by The Apples in Stereo - if you don't know them, you should definitely check them out) cued up just as I walked into a room full of Modernist paintings, including "Political Drama" by Robert Delaunay:

I think the standard museum setup tends to do some artwork something of a disservice - the setting is too reverential as we silently cast our rueful gazes on the canvas. I think that tends to drain a lot of the vibrancy from the paintings and make you forget that the thing was dreamed up by a living, breathing person just like you or me. But this song broke up the sterility of the museum and unlocked a ton of energy inside the painting. Admittedly, this really isn't the most imaginative pairing - they are both really bright, high-energy works, and the title of the song seems rather obvious given the crazy arrays of colors Delaunay throws at us - but there were other unexpected combos of music and art that brought out subtle qualities in the latter that I might not have noticed otherwise.

So thanks, Jess, for the first museum tip: rock out to some tunes while you look at art. The second museum tip I observed on my trip came from Cookie Monster. This song comes from an old one-hour Sesame Street special that was a favorite around the Tanner house, and it's some pretty solid museum-going advice:

Out of the Fires of Mordor

2011-11-12T15:49:00.000-05:00

Back in 2009, I grew a mustache for a production of Albert Herring at the University of Michigan which inadvertently gave one of my students a panic attack. After that I made a vow:

[N]ow I realize that this mustache is actually very dangerous and has the potential to unleash much pain and psychological anguish on the world, like Pandora's Box or The One Ring... [I]t must be destroyed (possibly in the fires of Mordor, although that sounds like a lot of work) before it has a chance to harm anyone else.

Well, the mustache is back again, and hopefully this time I can harness its powers for good rather than evil. I am a member of Yahoo!'s Movember team. Movember is an organization that was founded in Australia to help raise money for cancer prevention:

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I had a beard in October (which turned into a goatee for Halloween), but according to the Movember rules I had to start November 1st clean-shaven. Here's the 'stache on day eight:

So as you can see, this 'stache rocks a lot harder than my previous 'staches. And that's only after eight days - I can't wait to see how awesome it will be by the end of the month.

If you would like to donate to the Movember cause in my name, you may do so on my Movember profile page: http://mobro.co/opticwalrus

"I am the one who knocks!"

2011-11-06T13:00:00.000-05:00

We had a costume contest at work for Halloween, and I had Breaking Bad on the mind since it recently wrapped up its stellar fourth season. A similarly Breaking Bad-obsessed co-worker and I decided to go as a pair of characters from the show: I as Walter White, the lead character, and he as Tio Hector Salamanca, a old man confined to a wheelchair and a respirator, whose only way of communicating with others is to ring a bell (once for yes, twice for no). I went to the trouble of securing a wheelchair and bell for him - all he had to do was find a bathrobe. But on the day of the contest he was like, "Sorry man, didn't have time to get one." I was a little disappointed, but we got our picture taken for the contest anyways:

I didn't think we would have a chance in the costume contest for the same reason that I didn't expect to win a prize for my gelatina colorida earlier last month - when you put forth something that people are less familiar with (such as a kind of strange Brazilian gelatin dessert or characters from a critically acclaimed but largely unknown T.V. show), you run the risk of marginalizing your chances for recognition. In fact, one of the members of the judging panel IM'ed me during their deliberations saying that they didn't know who we were supposed to be (I sent them some YouTube links). However, I've kind of made it my life's mission to champion lesser-known but worthy works, be it through my Brian Presents: film lectures, the music I program on my voice recitals, or even the Halloween costumes that I choose. And I was actually surprised by the number of people at work who saw us and started to gush about how much they too love Breaking Bad.

Much to my delight, the day after the contest I arrived at work to find an the results sitting in my inbox: Best Original Costume, baby! I ended up getting a really nice Yahoo!-branded gym bag for my efforts. All in all, I brought in a very impressive haul of free stuff through Yahoo! in the month of October:

For those of you playing "I Spy," items include: a gym bag, a cake pan and quiche pans (for the dessert contest), two Yahoo! Oktoberfest glasses, a mug from a product launch, a portable charcoal grill that I won in a raffle, a bound notebook, and a t-shirt. Pity - I forgot to include the "Awesome Costume" ribbon that I also won for my Breaking Bad ensemble.

Note: The title of this post refers to Trick or Treating! Or to this clip. It's up to you!

Year of Songs: It Started Feeling Like October

2011-10-29T21:00:00.000-04:00

Answer me this: why do we have September, November, and December, but we have October? Shouldn't it be Octember? And aren't all the prefixes on these months off by two? "Sept-" means seven, but September is the ninth month. "Oct-" means eight, and it's the tenth month. Shouldn't "November" and "December" refer to the ninth and tenth months, respectively?

Perhaps we'll never solve all the mysteries surrounding Octember... er, October. On to the playlist:

October - Broken Bells

I knew I was going to love Broken Bells even before I heard a note of their music. How could I not love a collaboration between James Mercer (the lead singer/guitarist/songwriter from The Shins) and Danger Mouse (producer of some of my favorite albums of the past decade by the likes of Beck, Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley*, and The Good, the Bad, and the Queen)? Their debut album was one of my favorite albums of last year.

Annie Use Your Telescope - Jack's Mannequin

A recommendation from Brady Emmett**, who very punctually filed this suggestion back in August:
"I've been sitting on this all year! My absolute favorite Jack's Mannequin song is 'Annie Use Your Telescope' (Also, saw him live in concert last night. Awesome!) 'It started feeling like October...'"

Outubro - Milton Nascimento

Milton Nascimento is one of the giants of Brazilian popular music, along with legends like Gal Costa (flimsy excuse to brag about meeting her again). "Outubro," as you can probably guess, means "October."

Gloria - U2

This is from October, U2's second album, released in 1981. There is a track named "October" on the album that would have been more apropos, but it's this dull, mostly instrumental track that I invariably skip over. I much prefer "Gloria," which may be the best rock song with a chorus in Latin.

Miss You - Blink-182

Not a Blink-182 fan, but I've always liked this song. This was also on my "Obliquely Christmas" playlist, due to the line, "We'll have Halloween on Christmas." Speaking of mixing Halloween and Christmas...

This is Halloween - From The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Remains of the Day - From Corpse Bride

Danny Elfman and Tim Burton bring a very Halloween-y vibe to a lot of their collaborations. Corpse Bride is obviously less Halloween-related than The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I actually like "The Remains of the Day" better than any song in Nightmare. And it is performed by a bunch of animated skeletons, for goodness' sake.

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah - Tracy Jordan (From 30 Rock)

Forget "Monster Mash" or any other Halloween novelty party songs. This is the Halloween novelty party song to end all Halloween novelty party songs. This was originally a seven second long cutaway gag on an episode of 30 Rock:

Thankfully the writers*** fleshed it out to a full-length song, which you can hear on the playlist above. Mazel tov!

******************

As always, if you have any song suggestions for November (or December), please leave them in the comments below.

* The Gnarls Barkley song I linked to above ("Online") is built around a sample from "Welcome to the Rain," a minor hit by long-forgotten Portland band Mid Day Rain. (Click here for a side-by-side comparison of the songs.) The song was written in 1970 by the band's bassist, Scott Davis, who I know better as "Bishop Davis." Check out the original song:

Admit it - my bishop is cooler than yours (provided you have a bishop). What's funny is that he had no idea that Gnarls Barkley had sampled his song until a few months ago when I told him and played him a little bit of the track. He said that the copyright expired after 25 years, so he didn't get any financial windfall from the sampling. However, the original profits from the song helped him pay for his mission.

** Happy birthday to Brady on Halloween!

*** "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" was written by Donald Glover, a former 30 Rock staff writer who is now better known as Troy on Community.

Step Right Up

2011-10-22T22:00:00.000-04:00

Saturday, October 8:
Michigan vs. Northwestern, Thirsty Lion Pub in Portland

Saturday, October 15:
Oregon State vs. Brigham Young, Reser Stadium in Corvallis, OR

Saturday, October 22:
Utah vs. Cal, Macadam's Grill in Portland

Funny how prior to 2007 I actually flaunted my ignorance of/indifference toward football, yet suddenly it is my Saturday activity of choice.

I went down to Corvallis last weekend with my sister and two of her boys to see the Beaver game. However, my favorite part of the trip actually happened before the game. They had a bunch of booths and carnival-type games set up in front of the stadium, including one of those "swing the hammer, ring the bell" games with free t-shirts for the victors. I'm pretty wimpy and I was sure I'd make a fool of myself, but I can't resist the allure of a free t-shirt, so I stepped right up:

Boo-yah! With my new Emblem of Manliness I felt pretty good about myself. I wore it to work this week and told my manager how I had won the shirt where other burlier men had failed. His response? "You do know that the game operators can change the resistance, right? A lot of times they like to mess with the burly guys and let the wusses win."

Huh. So maybe my Emblem of Manliness is actually a Stigma of Wussiness. But hey, free t-shirt!

SST: Geometry of Circles

2011-10-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Last month Bob Boilen, host of one of my favorite podcasts (All Songs Considered), posted a memory on his NPR blog about his days as a director of the NPR program All Things Considered. It was his job to select appropriate, mood-setting music to play between segments, which was never more difficult than on September 11, 2001. He ended up choosing this piece by minimalist composer Philip Glass:

He later gave a talk where he explained why he chose this particular piece on that day:

"I wasn't going to play very dramatic music... I wasn't going to play music that had a lot of baggage to it... Not a famous Mozart or a Beethoven piece that was heavy or weighty... [Instead I played] a piece that didn't have a beginning, middle, and an end, because that is how I sometimes think about minimalist music, where it is just this mood that falls and happens... And it was just right... All of a sudden there was a place to breathe...... People didn't need more emotion, they just needed time to think."

Although I had studied many of Philip Glass's works in depth as a music major in college and had seen many films that he has scored, I was unfamiliar with this particular piece. As I listened to it for the first time there was something about it that pushed out a lot of clutter in my mind and brought in a lot of clarity. I was recently able to track down the CD on which it is found, Glassworks, and I have been listening to it a lot over the last week, especially at work, where I have found that it makes me incredibly productive.

Little did I know* that my first exposure to Philip Glass came at a very young age via a series of pieces called "Geometry of a Circle" that he composed in 1979 specifically for Sesame Street:

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*I wouldn't have realized this was Glass without an assist from my friend Peter. He emailed me about this a while ago, saying, "in retrospect, [this is] pretty crazy for a kid's show."

Vindicated!

2011-10-04T22:09:00.001-04:00

I was in Chicago in 1994 … and at this time I had no thoughts of coming back and playing the game of basketball. Bryon Russell came over to me and said, ‘Why’d you quit? You know I could guard you. If I ever see you in a pair of shorts …’

When I did come back in 1995 and we played Utah in ‘96, I’m at the center circle and Bryon Russell is standing next to me. I said, "You remember the [comments] you made in 1994 about, ‘I think I can guard you, I can shut you down, I would love to play against you? Well, you’re about to get your chance."

The quote above comes from Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame induction speech, in which we learned that what drove him to greatness was petty grudges based on past slights.

Likewise, I have held a petty grudge since Memorial Day weekend 2008 that has served as given me motivation. I quote my own blog:

...on Sunday night our ward FHE activity was a Jell-O competition, I am holding my entry in that same picture on the left - Gelatina Colorida. It's a dessert I had frequently in Brazil, consisting of various colors of Jell-O cubed and then encased in a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, heavy cream, and unflavored gelatin... There were only seven entries in the contest and there were five grand prizes and mine failed to win any of them. Even a plate of lemon Jell-O with peas and string beans in it, which even its creator declared inedible, won a prize. The only other participant who didn't win a prize was Brady Emmett, and his dish didn't even have Jell-O in it (it was tapioca pudding). They did invent an honorary award for my dish ("Most Least American"), but My Gelatina Colorida losing out on the real awards was the biggest snub since The Color Purple went 0 for 11 at the 1986 Oscars.

Flash forward to today. At work we had a purple dessert competition (it is Yahoo!, after all), and I once again made Gelatina Colorida, only this time I only used purple Jell-O to fit the theme. I even painstakingly carved out the Yahoo! logo into the purple Jell-O with a knife. I was afraid that once again the American palettes of the judges might not understand my dish.

However, near the end of the day the contest results popped up in my inbox:

Like before, an additional award was created for me, but unlike the condescending "Most Least American" (which I admit is pretty clever), instead they gave this more flattering qualification: "Given the array of yummy creations this year, we were actually able to add another prize to honor a 4th place winner as well!" My prize? A cake pan with a cover and handle, and a set of quiche pans. Score!

So kids, always hold grudges ;)

Year of Songs: September of My Years

2011-09-30T23:00:00.000-04:00

September Song &
September of My Years - Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra turned 50 in 1965, and to mark the occasion he recorded the incredibly reflective and age-conscious album September of My Years. Just a glance at the song titles betrays his preoccupation with his age: "How Old Am I?" "Last Night When We Were Young," "The Man in the Looking Glass." The track "It Was a Very Good Year" (the "when I was seventeen..." song) went on to be one of the songs most associated with Sinatra, but for my money the real showstopper on the disc is his performance of the Kurt Weill standard "September Song." So many other singers interpret this song in a glib way, but Sinatra gives it a gravity that makes it profoundly moving.

"September of My Years" is the the album's one newly composed tune, and I have also included it here. It's a nice song, but a little bit on the nose thematically (and some of the lyrics read as a little bit creepy in 2011).

Into the Fire &
You're Missing - Bruce Springsteen
A very different album that came to mind for September was Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, inspired by and recorded soon after 9/11. As the Rolling Stone review put it, "The music is often fierce in its execution, but in essence it is a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them."

