I’m way behind on my reading challenge so what do I do? I pick up a new book to read, of course. Actually, there is some logic to this decision – I tend to read ponderous works of nonfiction which means it takes a long time to get through a work. So I am adding a short piece of fiction to my list, which should increase my odds of finishing a book soon.
The fictional work is the novel Freedom Road, by Howard Fast. I didn’t know this before, but he is the same author who wrote the novel Spartacus, on which the film was based. And Freedom Road was also made into a TV mini-series, starring Muhammad Ali. So I’m going to look for that on streaming video once I’m done with the book.
I have small paperback edition I can carry with me at work in this odd little bag I bought, to read during my lunch breaks. Now that’s progress!
I have read a lot of books. I have been especially interested in reading history, and one thing I’ve learned over the years is how much there is that I don’t know. Of course, this drives me to read more, so now I have a fairly long reading list of books that I just haven’t gotten to quite yet.
This is not an uncommon thing; there is even a term for collecting unread books – tsundoku. A collection of unread books is called an antilibrary, and supposedly it’s good to have one, to remind oneself of the limits of one’s knowledge. My antilibrary, honestly, is actually not that large. But it’s large enough, possibly, to last me the rest of my life.
Between work, family, and other hobbies, I have not found much time to read lately. So, for 2020, I have decided to read more, and to track what I read on the social website Goodreads. My goal is simple – 20 books completed in 2020. And I plan to post reviews, some of which I may share on this blog.
Let’s see…20 books a year. If I live for 30 more years, which is plausible, that means 600 more books to read before I die. That’s it!?? There’s more than that many books in one aisle at the Barnes & Noble!
When will I have time enough? It almost makes me wish for the fate of Burgess Meredith’s character in the famous Twilight Zone episode. But of course, we know how that turns out. And even if I found time to read 6000 books, I would only scratch the surface of all that humanity has recorded.
Ah well. It’s still a joy to read a good book, despite the limitations of our mere mortal lives. I end with a quote from a great poet.
Knowledge is precious to us, because we shall never have time to complete it. All is done and finished in the eternal Heaven.
Rabindranath Tagore
A small sample of my library. There’s even more on my Kindle.
So I accepted this challenge on Facebook where you post ten indispensable albums, one a day. Here are the albums I chose, along with the text I posted on FB (with some edits). I consolidated them into one list for the blog format, also figuring I should save the information somewhere that doesn’t belong to the android overlord of social media.
So without further ado, here are my top ten indispensable albums.
1) Jesus Christ Superstar
My first experiences with music were listening to my parents’ record collection. They had a lot of old albums that I remember, but the one that I remember most fondly is the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. They had the double LP set, with Sides 1 and 4 on one record and sides 2 and 3 on the other, so you could play them on a turntable with a record changer. My sister and I knew all the lyrics and would sing along together. This was actually a concept album before it became a Broadway musical, and as a musical is still produced to this day. It’s a brilliant work that has stood the test of time.
2)We’re An American Band
My generation grew up on rock and roll, and was greatly influenced by the music made by the generation that came before us – the Baby Boomers. We call that music “classic rock” now, and there are a ton of possible choices that might go on a Gen-Xer’s list of indispensable albums. I chose this one: We’re an American Band by Grand Funk (Railroad). It was also in my parents’ collection; they had one of the original gold foil copies, and I listened to it from an early age. I think this album captures perfectly the energy, attitude, and ambition of the young Boomer generation. I still have it on CD and pop it into my car stereo when I need to get my blood flowing.
3)Space Ritual
Here’s where my list of indispensable albums starts to veer away from the ordinary. When I was in high school some friends introduced me to the progressive rock/space rock/acid rock/whatever you want to call them rock band Hawkwind. I was instantly hooked on them. It’s not that they are that impressive musically; I just loved their weird style, their use of electronics, and the psychedelic and science fiction themes in their songs. And I’m telling you, until you’ve listened to Hawkwind’s epic live double album Space Ritual with your headphones on in a dark room in an altered state of mind, you have not truly experienced the mystery and majesty of this Universe.
