SST: Heeeeere Fishy Fishy Fishy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

When It Rains, It Freaking Pours

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

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.