"Into the Fire" contains a lot of grief, but it has a surprisingly uplifting chorus. "You're Missing," on the other hand, is just devastatingly sad - a rumination on the negative space left behind by all the lives lost on September 11th.

September Gurls - Big Star
How about a nice upbeat song for a change? Sorry Katy Perry, but Big Star beat you to the misspelling of "gurls" by forty years - this song was released in 1974.

Big Star is one of those bands that a lot of my favorite bands name-check when listing their influences, and I only recently decided to check them out for myself and I liked what I heard - very Byrds-y, which is cool by me.

The Bangles recorded a surprisingly faithful cover of this song in the 80's:

Wake Me Up When September Ends - Green Day
This song drove me crazy when it came out, but revisiting it now after 7 years (wow - time flies) it's kind of grown on me.

This song continues the "sleep through entire months" theme from the previous Year of Songs post. Who knew there were so many songs on this theme? I feel pressure to find ones for October, November, and December. My favorite song on this theme, however, has to be Belle and Sebastian's "Sleep the Clock Around":

September in the Rain - Dinah Washington
This is a standard covered by a lot of great singers, but I saw an interview today with Tony Bennett in which he compared Amy Winehouse to Dinah Washington, so I thought I'd pick Dinah Washington's version. And it's great.

Try to Remember (The Kind of September) - From The Fantasticks
This is one of the most common songs that voice teachers assign to beginning students. Having lived in that world for many years, I'm actually a little burned out on it. However, hearing this recording while assembling this playlist was actually the first time that I'd ever heard a well-trained singer doing this song. Guess what - turns out it's actually a nice little song.

See You in September - Frankie Avalon & the Four Seasons
In my high school choir we practiced an arrangement of this song for several weeks, and then the choir teacher was like, "Nevermind. Let's not do that one." That's my sole connection to this song.

September - Jessye Norman
And we'll end with this gorgeous lied by Richard Strauss. By the time Strauss wrote this song in 1948, no one was writing lush, Wagnerian music like this anymore - most serious composers had moved on to writing increasingly atonal music. Strauss himself had been at the forefront of the movement towards atonality with his shocking opera Salome in 1905. However, I think it's kind of beautiful that at age 84, when writing his very last songs ("September" comes from a set that is called Vier letzte Lieder [Four Last Songs] and they are literally his last compositions) Strauss returned to the Romantic style of his youth.

In case you're wondering who Richard Strauss is, allow me to jog your memory with what is no doubt his most famous work:

By the way, I picked Jessye Norman's recording of "September" for two reasons: 1) It's exquisite, and 2) She's probably the greatest singer to ever come out of the University of Michigan. Go Blue!

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As always, if you have any song suggestions for October, please leave them below in the comments. (Especially if you know of a song about sleeping through the whole month of October.)

A Part of the Main

2011-09-11T15:52:00.000-04:00

I have a friend at Yahoo! who is originally from the Ann Arbor area, went to school at the University of Michigan, and is fanatical about Michigan Wolverines football. He told me that there is a pub in downtown Portland that shows every Michigan game and that a healthy crowd of Michigan alums turn up for the occasion. I work during the day on Saturdays so normally I wouldn't be able to attend, but yesterday was the much ballyhooed first night game ever in Michigan Stadium, so after work I headed down to The Thirsty Lion to check out the game.

Ann Arbor, Michigan is roughly 1,934 miles from here. Prior to this afternoon, I would have never imagined that a scene like this could ever take place in Portland, Oregon:

I asked the man distributing the University of Michigan Alumni Association name tags (yes, they had name tags, and yes, they are an official branch of the Alumni Association) how many Michigan fans were at the bar, and he said well over two hundred.

The atmosphere at the pub was electric. That was mostly due to the game, which was one of the most dramatic sporting events I have ever watched (see a video recap here): there were three touchdowns and lead changes in the final 1:12, and Michigan came from behind to seal the victory with a mere two seconds left on the clock. At that moment, the pub burst into utter pandemonium. Everyone in the place, myself included, was bouncing up and down, screaming, hugging and/or high-fiving every perfect stranger within 10 feet, and of course, singing "Hail to the Victors" at the top of our lungs.

However, there was something besides the game that made the night feel so special. Looking around at all the alums young and old (some very old) clad in Michigan Maize and Blue, it made me feel like I was a part of something so much larger than myself. The Alumni Association's website states: "With more than 460,000 living Michigan alumni, the Alumni Association represents one of the largest alumni bodies in the world." I feel a tremendous amount of pride to be a Wolverine, and though I know but a small fraction of them, I feel a strong connection to the 460,000 others out there.

Michigan football is one of the primary channels through which I feel that connection. It's not like I have a strong connection to football in general - I had never actually watched a football game of any sort before I moved to Ann Arbor, and the team had three of the most regrettable seasons in its storied history while I was a student there. Regardless, Michigan football seems to transcend time and circumstance and reach into something deeper inside me. (Judging by my Facebook news feed immediately after the game, a whole lot of my Michigan friends share this sentiment.) Even before the game, as I watched the players run out onto the field and jump up to touch the "GO BLUE" banner as part of their pregame ritual, I had goosebumps.

The elation I felt after my communal experience watching Michigan's dramatic victory was a stark change from how I had been feeling earlier in the day. In the course of my work I land on the Yahoo! homepage frequently, and in the past few weeks they have been featuring a lot of content commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Part of the way through the day I clicked on a photo slideshow called "9/11: The 25 Most Powerful Photos." As I clicked through the photos and read the captions, I had a breakdown and began to cry at my desk.

I spent September 11, 2001 in Campinas, Brazil as a missionary. It was a Tuesday morning, so we went to a district meeting as usual. Afterwards, (Elder) Sam Green, my missionary companion at the time, and I had lunch with a woman from church. Early on in the lunch I remember her saying that she had seen something strange on the TV. She asked, "What's the name of that really big city in America?" I said, "Uh, New York?" "Yeah, that's the one," she answered. "What's the name of the really tall, famous building there?" I thought for a moment. "The Empire State Building, maybe?" To which she replied, "Yeah, I think that's it. I saw on TV that it got bombed or fell over or something." I thought she must have been confused or was maybe talking about a movie that was on TV.

Halfway through the meal the we got a phone call from the bishop saying that we needed to stop everything and get over to his house immediately. I don't believe he even mentioned what the reason was. So we hurried over to Bishop Sérgio's place where the news was playing. I was totally stunned - it didn't seem like it was real. The whole thing felt so distant - it was happening in a country that was so far away, being reported on the TV in a language that was not my native tongue.

The Brazilian news didn't seem to have very much footage. They kept looping the same piece of video taken from the street level looking up at the second tower as it exploded. The camera then whipped back down to focus on a man with a look of sheer terror on his face who collapsed as if his nerves had stopped firing the necessary messages to his muscles in order for him to stay standing. They showed that man collapsing over and over and over again, and I remember thinking of the scripture in Luke about "men's hearts failing them for fear" in the last days.

I don't remember exactly how long we stayed there watching the news - an hour, maybe two hours. The bishop wanted us to stay longer and keep watching (I think he understood that we needed to let it sink in), but I remember thinking that there was nothing we could do about it, so we should probably just get back to work.

The life of a missionary is very disconnected from the media, so a lot of what I heard about life in America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was through my parents' letters. They talked about how people displayed flags everywhere, how everyone became nicer, and how the country as a whole had been brought together by the tragedy. However, by the time I got back home to the United States in July of 2002, the country had already started to move on, which left me feeling like I never had a chance to be a part of what is perhaps the defining American experience of my lifetime. And in a weird way I have felt like there is an essential component of American-ness that I have been missing because of that.

Do you remember Charlie Brown's opening monologue from A Charlie Brown Christmas, where he laments that he doesn't understand The True Meaning of Christmas? Here's a refresher:

If you substitute 9/11 for Christmas, that's how I have felt for the past 10 years:

"I think there must be something wrong with me... I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand 9/11, I guess."

For the past few weeks I have been following the 9/11 retrospectives in the media particularly closely because I saw it as an opportunity to gain some great insight into The True Meaning of 9/11. When I clicked on that photo slideshow at work, I was overwhelmed by how fresh and raw it all felt to me, having never seen any of the images before. I went through so many emotions in a matter of minutes - terror, anger, sadness at the loss of life and our country's loss of innocence.* I felt my heart ache for the victims, for their families, for the survivors covered in ashes, for the brave ones pulling bodies out of the rubble, for the men whose hearts failed them for fear, and for our great nation.

You may think it odd that a post about Michigan football veered off into a "Where Were You on 9/11" story. I had originally planned a much more straightforward post about how I feel on the 10th anniversary of the attack. However, on the drive home from the pub last night I was thinking about the extremes of my day, and how both a football team and the commemoration of a national tragedy had made me feel like I am connected to something larger than myself. I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing 9/11, but something about sharing that experience with all those Michigan alums in a pub thousands of miles away from that football game helped me make some sense out of my feelings about 9/11.

I didn't know a thing about Michigan football until September 2007, yet I still feel like I have some kind of place inside of that tradition. I've been an American my whole life (and a proud one to boot). Although I wasn't physically located in the country on 9/11 and my missionary calling prevented me from following the media coverage of the aftermath, I think I can rest from my search for The True Meaning of 9/11 because on this day I do feel a strong connection to my fellow Americans.

*While I was writing this post, I saw a note pop up in my Facebook news feed written by my friend Bryan, whose 9/11 story is eerily similar to my own (on a mission in Brazil at the time, never felt like he processed it, broke down this week while looking at a photo slideshow, our two names are homophones, etc.). In his brief note he expressed some thoughts that are very similar to what I have written here. He articulated a few things so well that I hope he doesn't mind that I have borrowed some of his phrasing. Seeing his note was a really unexpected moment of feeling a connection to someone.

Note - I took the title of this post from a well-known poem by John Donne:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

SST: The Yellow Yahoo

2011-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A few weeks ago I got a big purple box in the mail. When I opened it up, it made this sound:

Enclosed was a purple Yahoo!-branded t-shirt, a folder stuffed with information about benefits plans, and a offer of full-time employment. I have to give Yahoo! a lot of credit - they know how to make their employees feel cool and wanted.

As I have previously mentioned in this space, when I was first hired by Yahoo!, I was just a temporary contractor hired through an outside agency. I worked for Yahoo! Brasil for 4 months, and then they extended my temporary contract and moved me over to the US Mail Tech team, where I have been for about three months. Effective August 29th, they decided to "roll me over," or make me an actual Yahoo! employee rather than just a contractor through an agency. This is great because I don't have to worry about whether they would extend my contract again when the current one runs out. Plus I am now eligible for benefits and bonuses, and I got a nice little pay bump too.

While I have missed working with my Latin American buddies (I still go to lunch with them every day), I have enjoyed working on the US team. In fact, my unique position as one who has worked on both the Latin American and US teams has put me in a position to be very useful. At my behest, my bosses have given me the unofficial title of "Latin American Ambassador," meaning that anytime the US team receives new policies or content or resources, I inform the Latin American team, give tutorials, and sometimes translate documents into Portuguese.

When the US Mail Team gets really backlogged, we have a bunch of helpers that we can pull in from all over the site to help us out. However, when the Brazil team gets backlogged, I am the only person on the site who can help them because of the language barrier. That combined with my "Latin American Ambassador" responsibilities make my job really satisfying because I feel like I have something unique to contribute to the company.

So I too must yodel "Ya-HOOOO-ooo!" for having a secure employment. Too bad this guy is not purple, or Yahoo! could use him as their company mascot:

Year of Songs: August and Everything Before

2011-08-31T00:01:00.005-04:00

I seem to have gotten a little bit behind, eh? Let's lump the summer months together:

August:
August Day Song - Bebel Gilberto
Bebel Gilberto is musical royalty in Brazil - her father João and mother Astrud, along with composer Tom Jobim, practically invented the sound of bossa nova on immortal classics such as "The Girl from Ipanema" (I posted my performance of it here). I really like Bebel - she stays true to the spirit of bossa but gives it a nice modern feel.

August - Rilo Kiley
Sure, Jenny Lewis has done pretty well for herself as a member of Rilo Kiley and as a solo artist, but she reached her peak as an artist at age thirteen when she co-starred in the cinematic masterpiece/shameless Nintendo propaganda film The Wizard:

Perfect Blue Buildings - Counting CrowsMy favorite song off of the once-ubiquitous August and Everything After. Plus, the lyric "so help me stay awake, I'm falling asleep in perfect blue buildings" fits in well with the oversleeping theme in "Lorelai" and "July" (see below).

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine - Bob Dylan
Stretching the August thing a little bit, here's a favorite Dylan tune.

July:

Tears of Rage - Bob Dylan and The Band
Tears of Rage - The Band
One Headlight - Wallflowers
Speaking of Dylan, here's a trilogy of Independence Day-related Dylan songs:
• The song "Tears of Rage" opens with the line "We carried you in our arms on Independence Day." Bob Dylan made the demo-style recording of this song heard here with The Band in 1967 without any plans of ever releasing it. It eventually surfaced on the 1975 collection The Basement Tapes, which is probably my favorite Dylan album.
• The Band then reworked the song extensively and released it in 1968 as the first track on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, one of my all-time favorite albums.
• Jakob Dylan, son of Bob, references Independence Day on one of my high school favs, "One Headlight."
Lorelai - Fleet Foxes
Speaking of Dylan again, this July-related song sounds remarkably like the 1965 Bob Dylan song "4th Time Around." It also reminds me of my girls.

July - Low
The previous song said, "I slept through July," but this one takes oversleeping to an even greater extreme: "They'll never wake us in time Maybe we'll wait 'til July Then August, September October, November or December."