4)Angel’s Egg
After being introduced to Hawkwind, I started getting into more alternative rock music, especially what was coming out of Europe. There’s a lot of interesting stuff from this time period (late 60s through 70s), but as for indispensable, I would have to pick the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy by Gong. This is a three album series that tells a strange mythological tale involving, among other things, magic tea, extraterrestrials and mystical prostitutes. A wonderful expression of the spirit of its age, it is playful, humorous, and – to me at least – has a profound spiritual message. The second album, Angel’s Egg, is the centerpiece and my favorite of the three.
5)Liege & Lief
So what makes an album indispensable, I think, is that you’ve listened to it many times, never tire of it, and feel that the world would be a lesser place without it. With that in mind, I have to include Liege & Lief, by Fairport Convention. This folk rock album features adaptations of traditional Celtic music and the enchanting singing voice of Sandy Denny. It is an all-time favorite of mine.
6)Extraterrestrial Live
When I was in high school my friend Joe Webb introduced me to my next indispensable album, Extraterrestrial Live by Blue Öyster Cult. It’s the second live album I’ve put on this list. I guess there can be something in a particular concert performance that makes it memorable and unrepeatable and better than a studio album, and this is one example. And of course it has the sci-fi/fantasy appeal that is a staple of heavy metal music. This double LP set has so many great numbers – Black Blade, Godzilla, Don’t Fear the Reaper, Joan Crawford, and my all-time favorite, Veteran of the Psychic Wars.
7)The Dreaming
There is a lot of music from high school days on my list of indispensable albums. It just goes to show how the impressions made in your formative years are the ones that stay with you. And here’s an astounding album that has made a lasting impression on me: The Dreaming by the inimitable Kate Bush. It’s so uniquely creative, and every song is a gem.
8)Joe’s Garage
This next indispensable album might not appeal to all tastes. Frankly (heh), it’s obnoxious and crass and has lyrics that would get an artist ratioed and hashtagged into oblivion in today’s social climate. But it fit into its time, which was a much more free-wheeling age.
I’m talking about the brilliant satirical rock opera Joe’s Garage, by Frank Zappa. I want to listen to it many more times before I die, and when I do die, you can play this song – which features the greatest guitar solo in history – at my funeral.
9)Beaucoup Fish
Suddenly I’m jumping ahead two decades to 1999. What about all the wondrous varieties of rock music of the 80s and 90s? Well, I can appreciate it and admire it, but none of it made it to…indispensable. Maybe if this was a top 20 list.
Plus, at some point later in life, I started getting heavily into electronic music, so that genre gets the last two of the ten albums.
Now, for electronic music, I actually have an indispensable band, and that band would be Underworld. They are just freaking amazing in their mixing skills and their composition and tempo – and what’s even better is they’re still active and producing as much as ever. Just follow them on Spotify for endless fresh tracks. They’ve had a lot of great stuff since the early 90s, but if I had to live with just one of their albums, then that album would be Beacuoup Fish.
10)Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost
My number 10 indispensable album is a probably obscure psychedelic trance masterpiece by electronic musical project Shpongle. It’s title is Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost, which is taken from William Blake and speaks to the ineffable mysteries of time and consciousness. It’s a work of genius, a dream journey in an electronic and world music soundscape that is utterly entrancing and profound. That’s my opinion, anyway; I think it’s one of the best albums in its genre. It is best listened to in its entirety as one continuous piece, which you can only approximate on YouTube.
11)Illinoise
That’s right, my top ten list goes to eleven.
Most of the albums were from the way back, when I was first developing my attachment to music. But I really do appreciate the more recent waves of artists as well, so here is one more. My eleventh and final indispensable album of this list is Illinoise, by the quirky, creative indie musician Sufjan Stevens. He is a multi-talented virtuoso, and while his albums can be hit or miss as he genre-hops, this is one that I never tire of hearing.
Last weekend I went to Manhattan to catch up with my BFF, who was already there for a conference. It’s the greatest city in the world, and I love to go there and feel the energy of the teeming masses and all the things there are to see and do. But mainly the plan was to see a show. You know what I mean: a Broadway show.
We saw two, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. What we do is go to Times Square where there is a booth to get discount tickets. You won’t get to see a show that is selling out this way, but there are enough options to find something you are interested in, and the tickets will be about 50% off. I got to pick the shows this time, because my BFF was so busy.
Saturday’s show was Waitress, a reliably fun and romantic romp through the life of a working girl whose dreams are grander than her circumstances. These productions know how to tug on your heart strings, and take you on an emotional ride – up and down like a roller coaster. TV and movies can do the same thing, but live theater is much more powerful. The experience leaves me enervated, but during the show I feel my whole being expanding with joy, from the center.
What I’m feeling is my heart chakra blossoming open. That’s the central of the seven chakras – there are three below it and three above. Theater, done right, connects you to the emotional core of your being. It makes you care. Yes, about something fictional, but in doing so it has healing power. Mushy romance to stir up your heart is vital to living a long and healthy life. I highly recommend it.
My BFF meets the King
Sunday’s show was King Kong. Which we absolutely love, and in fact we were seeing it for the second time. It is not as emotional a show as Waitress, but it is wondrous because of the skillful puppetry. It also has a standout performance from the lead, whose acting brings the great beast to life. I believe you have about a week to go see it before it closes.
But even if you miss it, at least get out there somewhere and see something romantic. Or even just watch it on TV. Your heart and soul will be grateful. Namaste.
This past weekend I traveled to Washington D.C. to celebrate my sister’s birthday. I stayed at my mother’s house. It was comforting to walk up the stairs to her familiar front door, a door which has welcomed me for nearly three decades of visits. A fixture in my life, anchoring my wandering soul.
I slept in the basement, which Mom uses as an art studio. The furnishings in there are older ones, including some that I remember from growing up. Again there was a sense of comfort from seeing these things; their material fixity reassuring me of the constancy and immutability of the past. For all the changes over the years, these things remind me that the past experience which made me who I am today is definite. It cannot be erased.
As William Blake put it: nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.
Of course the fixity of these material things is an illusion; they will all crumble away into nothingness in the due course of time. What is important to us in life is not stuff but our loved ones, and the relationships we have with them. That is why in all my wanderings, I keep circling back to the family in which I was born and raised.
We gathered for the celebration in a cheery restaurant – siblings and friends and relations all together again for the first time in a few years. There have been many changes in that short time – moves from one state to another, jobs lost and gained, marriages, divorces – but still we remain a family. So happy birthday again to my sister, and may we never forget our true and perfect home, in our hearts.
I joined Facebook in 2008, the first year of the current Crisis Era. I was really just jumping on a bandwagon – everyone around me was joining and I wanted to be a part of it. It was an early example of FOMO, I suppose. I soon found myself reconnecting with people from my past – from high school and college – distant in time and place from where my life was then. Facebook became a place of gathering. It also became a place to assess my life, as I saw how the careers and family lives of my peers had progressed compared to mine.
Eventually I reconnected in physical space with some friends, and renewed relationships. It was as though – assisted by social media – my life folded back on itself and began again from a past point. I wonder if others of my generation have had the same experience – a chance to revisit the past and reorient oneself towards the future. Like social media is our hot tub time machine.
I wonder if the experience of social media has been different for other generations. Some Boomers I know have embraced social media wholeheartedly, and post far more than I do. For them the smartphone age represents an even greater technological leap from their childhood than my generation experienced. Millennials, on the other hand, have joined social media at a younger age than Generation X – in young adulthood rather than midlife – but they still remember a time when it did not exist.