If you don't know Low, check out the fantastic "Try to Sleep," released earlier this year. I couldn't stop listening to it for weeks.

1° de Julho (First of July) - Legião Urbana
My favorite Brazilian rock band. A few weeks ago I played a solo acoustic set at Best Buy (yeah, you read that right) and I did a guitar/harmonica cover of their song "Teatro dos Vampiros (Theater of the Vampires)." If songwriter Renato Russo had written his songs in English, we'd rank him among Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, and the rest of the great rock lyricists.

Christmas in July - Sufjan Stevens
Suggestion from Amy J: "If you hadn't already thought of it, I think you should include Sufjan Stevens' 'Christmas in July' on your upcoming blog post - it feels like kind of a nice mid-year homage to the Christmas playlist that inspired the year in songs."

June:
June is Busting Out - Benny Goodman
The first song that popped into my head when I thought of June songs. This is from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, but in the context of the show it's way to hard to extract it from the surrounding music and have it stand alone. So I'm glad I found this swingin' Benny Goodman version from 1945 (the same year Carousel opened).

Ghost Town - The Specials
Like "Ohio" on the May Year of Songs playlist, this song was written, recorded, and released at whirlwind speed in June, 1981 in reaction to events that left a nation in shock. In this case the song was written about a rash of race riots that raged all over England that summer, causing the police to enforce a strict curfew in some cities. "This town is coming like a ghost town, all the clubs have been closed down... Bands won't play no more, too much fighting on the dance floor."

Despite its unfortunate origins, this song is just all kinds of awesome and I wanted to find some way to sneak it onto this playlist. Easily my favorite song from my birth year.

Surfin' U.S.A.
"We can't wait for June!" A few months ago I taught a group guitar lesson to nine kids ranging from 8-11 years of age and we learned this song. My song choice at a previous group lesson hadn't gone over very well ("Love Me Do," since the majority of the song has just 2 chords), so I was thrilled that some of them had actually had heard it before - they had learned it in school - and that they liked it (Hey Mikey!).

June Hymn - Decemberists
Back in January they gave us "January Hymn," and now "June Hymn." Even their name is month-y.

A Couple of Swells - Fred Astaire and Judy Garland
A song that lumps the summer months together, just I have done in this post: "In June, July, and August we look cute when we're dressed in shorts." This is most famously used in the film Easter Parade (mentioned in a previous Year of Songs post):

Bonus June Track:
I'll Be On My Way - The Beatles
As I have noted in the past, Grooveshark doesn't seem to have any Beatles recordings in their catalogue. This is a nice little rarity from the Live at the BBC collection released in the '90s. As the album title suggest, this Lennon/McCartney original was recorded live for a radio show, and the Beatles never did make a studio recording of it:

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Believe it or not, September is an extremely fertile month for songs, so hopefully I'll get that one up before the last day of the month. As always, if you have a song suggestion for next month, please let me know in the comments below!

Happy Trails

2011-08-25T19:06:00.001-04:00

For my final Master's recital back in 2007, I did an entire program of extended oratorio excerpts: all of the character Jonathan's arias from Handel's Saul, the first big recitative and aria from Beethoven's Christ on the Mount of Olives, and, most ambitiously, the entire first half of Sir Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.

The Dream of Gerontius is a criminally underappreciated masterwork on a truly epic, Wagnerian scale. In my recital, I sang the role of Gerontius, and I recruited friends from the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City to be the choir (a shout-out to my pianist Emily as well). Most of the first half of the piece is an extended musical monologue for the character of Gerontius with occasional interjections from the chorus. Gerontius is on his deathbed, contemplating the eternal fate of his soul before finally giving up the ghost just before the end of the first half of the work. Seconds after he slips away ("Into Thy hands, oh Lord," he sings), a Priest (a baritone, sung by my friend Tyler at my recital) enters and initiates a glorious chorus to send the spirit of Gerontius off into the next life:

Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God
The Omnipotent Father, Who created thee!
Go, in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the Living God, Who bled for thee!
Go, in the Name of the Holy Spirit,
Who Hath been poured out on thee!

I don't even have words to describe how powerfully this music affects me. For me it thrillingly captures the majesty of this scripture from The Book of Mormon:

Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection—Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life. (Alma 40:11)

Gerontius came to mind two weeks ago when I heard that my grandpa had died. He was 95, had led a rich, full life, had accomplished everything he wanted to do in life, and was healthy up until the end when he slipped away gently in his sleep. He was a tremendously hard-working man, and left an incredible legacy of righteousness for his family. If there is anyone that could feel prepared to return to God, I think it was Grandpa Tanner.

I was asked to perform a musical number at the funeral, and my mind first went to something classical along the lines of Gerontius or old funeral standbys like "O Divine Redeemer" or "You'll Never Walk Alone." Though the sentiments found in those pieces are certainly fitting for the great man that was my grandpa, the music just isn't his style. My grandpa was a cowboy:

So Grandma Tanner (also 95) suggested that Grandpa would have wanted cowboy songs at his funeral. I immediately jumped on board with her suggestion and prepared a medley of cowboy songs mixed in with the hymn "How Great Thou Art." Thematically I thought it worked really well: "How Great Thou Art" expresses wonder at the magnificence of the world that Heavenly Father created for us, and one of the ways that Grandpa partook of that magnificence was out riding his horses.

He loved these old songs too - I remember riding around in his truck accompanied by the sounds of The Sons of the Pioneers and other singers from that era. Here are the two Cowboy songs I mixed into the medley, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and "Cool Water":

I was really proud of the arrangement I put together, but I was afraid that people wouldn't get it, or worse, think it was inappropriate that I was up at the front of the chapel with a guitar singing lines like, "I'm a roamin' cowboy, ridin' all day long." I felt good about my performance, but I returned to my pew feeling uncertain about its reception until my uncle Don got up to speak. "I was doing okay 'til Brian got up," he began. "Brian, thank you for capturing the heart and soul of Dad. He loved horses and Heavenly Father. That was beautiful. Thank you."

At that point I just started bawling. I loved and admired my grandpa and I really wanted to honor him. My uncle's comments confirmed that the message of my song - "horses and Heavenly Father" - had been received.

There was one more musical number besides mine, performed just before the closing prayer - a duet with guitar of the old cowboy classic "Happy Trails":

Happy trails, Grandpa, until we meet again.

Red Ryder BB Gun

2011-07-10T17:38:00.000-04:00

Ralphie knows exactly what he wants:

He doesn't just want any old BB Gun, he wants "an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot range model air rifle." When I was a kid a remember how specific I was about things that I wanted, too. However, as I have gotten older I seem to have gotten less specific about certain things that I want. For instance, when I was shopping around for a new guitar, I had a few criteria that I was looking for (steel string, cutaway, acoustic/electric), but I didn't have a specific brand or model number in mind before I eventual settled on Tigrão.

However, over the last few months I rediscovered how fun it is to want something really specific and make plans to get it. I'm grateful to Mike McMurtrey for bequeathing Laddie the Laptop to me, but he wasn't exactly top of the line when I got him and he's gone steadily downhill since then. Observe:

The hinges that hold up the screen broke beyond repair, so for a while I could only use the computer if I first found a sturdy object to lean the screen against. However, my brother-in-law Tom, a highly skilled mechanical engineer, rigged me up a piece of string duct-taped to the top and bottom of the computer to make the thing a little more portable (and making it into an object of great curiosity for onlookers).

The battery was shot before I got the computer, so whenever I used it I had to have it plugged in. However, the power source's cord became so frayed that I had to strip the paper off part of a twist tie and wrap the metal around the exposed wires to complete the circuit. It was always very temperamental - sometimes I had to tweak the tightness or placement of the twist tie for 5 minutes before that dang green power light would finally come on.

But this is all external and says nothing of the computer's performance. Let's say I wanted to open Word. After double-clicking the icon, I could take a bathroom break, go out and check the mailbox, and pour myself a bowl of cereal in about the time that it would take Word to load. The total size of the hard drive was about 27 GB, so I had to store a lot of my pictures on a flash drive and crank down the bit rate of my MP3 files to 64 kbps (ridiculously low) just so that I could fit them on my hard drive.

For 8 of the 9 years that I was in college I never had a computer and I did all my computing at school computer labs, which at both Utah and Michigan were populated almost exclusively with Macs. I got so used to Macs that when I came into possession of a PC I found myself wondering why certain things about it had to be so annoying and why couldn't it just work smoothly like a Mac.

So you could say that my Red Ryder BB Gun has been a Macbook Pro. They are not the cheapest things, but luckily my Michigan student ID card does not expire until 2015, so I was able to get a nice student discount. I actually waited for about six weeks before my purchase because I was told by Apple employees that during the summer they would run a back-to-school special wherein they give away a free iPod Touch (a $229 value) with each computer purchase. However, much to my chagrin, the Apple employees were wrong; the promotion was changed this year to be a $100 gift card to the Mac App store. Bleh. Oh well, I'll hang onto it and maybe it will be useful at some point in the future. And they did throw in a free printer, so that was cool.

My MacBook* has been really fun so far. My favorite thing to mess around with right now is Garage Band, a music recording program. I picked up some cables and adapters so that I can plug my guitar straight into the computer - my two big toys plugging into each other. Over the last year and a half I've made a lot of recordings of me playing my guitar and singing with the crude little microphone and voice memos tool on my iPod**, so compared to that Garage Band is like having a whole laboratory where I can add all kinds of effects to my acoustic guitar or voice and layer multiple tracks on top of each other.

I've never been the kind of guy who usually splurges on big toys, but so far it's been great and fun and I have no regrets. I just hope I don't shoot my eye out.

*I have yet to give it a proper name. My roommate mistakenly referred to it as a "Mactop" the other day, and I though that was kind of funny. Any other suggestions?

**Which is not as crude as the recording method I used as a teenager, as described in this post. It would be fun to recreate that "Capital I" recording.

SST: Letter B

2011-06-28T18:28:00.006-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

As soon as I heard the release date for season 4 of Mad Men on DVD, I raced to put a hold on it at the public library. Turns out 172 other library patrons beat me to it, but after months of waiting I have finally got my hands on it and so far it has definitely been worth the wait. (Plus, season 5 won't air until sometime in 2012, so this way I'll have less of a gap between the seasons.)

This season takes place in 1964-1965, and one of the season's more delightful moments was young Sally Draper's reaction to the news that her dad had scored tickets to The Beatles' legendary Shea Stadium show:

So today's clip is courtesy of Sesame Street's thinly disguised Beatles parody, "The Beetles." As with many pop culture touchstones, I encountered the Sesame Street version years before I ever heard "Let It Be," and my first reaction to the latter was, "Hey, these guys are ripping off Sesame Street!"

SST: Children's Alphabet

2011-06-07T00:13:00.003-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A classic clip today that I've been looking for forever. It was aired so often that I'm surprised that is the best version I could find.

It's also surprisingly difficult to find the clips where the the kids run around like crazy in fast motion and then lay on the ground to form different letters of the alphabet. (It's very easy, however, to find these later, lame variations on that same idea.)

P.S. - I made a joke about Sam's talking computer on Today's Special at work today and drew blank stares from my coworkers. I know I'm getting older, but many of them are around my same age and surely I'm not the only one who remembers Today's Special. Or am I?

Year of Songs: The Merry/Lusty Month of May

2011-06-06T19:09:00.005-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started a new position at work recently, which has been a little stressful and exhausting. Plus my internet at home has been a little sketchy, so my apologies for not getting this up during the actual month of May. However, at least one blog reader mentioned to me that she noticed on the sidebar that I had added all these songs before May ended, so I'll accept partial credit this month. (The lowest score gets dropped anyways, so it shouldn't affect my final grade.)

Given the wealth of songs about April, I thought I would find a similar amount for May. However, that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you go back to the Renaissance and early Baroque era, when they thought May was the bomb.

Month of May - Arcade Fire

The first song to come to mind, off The Suburbs, the reigning (and surprising) Grammy winner for Album of the Year.

Now is the Month of Maying - The Kings' Singers
The Sweet and Merry Month of May - The Kings' Singers

My two favorite madrigals about May. I could have added several more, but I didn't want to bog down the playlist too much. Like I said above, those madrigalists sure love them some May.

The Lusty Month of May - from Camelot

'Nuff said.

Ohio - Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young

Neil Young wrote this song in response to the Kent State Massacre on Monday, May 4, 1970, when four student protesters were killed by national guardsmen. This raw and emotional recording was recorded live just days after the event and rushed out as a single while the tragedy was still fresh on Americans' minds.

Mammy - Al Jolson

Happy Mother's Day. Al Jolson is so affectionate towards his mom that it's actually a little creepy.

Rapture - Blondie

Alas, May 21st passed and we're all still here. Guess we'll have to keep kicking around until October 21st.

Peach Trees - Rufus Wainwright

"Is true love a long walk through Bryant park, or being held in the month of May under the peach trees?"

Mai (May) - Gabriel Fauré (Op. 1 No. 2)

I performed this piece on my first dissertation recital, which was entitled "A Novel Approach." Befitting the theme, French composer Fauré sets a text by novelist/poet Victor Hugo:

Since May, all in bloom, invites us to the meadows
Come! never tire of mingling with your soul
The countryside, woods, the charming shady places,
The moonlight on the bank of the sleeping waters,
The path that ends where the road begins,
And the air, and Spring and the boundless horizon,
The horizon that this world fastens, humble and joyous
Like a lip at the hem of the sky’s gown!

Pretty flowery, huh?

My Girl - The Temptations

"When it's cold outside, I've got the month of May."

P.S. - I mentioned in my last post that I needed to pick out an alias to sign my English-language Yahoo! responses. I had a few criteria for choosing a name:

1. Something fairly unique and memorable
2. Something reflecting my origins on the Yahoo! Brasil team
3. A female name, to supposedly score higher on customer satisfaction surveys

And the winner is: Amelia. It satisfies all of the above and also has some sentimental value, since the name of the first opera I staged with my student opera group was called "Amelia Goes to the Ball."

Happy D-Day, everybody!

Out of Work

2011-05-27T13:38:00.007-04:00

When I was hired at Yahoo! back in January, it was a temporary contractor position ending on May 31st. They hired me to fill in for one of the Brazilian agents while she was away on maternity leave, but she actually returned several weeks ahead of schedule, giving our Brazil team some much-needed extra manpower. Normally our policy is to respond to customers' emails within 48 hours, but for much of the time I've been working here we've been in such a serious backlog that it was literally taking us 2-3 weeks before we got around to returning some emails. In a lot of those cases we'd find that by the time we got around to their email they had already figured out how to solve their problem on their own, or worse - out of frustration they cancelled their Yahoo! account.

For most of the last month they have been asking us to do as much overtime as possible to help us clear out the backlog. As of this morning we officially hit zero. As in, zero emails waiting for a response. So, to keep us busy they have enlisted us to help the US Mail team with a major backlog problem they are having, but it turns out that I have to be granted permission from IT to be able to access the US Mail server, so I literally cannot do any work until that request is granted. And given my track record with requests from IT, that could take anywhere from 2 hours to 2-3 days. So I am out of work to do right now.

Thankfully, when this contract of mine expires, I will not be out of work.* After a few weeks of working here my boss told me that he was actively looking for a longer-term position for me on other teams outside of Latam (the name of my team - Latin America) that would have staffing vacancies around the end of May. He said that he wanted to help me out by keeping me working longer, but he also had a somewhat selfish interest in keeping me around. Just as today I am being temporarily pulled over to help the US Mail Team with their backlog, around here the different departments will sometimes loan out their employees to other departments if they have a serious need. However, the Brazil team currently doesn't have the option to pull in any extra help because no one outside of the team knows how to read and write in Portuguese. So by keeping me around in a different department he'll be able to pull me over to help with Brazilian emails whenever there is a need.

So effective June 1, I will start working full-time on the aforementioned US Mail Team. For the last few days I've spent a few hours a day shadowing team members over there, and it seems like it should be a fairly easy transition - it's the same work I've been doing all along, but now I'll just be doing it in English instead of Portuguese. I'm bummed that I won't get to stay immersed in Portuguese all day anymore, but in some ways it is kind of a relief. My supervisors have told me that they have been really impressed with my writing and that in some was it even surpasses my native Brazilian counterparts, but I can't escape that Portuguese is not my native language. It will always take me more time and effort to do the same amount of work as them.

But I'm really going to miss my Latam buddies. Our team is really small compared to other teams - 8 people total, 4 Portuguese speakers (3 Brazilians and I) and 4 Spanish speakers (a Mexican, a Cuban, a Peruvian, and a Puerto Rican**) - and we're really tight. We have outings all the time (my favorite was bowling - bowling is not really a Latin American thing so it was amusing to watch them figuring it out), and unlike any other team here we all go to lunch together every single day. But if I have too many saudades*** I can always just walk over to their area for a visit or head off to lunch with them.

Suggestion time: One difference on the US Mail Team is that each agent picks out an alias that they include in the footer of every message they send out. Picking out a new name for myself is not something that I take lightly, so I would love your suggestions and feedback. Speaking of bowling, the name I always enter in the computer when I bowl is "Quinn the Eskimo," so maybe Quinn would be a good name. Or maybe a name that would reflect my origins on the Brazil team, such as Paulo or Marcelo. Or something wacky like Cletus or Hercules (my apologies to any Cletuses or Herculeses - Cleti? Herculi? - that may be among my readership).

Leave your name suggestions in the comments below!

*If you were misled by the title of the post, then I am pleased because that was my intention.
** Just add "walked into a bar" at the end of that and you've got a good setup for a joke.
*** "Saudade" is a very common Portuguese word that doesn't translate very well into English. A close approximation would be "longing" or "yearning," but it's more like a noun version of "to miss" - "I have missings for you."

Update: Still no access to the US server, so I still can't work on anything (although I did do some brief translation work). While composing this post one (1) Brazilian email came in, but someone else on the team snatched it up before I could get to it.

Second update: I have spent the last few hours shadowing US Mail Team agents and though both of them were male, they both used female aliases. They explained that after a customer receives support from us they can fill out a customer satisfaction survey. The scores from those surveys factor into our performance reviews and bonuses. Apparently there is data to suggest that customers give higher scores to female names, so take that into consideration when suggesting names.

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!

2011-05-21T12:40:00.004-04:00

This morning I woke up to a story on NPR about how many believe that today, May 21, 2011, is the day of the Rapture. It caught me totally by surprise (although I would have been prepared if I had been keeping up on my friends' blogs), but then I remembered that I had been alerted about the impending Judgement Day last fall in the parking lot of the Clackamas, Oregon Wal-Mart:

Of course I was a little bit skeptical about this - how could I not be after getting burned before when the doomsday prediction from the opening titles of the 1990 Nintendo game Crystalis failed to come to pass?

P.S. - I really love the word "rapture" because my beloved operetta composing team of Gilbert & Sullivan worked that word into nearly every one of their 14 collaborations, often rhyming it with "capture":

From The Pirates of Penzance:

MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY:
Frederic here! Oh joy! Oh rapture!
Summon your men and effect their capture!

From The Gondoliers:

GIUSEPPE:
I've at length achieved a capture!
This is Tessa! Rapture, rapture!

C HORUS:
Rapture, rapture!

From The Yeomen of the Guard:

DAME CARRUTHERS:
Rapture, rapture
When love's votary,
Flushed with capture,
Seeks the notary,
Joy and jollity
Then is polity;
Reigns frivolity!
Rapture, rapture!

(That last excerpt was perfectly understandable, right?)

And finally, my favorite use of "rapture," from this fantastic bit of dialogue in The Mikado:

NANKI-POO:
But you do not love him?
YUM-YUM:
Alas, no!
NANKI-POO:
Modified rapture!

SST: Dog Paddle Song

2011-05-17T11:58:00.004-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Last weekend my friends Amy and Jess came to visit me here in Portland (as I am the last to blog about it, you can read their accounts here and here). It was a really great time and by far the Portlandiest weekend I've ever had since moving here in November. We basically went through the Portland checklist: foodwise we hit McMenamins and Voodoo Donuts, we did some hipster-watching at a traveling artistic miniature golf installation called Smash Putt: Miniature Golf Apocalypse (here's a video for you to get an idea, except this video was taken in a well-lit building in Seattle - for it's sojourn in Portland they found a dank and dimly lit old building/bar that felt more like a haunted house), we went to the Saturday Market along the Willamette River and caught some local musicians playing, we went to Powell's (the world's largest independent bookstore - 1.6 acres of retail space!), we visited locations where Twilight was filmed and reenacted scenes, and we did much hiking/waterfall looking at-ing in the Columbia Gorge.

While hiking up to Punchbowl Falls we somehow ended up talking about this Sesame Street clip:

Happy Sesame Street Tuesday!

Year of Songs: April After All

2011-04-30T13:17:00.003-04:00

April is such an inspirational month for songwriters that it took me all month to compile this list. There were so many choices that I was able to divide the list into thematic subcategories.

I. Overture:

Avery Island/April 1st - Neutral Milk Hotel
Neutral Milk Hotel is one of those bands that I just discovered within the past few months and wondered, "How come it took me so long to discover this?" Their 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea sounds like it could have been made today and so can hear its influence over current indie rockers. The band is quite fond of instrumentals such as "Avery Island/April 1st", none of which is cooler than this untitled instrumental off the aforementioned album, featuring the rockingest uilleann pipes solo ever:

II. April Holidays:

April Fools - Rufus Wainwright
This April Fool's Day was extra special in that it was my grandpa's 95th birthday. No foolin'!

It was also fun because I showed up at work that day rocking this suave look:

My boss did a legitimate triple take when she saw me. I had never seen a triple take outside of a Cary Grant movie.

Like Ron Sexsmith below, I discovered Rufus Wainwright through Elvis Costello's fantastic interview/concert show "Spectacle" on the Sundance Channel.

Start - The Jam
I wanted to include The Beatles' "Taxman" for Tax Day...

...but unfortunately Grooveshark has no Beatles tracks. So we'll have to settle for "Start!", the Jam's blatant ripoff of "Taxman." The Jam are one of those "huge in Britain, never really broke through in America" bands (think Arctic Monkeys or Robbie Williams) and they have plenty of great tunes that aren't direct ripoffs. Apparently the British public had no qualms about the overt plagiarism because this was a #1 hit in 1980.

Easter Parade - Judy Garland and Fred Astaire
I am the Family Home Evening co-chair for my ward and last week for FHE I pulled a gutsy move and did a Brian Presents:-style showing the 1948 Fred Astaire/Judy Garland classic Easter Parade. I knew that we would lose tons of people after the lesson, but I imagined that we might have 10-12 stick around. Wrong. Just 4. And two of them were me and my co-chair. And another one only stayed because her ride left and I had to take her home afterward.

III. April Tragedies:

Pride (In the Name of Love) - U2
MLK - The King's Singers
Bono has a huge Martin Luther King fixation that comes out in "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "MLK." It always bugged me how Bono rewrites history in this song, unless Bono's definition of "early morning, April 4" is liberal enough to include 6:01 p.m. I actually prefer the King's Singers cover of MLK to U2's original, probably because I sang this arrangement in my high school choir and have an emotional attachment to it.

April 14th, Part I - Gillian Welch
Draws connections between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic. Thanks to Amy J. for the recommendation.

IV. April in Paris:

April in Paris - Billie Holiday
April in Paris - Count Basie Orchestra
Two versions of this tune that totally different. The Count Basie version for its "string of self-initiated encores"* and for Count Basie and his Orchestra's cameo in Blazing Saddles.

*Source: Musicologist Peter Shirts

Une Américaine à Paris - Rupa & the April Fishes
A fun musical discovery at the suggestion of Amy J.

V. April Showers:

April Showers - Al Jolson
This song was requested both by my aunt Barbara and my friend Peter. Though it has been performed by dozens of popular singers of that era, I went with the Al Jolson (best known for his blackface performance in the first-ever "talkie," The Jazz Singer) at Peter's suggestion.

Little April Showers (from Bambi) - Disney Chorus and Orchestra
This was actually the first thing that came to mind when I thought about April songs.

April After All - Ron Sexsmith
Canadian singer/songwriter that I discovered through Elvis Costello's "Spectacle" show on Sundance Channel.

My Own Way - Duran Duran
Thorn of Crowns - Echo and the Bunnymen
Sometimes it Snows in April - Prince
Within this "April Showers" category there's a little '80s sub-genre. Prince raises the stakes though and elevates the showers to snow, which unfortunately happens sometimes.

VI. Apocalyptic April:

Country Disappeared - Wilco
April Skies - The Jesus and Mary Chain
Mad About You - Sting
Most songs about April are about rebirth and spring, but for those of you who like a little bit of apocalyptic imagery in the mix, here are three songs that you might enjoy. Peter Shirts recommended many songs for this list, but surprisingly he did not recommend the Sting song, since he is the man who has written the entry on String for the new edition of Grove's Dictionary of American Music (trust me, it's a big deal).

VII. April and Beyond:

Both of these songs start with April and progress through the coming months.

April, Come She Will - Simon & Garfunkel
Another Peter suggestion.** This was used recently in a very sweet scene on the show Parks and Recreation. (Mild spoiler alert if you're a few weeks behind on your Parks and Rec)

That´s Life - Frank Sinatra
Sinatra, Count Basie, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Billie Holiday, Al Jolson - this playlist has got a lot of old-school legends on it. They must all like April or something.

**Maybe you're noticing a pattern at this point - if you suggest songs to me I will most likely put them on the playlist. So, if you've got suggestions for May song, and there's a lot of them out there, or have any April songs to add to this playlist (even if they don't fit neatly in the predetermined categories), please leave a comment below.

Terrible Life Choice

2011-04-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

My life as a graduate student may be over, but I will still reap the benefits this tax season. Turns out that if you are a doctoral candidate who makes almost no money, the government likes to give you lots of money at tax time. For the record, I did make more than $600 last year, but not that much more (I made more money in my first 6 weeks at Yahoo! than I did all of last year), and my tax refund is equal to about 30% of my total income from last year. I'll take it!

SST: Captain Vegetable

2011-04-12T10:02:00.000-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

It was my nephew Braden's birthday yesterday and I remember singing this song around him recently, so I thought I'd put it up for him.

Happy Sesame Street Tuesday!

My New Axe

2011-03-31T19:12:00.003-04:00

I finally got a new guitar. Up until now the only guitar I had ever owned was the old nylon-string classical guitar my brother-in-law Lance gave me when I was 13 or 14. It has been a perfectly serviceable instrument for all these years and it's great for certain styles of music so I'm definitely planning to hold on to it.

However, during my final year in Ann Arbor I had a guitar affair with my roommate Peter's steel-sting acoustic (with his permission, of course). I would take it out of his room every morning, mess around on it all day, and then stick it back in his room at night (he's an early sleeper so most of the time I just put it back in its case and leaned it up against his door after just before I went to bed). It was much more suitable for the type of stuff I typically play and it had a great feel, but when I left Ann Arbor, I had to say goodbye to it (as seen here).

Ever since then I've been shopping around for a guitar. It turned out that my first paycheck from Yahoo! coincided with a big sale at Guitar Center, and as Homer Simpson's brain once taught us, money can be exchanged for goods and services.

I had four criteria when looking for a new guitar: 1) steel strings (as opposed to nylon like my old guitar), 2) acoustic/electric (meaning you can play it like a normal acoustic guitar but also plug it in), 3) cutaway (a notch cut out of the body to allow greater access to the highest frets), and 4) not a piece of crap (since I conceivably could go another decade or so without buying another guitar and I don't want to bemoan my choice every time I pick it up).

So say hello to my new guitar. I really like the grain of the wood on it. When I first showed it to my nephews one of them called it a tiger guitar, so I've decided to name it"Tigrão" (pronounced "chee-grau(n)"), which has three meanings in Portuguese:

1) Literally, "Big Tiger" - Tigre (tiger) + -ão (big) = Tigrão
2) It's the Portuguese name for Tigger (as in Winnie the Pooh - I suppose you can call my guitar Tigger if you wanted to)
3) It was the name of this awesomely lame, Macarena-style dance craze that swept across Brazil while I was on my mission (Here's a demonstration. Sample lyrics: "Want to dance? Want to dance? Tigrão will teach you... Hammer that hammer, like this, like this," which is of course accompanied by a hammer action.) I started singing it at work one day and all the Brazilians cringed in horror. It was awesome.

A few days after I bought it I had my first chance to bust it out* at the Portland Area LDS Performer's Concert. Here I am playing "If I Loved You" from Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein and "The Girl from Ipanema" by Antônio Carlos Jobim (which some of you may remember as the encore of my all-Brazilian dissertation recital at Michigan):

*If while watching that video you thought to yourself, "Wait a minute, that's not Tigrão! That's an impostor!" well, then you're right. That was the guitar I actually purchased, but after a few days I noticed this faint buzzing sound emanating from the A and low E strings. I took it back and traded it for a much stripier guitar of the same model.

Seen at Safeway

2011-03-22T17:10:00.002-04:00

1. Ranch Pecan Ice Cream

This can't be ranch-flavored ice cream, right? I bought it out of morbid curiosity. Maybe ranch ice cream will be the next big thing!

2. Ezekiel 4:9 Cereal
This cereal is either being marketed to religious zealots or hippies. True to the name of the cereal, the box art incorporates the first half of the Old Testament verse:

Ezekiel 4:9 - Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and ^afitches [OR spelt (a type of wheat)] and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof...

Q. How can you prevent Brian from buying a cereal named Ezekiel 4:9 despite his curiosity?
A. Charge $6.29 for it!

SST: Heeeeere Fishy Fishy Fishy!

2011-03-22T00:17:00.003-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

My friend Elizabeth recently turned me on to a weekly podcast called "Pop Culture Happy Hour," a loose, funny roundtable discussion among four members of the NPR arts and entertainment staff. Recently they devoted an entire show to things from pop culture that children should not miss out on, eliciting such suggestions as The Muppet Show, Fantasia, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, They Might Be Giants, and Schoolhouse Rock. One answer given by panelist Stephen Thompson really resonated with me: "General advice for those who want to set their children on the proper path, entertainment-wise: have a crazy uncle... who is there to expose your kids to weird pop culture."

This is a responsibility that I have felt for years as an uncle, it is something that I have mentioned before in this space, and it is one of the reasons that I started the Sesame Street Tuesday feature in the first place. I had a very rewarding moment talking to my niece Kate on the phone the other day when she told me that she pulls up my blog to show Sesame Street clips to her friends (no doubt skipping over the long-winded ruminations that precede the clips). I've felt similar satisfaction when watching my nieces' and nephews' faces light up when they watched the bus stop scene from My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, hearing them repeat the punchlines from Calvin and Hobbes, seeing them contort their faces and limbs in an imitation of Artie (The Strongest Man... in the World!) from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, or doing Beatles sing-alongs with me on my guitar.

However, yesterday I felt like I had somewhat failed in this regard when we were at a trout farm and my sister Emily's call of "Heeeeeeere fishy fishy fishy!" drew blank stares from the kids. It's one of the all-time great Sesame Street sketches and in the two-plus years I've been running this feature I somehow have never presented it. So allow me to now correct that gross oversight:

The aforementioned incident happened at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery, home of Herman the Sturgeon, who is 11 feet long, 500 pounds, and 70 years old. I can't find anything to confirm this, but here's my hypothesis: that native Portlander/Simpsons creator Matt Groening used Herman as the inspiration for General Sherman, the legendary giant catfish from a season 2 episode. The name is just off by one letter (plus a military title) and the species is changed from sturgeon to catfish, and this scrap of exposition from the episode seems to fit: "Yep, 'General Sherman.' They say he's five hundred pounds of bottom-dwelling fury, don't you know. No one knows how old he is, but if you ask me (and most people do), he's hundred years if he's a day." So if you're reading this, Matt Groening, leave me a comment and tell me if I'm off base with this.

P.S. - The first time someone introduced me to Homestarrunner.com they showed me the Strong Bad Email "Lures and Jigs," which I saw as a clear rip-off of Bert and Ernie. It dissuaded me from coming back to the site for a year or two, after which time I realized the Brothers Chaps are geniuses with highly original voices and that this email was either an aberration or a deliberate Bert and Ernie homage:

SST: Cookie Monster Buys a Rhyme/Bein' Green

2011-03-15T11:09:00.003-04:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Since this week has two holidays, today we're getting two clips. The first holiday can be a little bit hard to remember:

I myself had forgotten that yesterday (3/14) was Pi Day until the early afternoon when Yahoo! laid out a spread of about twenty different types of pie. You know you work for a nerdy company when they officially commemorate Pi Day (I mean that as a compliment).

Yahoo! is planning a much larger party for the second holiday this week:

Happy March!

Keep Portland Weird

2011-03-12T22:21:00.001-05:00

As seen in this ubiquitous bumper sticker (co-opted from "Keep Austin Weird!"), Portland is proud to be weird. Through outlets such as the new TV series Portlandia the proudly weirdo culture of Portland has become increasingly well-known across the country.

However, I didn't know about Portland's reputation until after I got here in November*, and in the four-ish months I've been living in the area I hadn't really participated in anything especially Portlandy. So I decided to make today a Super Portland Day:

1. I had heard on the radio that this weekend was the annual Portland Urban Iditarod, run through the streets of downtown Portland with shopping carts instead of sleds and people instead of dogs. They had me at shopping carts, so today I went down to check out the action. I headed downtown in my car without knowing beforehand where I should go to catch the race, but I had no trouble finding it because once I got within four blocks of the course I could hear what sounded sounded like the world's most raucous party:

I had a blast watching this. The shopping cart-sled template pulled out a zany, childlike energy out of all these twenty- and thirty-somethings that was absolutely infectious. I was dazzled by the sheer amount of creativity and bravado on the part of every single team and loved how this wacky event provided a mode of self-expression that didn't hurt anyone and just came off as a giant celebration of life. Any kind of social or political gesture that may have been made was softened by the absurdity of it all, such as the mock fistfight captured in this video:

2. If you look at the other side of the street in that second video you can see the tents and booths of the Portland Saturday Market. They had taken a winter hiatus at the end of December and had just started the market back up again last weekend. It reminded me of a smaller-scale Ann Arbor Art Fair (to be fair, this does run from March to December, whereas the Art Fair in Ann Arbor, while massive, only lasts a week), with the same kind of hippie arts and crafts and live music (I saw a rootsy Americana group called The Conjugal Visitors).

3. I stopped at the downtown Portland branch** of the Multnomah County Library to pick up a library card. About 6 weeks ago I moved to Beaverton in adjacent Washington County, and as a resident of a neighboring county they granted me a card. I don't imagine I'll make the trip out to use their libraries very often, but one of the perks of membership is access to a service called Freegal Music. They have a huge library of music and I am allowed three free downloads per week through my library card. Score! (A shout-out to my sister Emily and her incredible deal-finding powers for that tip.)

4. Before leaving the downtown I picked up a gyro at one of Portland's famous food carts. These carts are so awesome - they are tiny little stalls or trucks or campers that set up shop on the outside edge of parking lots facing the sidewalk. They are everywhere (the internet says there are over 400 in downtown Portland) and they have a staggering range of choices, whether it be hot dogs and burgers or Vietnamese Phở.

5. Portland is a major player in the shoe market; my new house is just a few blocks away from the Nike World Campus where there are dozens of buildings and a big beautiful artificial lake that I've jogged past along the public-access running trails. Adidas also has its U.S. headquarters in Portland, and Yahoo! recently gave all of its employees a pass to the Adidas employee store with a 50%-off coupon. I went there today and ended up getting a good deal on the pair of shoes on the left, which are the lightest, most comfortable things I've ever put on my feet - it's like wearing a cloud covered in pillow feathers. I've never had a pair of shoes with such loud, funky colors, but maybe I was emboldened by the lack of inhibition I witnessed at the Urban Iditarod.

6. My Portland day isn't quite over yet, so if you'll excuse me I've got to go put some birds on things:

*Shortly after I got here I read an article in the Oregonian newspaper called "Is Portland the New Neverland?" that made me feel like such a cliché. Like many of the people profiled in the article I was in my late twenties, I had a degree (or three) in the arts, I was unemployed and uncertain about my next move, I was living with my sister, and I had been drawn in by Portland's magnetic pull. I guess I lost a lot of my Portland hipster cred by turning thirty, getting a job (in the tech industry, no less), and moving out of my sister's house.

**This library branch also has a large, beautiful children's section named after beloved Portland author Beverly Cleary. Apparently she named several characters after Portland landmarks (i.s. Quimby St.) and set most of her stories in the city. Sidenote: Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, is also from Portland and he named many characters after street names. As a Simpsons fan it is fun to drive down Flanders Street, Lovejoy Street, or Terwilliger Boulevard.

Year of Songs: Songs for Casimir Pulaski Day

2011-03-06T12:47:00.003-05:00

Happy Casimir Pulaski Day tomorrow! Casimir Pulaski Day, you ask? Quoth Wikipedia:

Casimir Pulaski Day is a holiday observed in Illinois on the first Monday of every March in memory of Casimir Pulaski (March 6, 1745 – October 11, 1779), a Revolutionary War cavalry officer born in Poland as Kazimierz Pułaski... The day is celebrated mainly in areas that have large Polish populations, such as Chicago. Chicago Public Schools, Cook County government offices, the Chicago Public Library, Springfield Public Schools, and state-wide public and private schools close on this holiday.

(I know at least one of my readers might be affected by the holiday. You know who you are.)

1. "Casimir Pulaski Day" - Sufjan Stevens
This song is a devastating short story about bone cancer taking the life of a teenage girl and shaking the faith of those left behind. The tale reaches its sad end in a hospital room on the eponymous holiday:

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

2. "Águas de Março (Waters of March)" - Elis Regina & Tom Jobim
This song has been recorded by practically every major Brazilian artist, and by many non-Brazilians as well, but this wonderfully playful and spontaneous duet is the definitive version. It's a marriage of two of the most beloved figures in Brazilian music: singer Elis Regina and composer Tom Jobim. March is the end of summer in Brazil, and it's when the rainy season starts, hence the refrain "it's the waters of March closing the summer, and it's the promise of life in your heart."

The song on its own is incredibly charming, but this video of the recording session pushes it over the top (especially around 2:53):

3. "Água de Beber (Water to Drink)" - Incognito + Omar + Ana Caram
I randomly picked up this CD at the library recently called "Red Hot + Rio" simply because it had Rio in the title. Turns out it's this charity album from 1996 full of these funky, very mid-nineties-sounding reworkings of bossa nova standards by a bunch of artists you've either completely forgotten about (remember P.M. Dawn?) or never heard of (i.e. Incognito, Omar, and Ana Caram). The collection overall is quite uneven, but I dig this version of "Água de Beber," another Tom Jobim composition, that incorporates a fragment of the aforementioned "Águas de Março" at the beginning.

4. "The Wild Hunt" - The Tallest Man on Earth
I discovered this Swedish folk singer whose voice is definitely an acquired taste on NPR's All Songs Considered podcast (which I highly recommend - it has introduced me to all kinds of fantastic music). It begins:

There is a crow moon coming in well you keep looking out
It is the hollow month of March now sweeping in

5. "Liberty Bell March" - John Phillip Sousa
A march by the March King for the month of March. Try and guess why this is my favorite Sousa March - I'll give you a little hint:

6. "Backwards Down the Number Line" - Phish* This is my favorite birthday song and today, March 6th, is a day when a very special person has his birthday: Casimir Pulaski.

*Got a text from my friend John the other day: "I'm at a Trey Anastasio [lead singer of Phish] acoustic solo show right now, he just played Backwards down the number line for me. Reminded me of you :)" Like you do.

***************

As always, please use comments to tell me about any great March songs I might have missed, or if you have any suggestions for April (so far there's only been one person who has made any suggestions and I've used them all). As we get into the spring it seems to be a more inspirational time for songwriters so I'm sure there are tons of great song ideas out there.

Year of Songs: A Most Ingenious Paradox

2011-02-28T21:54:00.009-05:00

Remember my 'Year of Songs' project I announced in January? Yeah, me neither. With all the craziness of February it got put a couple burners behind the back burner. But there are still a few hours left in February, so I'm getting my assignment turned in just before the deadline. Too bad it's not leap year, or else we would have had a full day to drink in these February Jams. For as we learned from The Pirates of Penzance:

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

1. "When You Had Left Our Pirate Fold" - Gilbert and Sullivan
The above-quoted trio from The Pirates of Penzance explains how the protagonist, though he has lived for 21 years, has only had five birthdays since he is "the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February."

2. "País Tropical (Tropical Country)" - Gal Costa feat. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil
"I live in a tropical country, blessed by God and naturally beautiful. In February there's Carnaval, I have a VW bug and a guitar." The original version is by Jorge Ben, but I prefer this more raucous version by Gal Costa (maybe because I met her). This is a great song for winter - just start it up and suddenly the snow* melts away and you're sipping coconut water on a palm tree-lined beach (maybe because February is the middle of the summer in Brazil).
*If there were any snow in Portland. Best winter ever.

3. "President's Song" - The Simpsons
Fantastic President's Day musical number from the immortal Valentine's episode "I Love Lisa" (think "I Choo-Choo-Choose You").

4. "My Funny Valentine" - Elvis Costello
This 1937 standard by Rogers and Hart has been covered by all the usual suspects (Sinatra, Ella, etc.), but I like this unorthodox cover by Elvis Costello from 1979.

5. "Loomer" - My Bloody Valentine
The February-related name of this late-eighties/early-nineties shoegaze band was a barrier for entry for me for many years; however, when I finally gave them a chance a few years ago I fell under the spell of their unique sound: dreamy vocals floating over a guitar maelstrom. (Bands such as Smashing Pumpkins and recent indie darlings Sleigh Bells have since co-opted the Bloody Valentine formula.)

6. "I Got You, Babe" - Sonny & Cher

**********
Did I miss any great February songs? Any suggestions for March? Leave a comment!

When It Rains, It Freaking Pours

2011-02-19T17:09:00.001-05:00

I've been a little overwhelmed the past few weeks and my blog (among other things) has gotten lost in the shuffle. After many, many months of joblessness, I suddenly found myself with not one, but three jobs all starting up simultaneously, namely:

1. As I have mentioned before in this space, I now work full time at Yahoo! Although I've now been there for three weeks, I'm still in that awkward beginning phase where I have to call my more experienced co-workers over to my desk a dozen times a day to hold my hand through any unfamiliar situation. The work itself is pretty challenging, but then on top of that there is the additional challenge of doing it all in Portuguese.

I'm a very proficient speaker for a non-native, but this job is really teaching me that there is a huge difference between being a proficient non-native and being Brazilian. I spend the whole day reading emails that are mostly written in slangy, misspelled, internet-abbreviated Portuguese that is very different from the Portuguese I heard as a missionary or tourist. I frequently have to flip over to Google Translator or the Dicionário Informal (it's like a Portuguese Urban Dictionary). It's been two and half years since I was last in Brazil and much, much longer since my mission, so the Portuguese isn't as quick as it once was. Reading/writing in Portuguese still comes to me fairly easily (my bosses told me that the written translation I did in my interview was better than a few native Brazilians they interviewed - that's an encouraging thought that keeps me going on the hard days), but my spoken Portuguese is more difficult. My mental loading time is a little slower and I'm sometimes appalled by the gringo accent I hear coming out of my mouth. By the end of some days I feel like my brain has run out of spoken Portuguese and I need to go home and recharge.*

2. I am also teaching guitar lessons part time. Here's how that came about: One of the first people I met out here in Portland is an LDS guy who has a large piano academy (150ish students) where he employs several piano teachers. He used to have a voice teacher there too, but the voice teacher started his own business and signed a non-compete agreement with the piano academy that lasts until this summer. But the academy owner likes me and wants me to potentially teach voice at his academy eventually, so he has hired me on to be a guitar teacher in the meantime.

He has never had a guitar program at his academy and doesn't know anything about the guitar, so I've been building my own curriculum and methodology, which is both scary (though I love playing the guitar, I'm certainly not a guitar wizard or anything) and interesting (it's a really fun challenge to approach teaching a different instrument). I had been really stressing over it for weeks leading up to my first lessons, but each one of my students is a true beginner - like, picking-up-a-guitar-for-the-first-time-in-their-life beginner - so it's all really basic stuff that I can teach confidently.

3. I am continuing my work with the University of Michigan department of surgical education as a mock patient. I agreed to do this job again back at the beginning of December, when I had no real job prospects on the horizon. Little did I know that the work would start up the exact same time as the other two jobs. I'm playing the exact same patient as I was last year and I've literally recited the script hundreds of times, so at least there's not the stress of learning anything new for this job.

The job is done completely over the phone, so I could theoretically do it from anywhere, but the catch is that I have to call the patients between the hours of 8:00 am - 8:00 pm in whatever time zone they happen to be in. Many of them are in the Eastern Time Zone, meaning that I can make those calls from the West Coast is before I go to my other two jobs because by 5:00 p.m. my time it's already too late.

So, a typical day will go something like this: Wake up a little after 5:00 a.m., make mock patient phone calls until 7:30 a.m., go to Yahoo! until 4:30 p.m., drive a half hour in rush hour traffic over to the music academy, teach guitar until about 7:00 p.m., drive home, eat something, electronically submit the evaluations from that morning's mock patient phone calls, and fall exhausted into bed around 8:30 p.m. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yahoo! and teaching by themselves are actually quite manageable and I'll only be doing the mock patient job for one more week, so I'm expecting a return to sanity fairly soon. And while it has been overwhelming, I got my first Yahoo! paycheck yesterday and decided that there may be something to this whole "gainful employment" thing.

*A few years ago while waiting for my flight in the São Paulo airport I overheard a long conversation in Portuguese between a group of Brazilians, including a middle-aged married couple. At one point the couple turned to each other and had a short exchange in perfect, unaccented American English. I was shocked - I was completely convinced that they were Brazilian. Later I struck up a conversation with them. Turns out they were Americans who had lived in Brazil for 25 years. I asked them how their English was so great after 25 years and they said that they only spoke English to each other because when they arrive home after a long day at their respective jobs they have "run out of Portuguese." I find that to be a very reassuring memory whenever I feel my brain short-circuiting by the end of the day.

SST: Have a 7

2011-02-08T22:44:00.007-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

It's amazing how durable this ad is:

Coke Zero remade it for the Super Bowl two years ago with the Steeler's Polamalu, and this year's Super Bowl had a parody starring Dr. House and a churro. I remember finally seeing the original for the first time as a teenager and being confused - I always thought it was an ad for the number 7:

P.S. - This year's great Super Bowl ad was this stunning Chrysler/Detroit spot. It's already been plastered all over the blogs and facebook statuses of my Michigan peeps, so I will let you just link you through to their thoughtful analyses.

SST: Teeth Look for a Job

2011-02-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I rejoined the workforce yesterday. After several years of working only sporadic hours as a graduate student instructor, I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to make it through a full 8-to-5 day, but the day actually flew right by. The first day on the job is always a little strange with training and tours of the facilities and whatnot, so I won't really get a sense of what the job is actually like for a little while. However, based on today I think I'll survive the baptism by fire just fine.

The application process for teaching positions is still in full swing, but I'm really glad that I can take a break from the search for an immediate position. I was getting pretty tired of this:

Year of Songs: January Jams

2011-01-29T19:20:00.003-05:00

I had a fun time putting together my "Obliquely Christmas" playlist and just after Christmas I came up with a similar project that might become a monthly feature on my blog for the next year: a playlist for every month of the year with songs that either explicitly or passingly referenced the current month. A lot of obvious selections sprang to mind: "November Rain," "A Long December," "September Song," etc., but like the "Obliquely Christmas" set I wanted to mix in some out-of-left-field choices as well.

I was all excited to launch the series at the beginning of January, but I ran into a snag: January doesn't seem to be a very inspirational month for songwriters. At least not inspirational enough to assemble a full-length playlist. So here we are, nearing the end of January, and I have only a few songs to offer, but even if I only have 3-4 songs for a particular month, by the end of the year it will be one big, healthy playlist. I hope these selections add to your enjoyment of the final days of January:

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: February is looking to be a pretty paltry month for songs as well, so I need your help to fill out the playlist. If you have a favorite February jam, please tell me about it in the comments (or if you have any January suggestions to add to this playlist).

Yahoo!

2011-01-24T22:02:00.000-05:00

Monday, 5:39 p.m.
Right before shutting down the job search for the day, I hit refresh one last time on the Portland Craiglist "All Jobs" page. Curious, I check out the most recent entry on the list: "Bilingual Client Advocate." It's unclear what exactly the job is, but the pay is good and they're looking for someone with 1-5 years of customer service experience (check), with a bachelor's degree (super-check) who is fluent in Portuguese (check). I send off an email with a resume attached.

Wednesday, 9:39 a.m.
Having not received a response, I send another email about the job.

Wednesday, 10:50 a.m.
I get a phone call from Liza, who works for an employment agency. It was she who placed the Craigslist ad. She says the job is with Yahoo! and she is going to send them my resume and a few references. She says that she'll probably know by the end of the week if they want to schedule an interview.

Wednesday, 1:46 p.m.
Liza calls back and says that Yahoo! wants to interview me out at their campus in Hillsboro the next day at 1:00 p.m.

Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.
In preparation for the interview, I get a disastrous haircut at a beauty college.

Thursday, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
I have an interview on site with Giancarlo (American) and Fabiana (Brazilian). They ask me some standard interview questions in English and Fabiana and I chat in Portuguese about my experience with the language and my experiences in Brazil. They tell me what the job entails: every Yahoo! page that allows chat or comments contains links that say "Report abuse*," which leads to a form where users can explain their objections to another user's comments. All of the reports filed on all of Yahoo!'s Portuguese-language pages go to a team of seven Brazilians located in Hillsboro, but one of them is shortly going on maternity leave, so they need to bring in a replacement ASAP. The interviewers then give me a document to translate into Portuguese. The title is something like, "The Role of Webcasting in Emerging Markets." I can't recall ever having a conversation in Portuguese about webcasting or emerging markets, so my vocabulary on the subject seems a little thin, but I plow through it and at the end am fairly pleased with my work. After nearly two hours, Giancarlo then wraps up the interview, saying that they still have a number of applicants to interview on Friday, and that I will hear back from them sometime next week.

Thursday, 5:00 p.m.
I get a call from one of Liza's co-workers from the employment agency, informing me that Yahoo! would like to offer me the job. I accept.

**********

I've been looking for a job for so long that I was amazed at how one could go from having almost no prospects to having a job so quickly. I had had a number of close calls and after I while I felt like I'd always be a bridesmaid, never a bride (is there a masculine version of that expression?).

This Yahoo! job is remarkable because it pays better than most any other job I for which I had been in contention, it sounds like more interesting work than other positions (hooray, it's not a call center!), it's geographically close to the place where I'm going to be teaching a few guitar lessons (more on that another time), and since I'll be the only non-Brazilian on the team I anticipate that my Portuguese is going to go to the next level. It's only a contract job (filling in for the woman on maternity leave), so it will only last until mid-summer, but hopefully I'll be ready to move on to a voice teaching position somewhere by then. But it's the perfect solution for right now and I feel very blessed that it all came together so quickly (despite the bad haircut).

*Ou seja, "Reportar abuso."

"I shouldn't have stopped for that haircut!"

2011-01-22T22:25:00.001-05:00

Have you ever been at the barbershop and as the stylist is working you have the realization, "Wait a minute, I know what's going on here - I'm getting a bad haircut!"

Tonight was the first time that I was aware of a bad haircut while it was in the process of becoming. Since I have to remove my glasses I don't normally find out whether a haircut is bad until the end when the stylist says, "So how does that look?" But this time, even in the blur of glasseslessness I could tell immediately that a bad haircut was brewing.

I went to a beauty college where the students cut your hair for the fabulous low price of $5. I've had mixed results from beauty colleges, but usually I end up looking at semi-respectable at the very least. I gave the stylist-in-training the same simple directions that usually result in a successful haircut: short on the sides and back, a little longer on the top and front. However, her definition of "sides" apparently means "every part of the head except for a one and a half inch strip down the middle of the skull." She went straight for the clippers and buzzed me all the way up the right side of my head so quickly that I wasn't able to stop her until it was too late. "Hey!" I cried out as I put my glasses back on to survey the damage. "Let's stop for a second and make a plan, shall we?" But it was buzzed so short that she had no choice but to replicate her work on the left side as well.

When she finally got the scissors out I could feel how unsteady her hands were as she held my hair between her fingers. I don't know if she is normally that shaky or if I destroyed her confidence by speaking up, but I was on edge for the rest of the haircut. Several times she asked with finality "So how does that look?" with the implication that the haircut was over. And each time there was some glaringly obvious patch of wild hair that I had to point out to her, to which she'd mumble, "Oh... yeah, uh, I was going to fix that... I was just seeing if... uh.. yeah, I was gonna....." Together we neutralized the most egregiously bad spots, but eventually I just didn't want her to be near my hair anymore so I forfeited the fight and surrendered my five dollars.

A few days have now passed since the infamous haircut and each morning as I comb my hair (what's left of it, that is) I discover several previously unnoticed flaws, including some really obvious ones like in the picture on the right.

This experience has helped me realize three things:

1) A good haircut is a miraculous thing. The internet tells me that the average human head has 100,000 hairs and it is quite amazing how apparent it is when just a few of them are different lengths than their immediate neighbors.

2) I was much better off in the past when I found out about my bad haircuts after the fact - it's much less stressful than watching one evolve.

3) Maybe it's time for me to stop patronizing beauty colleges.

P.S. - 1,000 nerd points to whomever can identify the Simpsons episode from which I have taken this post's title without googling, plus 1,000 bonus nerd points for knowing who is credited with writing it.

250

2011-01-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is my 250th blog post and just like an old sitcom, I think we need to take a look back at some of our favorite episodes. So pretend that you've lost your memory or gone into a coma (à la ALF or The Simpsons), 'cause it's a CLIP SHOW! (Well, more like a clip show with the director's commentary track playing.)

Ready? Cue the wavy screen effect!

*****

Favorite Overall Post: "The Curse of Sports Night"
A no-brainer for favorite overall. I knew I had to post something on my blog about breaking my arm, but I delayed writing it for several days because I didn't want it to be another straightforward injury story (see the "Most Helpful Post" winner). I finally came up with the idea of turning the only photograph of the incident, which was taken after the drama had played out, into a structural device for the narrative, and then, like most of my favorite blog posts, it practically wrote itself.

Honorable Mentions:

The 'Leaving Ann Arbor' Series ("Five Days," "The Unmovable Bank," "This is Where We Used to Live," and "Saying Goodbye")
"Busy Schedule" - I liked the conceit of this one - TV commitments as college courses. (The locker in the picture is number 2009, chosen because I wrote it at the beginning of 2009. Not that anyone noticed.)
"Young at Heart," "Shout Out to My Roomies," "Home Alone," "Why the Jazz Matter to Me," "NERD!"
"Free Stuff Finds Me" - One of my quickest posts, written while waiting for the bus at Pierpont Commons. I loved it because I saw the two cashiers in question a few days later and they each told me that they had made the photo in the post their profile pic on Facebook and they had written in their respective statuses about how jazzed they were at being featured on some random guy's blog.

Most Helpful Post: "Injuries Afoot"
The picture of my lumpy foot in this first Sports Night injury-related post led to an intervention in the comments section, without which I might not have gone to the doctor and learned that my foot was broken.

Honorable Mention: "The Glasses Menagerie"
I was so glad to get input from so many friends, and I really did factor it into my eyewear decision.

Wackiest Post: "The Ties that Bind"
One of those posts where you hit publish and then wonder, "Did I seriously just publish that?" I started working on this right before bedtime, but I ended up staying up ridiculously late (read: 3 a.m.) as I feverishly "photoshopped" (read: "MS Painted") the tie on to dozens of famous figures from the past - I seem to recall doing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, President William Henry Harrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe among others (unfortunately, the location of the unused pictures is unknown). I limited it to just four pictures for the sake of brevity, but also because I wanted someone to try and breath some meaning into the pictures that I did select.

Honorable Mention: "Draft Night Thoughts **Live**"
My most stream-of-consciousness-y post, including thoughts on the draft, Michael Jackson's death earlier that day, mixing ice cream and cereal, and a "course evaluation" for Breaking Bad season 2. I even took a jogging break and returned for more live blogging afterward. I tried it again during the next year's draft but I couldn't capture the magic and it remains unpublished (although it did have some good material about Mathnet.)

Favorite Poll: B-Vitamin Poll
Not that I do a whole ton of polls, but I loved this silly poll to determine which B-Vitamin would make the best band name. As I imagined, Riboflavin won handily (63%), followed by Folic Acid (27%) and Niacin (9%). I feel bad for poor, voteless Thiamine.

Favorite Post Title: "How I Gave My Student a Panic Attack"
Honorable Mention: "Eets makelijk!"

Favorite Picture Post: "Saving Fish From Freezing"
Honorable Mention: "In This Home on Ice"/"In This Home on Ice II: The Meltdown"

Favorite Music Clip Post: "To My Dad on his 64th Birthday"
Honorable Mention: "Star of the East"

Favorite Sesame Street Tuesday Post: "SST: Name That Food"
Without Sesame Street Tuesday, I wouldn't even be close to this landmark - SST accounts for 59 of my 250 published posts posts. Sometimes I'll just throw a clip up just because I like it and want to share it, but most of the time I try to use the SST clips as an angle to explore what's going on in my life, such as my road trip to the South.

Honorable Mention: "SST: The Magician's Diary"
This SST post shows me at my most economical. Concision is hard to come by on my blog - just look at this post.

*****

The final wavy screen of the clip show reveals us all back sitting around the fireplace wearing wool sweaters and drinking hot cocoa, laughing warmly about all the shared memories. Roll credits.

Seriously though, thanks for sticking with me through the first 250 posts*. I get a tremendous amount satisfaction out of sharing my life, my thoughts, and the things that I love with all those who follow Brian Presents:**. I hope you'll stick around for the next 250.

*I have published 250 posts, but I must acknowledge that only 249 of them were written by me - "The Jazz Suck" was written by guest author/account hacker Jessica Allen.
**I do have a second blog, What Dreams May Come, but at my current rate of 11 posts in 22 months, it should take me roughly 40 years to reach 250 posts.

SST: Bad Luck to Be Born a Duck

2011-01-11T00:02:00.001-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

The moment I crossed the border from California into Oregon I could feel that the state was in the thrall of Oregon Duck Football. For months I have seen countless cars with Ducks flags mounted on the top, stores with the big yellow 'O' logo in the window, and people everywhere sporting the vast array of head-turning (and headline-grabbing) Nike-branded Ducks apparel. It's been fun to be along for the ride as Oregon surged into the national championship game. Last night we had a game viewing party with Emily and the boys (Brad was notably absent - he was attended the game in person with his team from work, which is ironic since he is the least football-crazed person around here) with Emily's homemade taquitos and some Ducks green-colored rice crispy treats.

The game went down to the wire, but Auburn scored the winning field goal as time expired. Talk about bad luck to be a Duck:

Obliquely Christmas III: Final Christmas Music Thoughts (I Promise)

2010-12-29T12:08:00.000-05:00

Editor's Note: This is the third and final part of a series (Part One, Part Two)

I was in Times Square on the night that Michael Phelps won his fifth gold medal in Beijing. The city was hectic as usual before the race began, but everything stopped as soon as Phelps strode up to the pool. People on the sidewalk stopped walking. Cars pulled over and the passengers got out and joined the pedestrian onlookers. Every eye in Times Square was fixed on the huge screen overhead. When Phelps touched the wall at the end of the race, the place just erupted. The square was filled with an amazing energy - for four straight minutes, thousands of individuals forgot about whatever was happening in their own lives and celebrated something that everyone could relate to.

(Footage not taken by me, but similar to my experience)

This year I've done a lot of thinking about Christmas music (in case you haven't noticed). A few days before Christmas I awoke to the sound of Burl Ives' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" leaking faintly through my bedroom wall. Later that day I was at the mall and heard the likes of Brenda Lee singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," Dean Martin singing "Let It Snow," and of course, Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." You know, the exact same recordings of the exact same Christmas songs that you hear everywhere year after year during the holidays. Against that musical backdrop I suddenly felt something akin to what I felt in Times Square during the Olympics.

I feel like the world has become a very niche-y place. I am reminded of some remarks that President Obama offered at my graduation ceremony at the University of Michigan earlier this year:

Whereas most of America used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows... If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized and set in our ways.

He was referring mostly to political insulation, but his comments could also apply to musical insulation. Two of my nephews have little MP3 players and they recently asked me, "What's on your iPod?" I had to think for a minute - hmm, they're not gonna know Regina Spektor or Caetano Veloso or Arcade Fire. Talk about musical insulation. The most universal band I could think of was the Beatles. They said that they thought they had heard of them, but they probably hadn't heard their music.

As universal as the Beatles may be, they can't touch the universality* of something like "Silent Night." So just like I love the way that the Olympics make me feel connected to the whole world, I have come to the realization that underneath the music I have formerly described as "cheesy" there is something very powerful: a spirit of mutual understanding and shared experience seems right in line with the Spirit of Christmas.

*Yes, I'm aware that not everyone in the whole world celebrates Christmas or is fluent in its traditions. Pardon my overgeneralization, but this is an overgeneralizing kind of post.

Obliquely Christmas II: Embracing Wham!

2010-12-21T06:00:00.005-05:00

Editor's note: This post is a follow-up to a previous post about Christmas music.

I recently listened to a holiday installment of one of my favorite podcasts, All Songs Considered, where each guest brought in a few favorite Christmas songs to play for each other and the listeners. All Songs Considered usually traffics in the kind of elitist and esoteric music that appeals to overeducated hipsters like myself, and the initial Christmas selections on the podcast reflected that bias. However, fairly early on in the proceedings one of the guests on the show made a most unexpected selection:

This song was greeted by huge groans from all the other guests on the podcast*, and from me too, listening in my car. But after we all suffered through the song, the guy who chose it offered an interesting apology for his selection. He said that oftentimes during the holidays we often find ourselves at gatherings where we're fully expecting to have awkward meetings with certain acquaintances or family members, but we attend just the same because it just wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't see them. Likewise, he argued, there may be a lot of Christmas music that bugs us, but it just wouldn't feel like Christmas without it.

That reasoning really resonated for me, and I feel like since then I've had more of an open mind towards mainstream Christmas music. Yes, Wham! or Mannheim Steamroller, for example, drive me crazy, but it just wouldn't seem like Christmas without them.

* I liked their dissection of the lyrics of "Last Christmas" - George Michael gave his heart to someone and then the recipient gave George Michael's heart away to someone else? That's awkward - does George Michael even know who has his heart anymore? Does the new owner of the heart realize that it originally belonged to George Michael**?

** All this talk of George Michael makes me think of Arrested Development.

P.S. - Congratulations to Cookie Monster for breaking onto SNL last week. There was a much bigger cheer for him than there was when real host Jeff Bridges came out (not that there's anything wrong with Jeff Bridges - I'm looking forward to the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit), so let's hope Cookie Monster can parlay this appearance into a full hosting gig.

A Tale of Two Nights

2010-12-19T20:44:00.003-05:00

Last week I lost my house key, so whenever no one was home/awake I had to enter the house through the garage. Last Friday night I was out watching movies with friends and didn't get home until about 1:00 a.m., so when I got home I clicked the garage door opener to get inside the garage. I then turned the handle on the door leading from the garage into the house. Locked. Uh-oh.

After a failed brainstorming session, the only way I could think of for getting inside the house was to get on my cell phone and call my sister's land line and have her come down and open the door. I was really reluctant to wake her up but made the call anyways. No answer. Huh.

There was one door in the garage that wasn't locked - the Hacking's Honda Odyssey. So I climbed inside, rolled my coat into a pillow, and scrunched my body across the back seat. I fell asleep pretty quickly, but at 3:30 I woke up because I was a little cold. I remembered that I had a big blanket in the trunk of my car, so I fetched it and went back to sleep in the back of the minivan. My cell phone's alarm clock went off at 7:30, at which time I called my brother-in-law and asked him to unlock the door for me. "Have you been out here all night?" he asked. Yep, I had. I went upstairs, brushed my teeth and changed into my pajamas, and slept for a few more hours in my bed.

This may sound like it was really irritating, but as the whole saga was playing out I thought it was incredibly funny. After all, it was my fault for losing my key and I knew it would be a funny story to tell afterward. It really wasn't that uncomfortable sleeping in the van (although my knees were a little sore since I had to fold my legs up to fit across the tight seat). As I drifted off to sleep in the van I fondly recalled a night I spent curled up in a similar fashion but under very different circumstances.

*****

When I returned to Brazil in 2008 my flight to São Paulo was delayed for about two hours, so by the time I got through immigration and customs it was already about midnight, and then the bus ride to Campinas took another hour and a half. Although I had arranged for a place to stay in Campinas for the rest of the week, I hadn´t been able to find a definite place to stay that first night. I had a guide book that mentioned several hotels close to the bus station in Campinas, so I figured I could just check into a room as soon as I arrived. However, the "hotels" it listed were actually just houses with the word "Hotel" painted on the outside wall where one could rent a vacant bedroom for a night, and they were all dark and gated up for the night.

So I followed the lead of the many homeless people inside the bus terminal and curled up across three hard plastic seats with my head resting on top of my small bag and my arms wrapped tightly around my large backpack. The building had no doors so it was no warmer in there than it was out on the street, but at least inside there were a few security guards wandering around.

The combination of the hard seats jutting into my back, the anxiety that my bags might disappear, and my shivering from the cold night air kept me from getting any real sleep. I just lay there for hours thinking, "Is this the craziest thing I have ever done in my life?" I scrolled through my brain looking at memories from every era of my life and concluded that if this wasn´t the craziest thing I´d ever done, it was definitely near the top.

*****

So, sleeping on the cushy backseat of a minivan inside of a safe garage wasn't bad at all.

SST: Mysterious Theater

2010-12-14T00:07:00.002-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

If the Three Young Sleuths ever need a mentor, they need look no further than Sherlock Hemlock, the World's Greatest Detective. He and his trusted companion Watson would prove invaluable to them should it turn out that the ever-elusive True Meaning of Christmas is housed inside of a circle, square, or triangle.

Star of the East

2010-12-07T10:50:00.004-05:00

Last night was my ward's Christmas dinner and two weeks in advance I was asked to perform a musical number. No prob - I just recycled my Soirée number from two years ago:

However, just two days in advance I was asked to do a second number because someone else on the program dropped out. So I spent an afternoon flipping through my sister's easy piano Christmas songbooks looking for a suitable selection, but most of it was the same old cheesy stuff that drives me crazy. However, one of the books yielded an unexpected surprise: "Star of the East."

This performance is dedicated to the only two people I have ever heard play "Star of the East," my Grandma Tanner and my dad:

P.S. - On the subject of Christmas music, my friend Jess sent me a copy of Sufjan Stevens' "Songs for Christmas" (42 songs in all!) and I absolutely love it. The holiday-themed originals are fun and ambitious, the arrangements of even the most overdone Christmas standards are as fresh and layered as anything on his "Michigan" or "Illinois" albums, and the whole vibe of the collection is joyous and warm. Or as Jess put it in the comments on my "Obliquely Christmas" post, "Sufjan Steven's album=amazing, brilliant and redemptive. redemptive in the sense that it upholds the sanctity of christmas music, while reinventing it and is not as you put it 'schmaltzy'." I highly recommend it and I can envision myself putting it on at Christmastime for years and years to come. I bet even the Three Young Sleuths would love it.

The True Meaning of Christmas

2010-12-04T20:45:00.004-05:00

About seven or eight years ago I was invited to a party where I only knew one other person out of a tight-knit group of friends. On that night they indoctrinated me into a game they invented and played at every get-together. The game went like this:

1) One person in the group made up a fake movie title.
2) Everyone in the group wrote a short plot synopsis of the fake movie.
3) Each synopsis was read aloud and the group tried to guess which member of the group had written which synopsis.

It was a fun game and the group of friends all thought of some wildly imaginative fake movie plots, but since I had just met them it was hard for me to guess who had written what, with one exception - this one guy who ended every single synopsis with the phrase "... and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas." Without fail. Every round.

A team of rogue botanists race to thwart a deadly race of mutant ferns that threatens to wipe out the entire population of French Guiana, and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas.

A world-famous concert violinist suddenly becomes the target of a ruthless gang of pirates when he inherits a priceless Fabergé egg collection, and three young sleuths discover The True Meaning of Christmas.

Ever since then I can't hear the phrase "The True Meaning of Christmas" without chuckling and thinking of those three poor, eternally youthful sleuths (in Sherlock Holmes attire, naturally) who must walk the earth in an everlasting quest for The True Meaning of Christmas. I hope that someday in their travels they cross paths with Linus van Pelt, that they may finally rest from their labors.

New Glasses(es)

2010-12-02T07:01:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, I solicited your help in picking out a new pair of glasses. Remember? The problem with glasses is that, like many goods and services, they cost money, which is in short supply when you're unemployed. So I held out until I found a good deal, courtesy of JC Penney. Said deal actually allowed me to get two pairs for less than the price of one pair of glasses/lenses at other places. For a guy who felt like he wasn't capable of picking out a suitable pair, getting two pairs took a lot of the pressure off. It allowed me to hedge my bets and get a more conservative pair to offset a bolder pair, and to get two different colors. Here are the results:

The first pair is roughly analogous to 'A' from the former post (but silver), which fared well in the poll. The second pair is nearly identical to 'C', which was by far the most divisive pair in the mix (scroll down to the comments section for that post - it's a battleground between the 'C' lovers and haters). Like the haters, I had some reservations about them - that they were too trendy, that they're a very different look for me - but when I tried them on again I just liked them. I slept on it and later took friends to the store with me who supported my decision (I liked the sentiment of my friend Nichole*, who said that they sent a message like "I'm wearing glasses, dangit!")

In case you have forgotten how my previous pair of glasses looked, here is a reminder for comparison's sake:

One thing that both of my new pairs of glasses have going for them is that they lack that "got flattened by a car" quality possessed by my former pair. But maybe the "flattened by a car" look will be hot in the future, so maybe I'll hang on to them.

After wearing naught but contacts every day for over three months, my exhausted eyes were more than ready for a break. However, I've had to adjust to wearing glasses again. When I first put them on they made the world look so flat. I got used to my whole field of vision being sharply in focus and suddenly my peripheral vision was blurry. For the first few days I get a little dizzy every time I turned my head sharply to the left or right. Fortunately, I have gotten over that and I am happily bespectacled once again.

*Happy birthday, Nichole!

SSSN: Sesame Street Saturday Night (Live!)

2010-11-27T21:30:00.001-05:00

SESAME STREET SATURDAY NIGHT

This special Sesame Street Saturday Night edition is brought to you by the letter "C." As in "C is for Cookie." Cookie Monster is following in the footsteps of Betty White, who wrestled her way onto Saturday Night Live through a Facebook fan campaign. Like White, Cookie Monster would totally walk away from the experience with an Emmy.

I've never proselytized for an online campaign before, but this is just plain fun and I thought that those of you out there that like my Sesame Street Tuesday posts might want to jump on board. To join the cause, watch the video, then jump on Facebook and like the "Cookie Monster should host Saturday Night Live!" group.

Seeing this clip makes me feel prescient for putting Cookie Monster and SNL veteran Tracy Morgan (aka Tracy Jordan) together to do a sketch in my 30 Rock spec script for my TV Writing class. I knew there was a sketch comedian inside Cookie Monster waiting to burst out.

NERD!

2010-11-24T13:30:00.004-05:00

In episode 1F07 of The Simpsons ("The Last Temptation of Homer," for you laymen), Bart has a sudden convergence of health problems that necessitate several changes in his physical appearance - thick glasses to combat lazy eye, orthopedic shoes to correct fallen arches, heavy medicated salve to sooth his itchy scalp. At school the next day Bart doesn't understand why he is suddenly an object of ridicule (Sherri and Terri: "Nice glasses, four-eyes!" Nelson: "Yeah, nice shoes, uh…two-feet."). He catches a glimpse of himself reflected in Milhouse's glasses and gasps, "I'm a nerd!" It then switches to Milhouse's point of view as he sees his own reflection in Bart's glasses and realizes in horror, "So am I!"

Like Milhouse, I never really considered myself a nerd, despite the overwhelming evidence visible to outside observers. However, there comes a point where the body of evidence makes it hard to argue otherwise. I submit to the court several previous blog topics: Setting video game records, Monty Python, Battlestar Galactica, Final Fantasy, dressing up like Buffy characters, origami, Jonathan Coulton, and referring to Simpsons episodes by their production code number. I rest my case.

In many of those selfsame posts I wrote a little disclaimer saying something like, "Yikes, this makes me sound like such a nerd." I just saw myself as a normal, cool guy who on occasion innocently dabbled in a few nerdy pursuits. However, I had a Milhouse-like moment of clarity on Thursday night as I donned my Harry Potter costume before heading out for the midnight showing of the new Potter movie. As I gazed in the mirror to check the magic marker scar on my forhead I thought, "I am almost thirty years old and I'm wearing a costume to a midnight screening of a fantasy movie. There's no other way to spin this, Bri - you're a straight-up nerd."

I had planned to meet up with friends down at the theater before the show, so I drove alone down to the mall around 10:30. The mall was still busy when I got there, with lots of folks hiking across the parking lot with big shopping bags. I have rarely felt so self-conscious in my life as when I emerged from my car, in my flowing cape and novelty glasses, and made the long, lonely walk across the parking lot . I was sure that scads of teenage hooligans were going to pop out from behind a parked car and yell "NERD!" at me.

I felt more comfortable among the costumed masses inside the sanctuary of the theater. I met my friends, some of whom were also dressed up*, and we passed the time until midnight by playing games and answering arcane Harry Potter trivia questions. Good, nerdy fun.

*I'm not implicating anyone else in my nerdhood. I'll leave it to each individual to draw their own conclusions.

On the way out of the theater, no sooner had I parted ways with my friends on route to my car when a woman in a "KATU 2 News"-branded jacket shoved a microphone in my face. She liked my costume and asked me about it. In that very public moment I could no long cage my inner nerd. "Can I just interject that I am nearly thirty years old and I'm dressed up like Harry Potter," I interjected, "Such a nerd, right?"

She interviewed me for a good long two minutes. I had some funny riffs (one about my incongruous beard) and gave her some really good material. The interview consisted of more than just me accepting my nerdiness - as an amateur film scholar, I provided I offered up some thoughtful analysis of the film's themes and technical accomplishments (well, that's kinda nerdy too, isn't it?).

The next day I watched the news at noon and 5 p.m., but the Harry Potter segment never ran. They probably played it on the 5 a.m. news, but I didn't get home from the movie until 3:30 so me getting up to watch it that early was not going to happen. I also have not been able to find the interview on the KATU 2 website or anywhere else on the internet.

That interview may have vanished into the ether, but it still stands as my nerd coming-out moment. Remember that big list of so-called "nerdy" subjects from earlier in the post? Guess what - all that stuff is really awesome. So if a nerd is someone who doesn't suppress his or her enthusiasm for awesome stuff, count me in. I'm a nerd.

P.S. - Nerdy words used in this post: convergence, orthopedic, selfsame, scads, arcane, incongruous, ether.

Scenes from the LA Job Search: The Hip-Hop Mogul

2010-11-17T16:10:00.000-05:00

One of the first job ads that I responded to in L.A. was for a call center where they do telephone surveys. You know, the people who call you up all like, "Hello, this is some guy from some place on behalf of some thing. We're not selling anything, but wanted to ask you a few questions about some issue. Would you care to participate?"

I had worked extensively in call centers when I was an undergrad and I wasn't especially thrilled to go back, but this particular ad mentioned that they needed fluent Portuguese speakers to conduct surveys in Portuguese. I thought that sounded fun, plus it paid double the normal rate.

So I applied and got invited to the training session. They told me to dress 'business casual' so I wore a nice button-up shirt and slacks. However, I got there and everyone else was wearing ragged flannel shirts and holey jeans. Plus, I was the only one there without visible tattoos or an eyebrow piercing or two. During the training they had us go around the room and take turns reading from a manual, and half of the people in the room either couldn't read or had to slowly sound out the words. Needless to say, I felt out of place.

At the beginning of the training, they made everyone introduce themselves - name, where you're from, hobbies - and this one kid in the back stands up for his turn. He reminded me of Jeffrey from season three of Project Runway (seen on right) - in a black t-shirt with a swooping neck to better show off his chest and neck tattoos, plus three or four studs on each earlobe. He says his name is Jordan, from L.A., and that he is a professional musician.

During the training they gave us a ten minute break, during which time I thought it would be interesting to talk to Jordan, us both being musicians and all. Below I have transcribed our conversation nearly word for word (well, as accurately as I could remember after three months). And since it happened in L.A., I wrote the scene out in screenplay format.

*****

FADE IN:

EXT. CALL CENTER MAIN ENTRANCE - DAY

BRIAN emerges from the automatic sliding doors into the harsh afternoon sunlight. The entrance is lined by several date palms and there are several concrete benches. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he spies JORDAN leaning against the wall behind a bench, texting. Brian approaches him slowly.

BRIAN
(politely)
Hey. So, it's Jordan, right?

JORDAN
(not looking up from his phone)
Huh? Oh, yeah.

BRIAN
Sorry, but I heard you say in there
that you are a musician?

JORDAN
(still looking at phone)
Yeah, I'm a record producer.

BRIAN
(surprised)
Yeah? That's pretty cool. I do some music too.

JORDAN
(putting away phone)
Yeah? I'm pretty huge. I work with
50 Cent, Diddy, Tupac. I just finished
making some beats for Kanye.

BRIAN
(Dubious)
Oh yeah? I heard his album is dropping
pretty soon? Did you work on that?

JORDAN
Yeah... the beats I gave him are a little too
forward-looking - a little too hot, you know?
It'll probably go unreleased.

BRIAN
Yeah, I know how that goes. So... since you're a
big hip-hop producer, what are you doing at a
call center training session?

JORDAN
You know, my talents keep getting disrespected
by the industry so I'm starting my own
studio and I need to buy all the equipment.

BRIAN
Like what kind of stuff?

JORDAN
Oh, like software. I have mastered over 2,000
music programs and I need to buy all those. Plus
like, amps and stuff.

BRIAN
Whoa. 2,ooo programs sounds expensive.

JORDAN
Yeah it is ai't. And this is one of the few
high-paying jobs that will take 16 year-olds.

BRIAN
(stunned)
Wait, you're 16?

JORDAN
Yeah bro.

BRIAN
Shouldn't you be in school right now?

JORDAN
(incredulous)
Dude, you think I'd have any cred if I went to school?
No man, I was out of there like two years ago.

BRIAN
Yeah. Right. That's deadly.
(checking the time)
Maybe we should get back?

JORDAN
I'll be right there. I'm just gonna
go light up real fast.

BRIAN
(backing away)
Yeah bro, I'll let 'em know you're coming.

Brian crosses away and heads back inside through the sliding glass doors as Jordan pulls out his lighter.

FADE OUT.

*****
Epilogue:

Jordan never came back inside to finish the training, so I'll never know if there was any truth to his claims. It does seem rather doubtful or several reasons, one being that Jordan was only two years old when Tupac was murdered. (However, six Tupac albums have been released posthumously using recorded scraps he left behind, so I suppose he theoretically could have worked on one of those projects.)

As for me, I finished the training, during which time there was no mention of foreign language speakers. Afterwards I asked the supervisor about doing Portuguese calls and he said that when I came in for my first shift they would put me on Portuguese calls. I came in for my first shift and the supervisor didn't know what I was talking about. Long story short, I worked there for three days before learning that there were no Portuguese calls to be made. I was getting paid the normal, crappy rate and they only let me work four hour shifts, which did not justify the long, gas-consuming drive. So, back to the job search.

SST: Let's Sing a Song About J

2010-11-16T14:27:00.006-05:00

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Though I don't regret putting a Road Runner cartoon on my blog, I do feel like it was an SST cop-out. So even though it's an off week, I'm giving you a Sesame Street fix. This clip is a favorite of my sister Emily and she recently pulled it out to teach my four year-old nephew Trevor about the letter J. I had somehow never heard it before, but it's fun and catchy and worth sharing:

Hopefully 'J' will soon stand for 'Job'.

P.S. - When I started writing this post (circa five minutes ago): no rain. Now: much rain. Welcome to the Northwest. But I actually kind of like rain. Snow is my real enemy and it doesn't get snowy here, so I think it will be a nice winter.

P.P.S. - In the time that it took me to find the links for that last paragraph, it stopped raining.