The one generation that stands out as fully immersed in “the social” is the Homeland generation, the first of whom were born in 2005. Their entire lives are documented on social media, from the first ultrasound images in the womb to the latest back to school snapshot standing outside of the family home. They are the true superstars of social media.
I still post regularly on Facebook, using it as a kind of diary to keep track of my life. It is fun to revisit the year and see all the places I have checked in, and my patterns of work and play. It’s also a joy to watch people I know from different times and places in my life come together in a discussion in the comments section of one of my posts.
Lately I’ve taken to Twitter as well to attempt to promote my blog and my thinking. Dare I call myself an “influencer”? Of course not – that is pure vanity. I know a hamster with more followers than I have.
We’ve been in the age of the social for a good decade now. I’m curious about how the experience has been different for people encountering it at different stages of their lives. If you’d care to share your experience in the comments below, please do.
My vision has been steadily and slowly deteriorating over the years, hence the need for the updated prescription lenses for nearsightedness that I am wearing in my recent profile picture. As my field of vision shrinks, it feels like a bubble is enclosing me, collapsing on me, isolating me and rendering me irrelevant. It’s like there is a timer in my eyes ticking down to a point when they will no longer be useful; when I will no longer be useful. Planned obsolescence – not an unfitting analogy for the limited lifespan of biological organisms, who must always make way for the next generations.
Vision is governed by the third-eye chakra, where life energy is involved with the intellect and with intuition – the higher functions of the human soul, as it were. Since I am very brain-oriented, as our species tends to be, spending most of my time mentally processing symbols at work or at play, I wonder if I am overworking it. After all, my favorite hobby – board gaming – is heavily intellectual. All this analysis in the mind – and how much of it is really fruitful?
Even in this reflection I am surely overthinking things. I’m probably not overstimulating my ajna chakra to a point where I am so caught up in the whirl of internal thought processes that my portal to the external world is closing down. My eyeballs are simply warping over time, entropy taking its inevitable toll as it does on all things physical. But if I am overintellectualizing or overinternalizing, that would fit with patterns in my past. So I’m hoping a little meditating might help. I need to clear my mind, to open up my soul.
I haven’t mentioned this online yet, but I had a minor foot injury which has plagued me for the past couple of weeks. It has finally healed to the point where I can walk without pain, and what a relief! I feel like a new man – you know that feeling when you have recovered from a health condition and you are energized like you have tasted from the fountain of youth.
The foot is a part of the body governed by the root chakra, where life energy is involved with survival and physical security. When I was limping from my pain I thought to myself, well if the zombie apocalypse starts now I am f*****d. The rest of you might as well let them get me if it will buy you a minute or two. I didn’t want to stand even, only to sit as much as I could.
It makes a lot more sense to me now that the lower limbs are associated with the root chakra – they are essential for “fight or flight” to even be an option. It sure feels good to walk freely and to appreciate the power of Mother Earth at my feet!
In my life I’ve had many jobs and moved around a lot. The Nomad life course. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and have mostly worked as a contractor. For fun, and because I like categorizing, I wrote down every company I’ve worked at and the year the company was founded. Some interesting patterns emerged.
The majority of companies where I have worked were founded in the 2T or 3T of this saeculum. Many of these were startups that failed or got bought out. Not surprising since I am a software engineer but too old to be in on the ground floor of any 4T unicorns.
These jobs were all in the first half of my career, pretty much coinciding with the 3T of this saeculum. The other places I worked in this time period were two venerable public institutions founded in the 1T of the Great Power saeculum: Virginia Tech where I went to school and the United States Geological Survey where I interned.
Then in the second half of my career, starting just at the tail end of the 3T, I started getting contracts at more established companies, founded in the 3T or 4T of the Great Power saeculum (IBM for example). This reflects both my increased work experience and a life course related desire for greater work stability. This is my Nomad settling down in the 4T phase.
Here is a complete chart:
Saeculum
Turning
First
Second
Third
Fourth
Revolutionary
o
x
Great Power
xxo
x
o
xo
Millennial
o
xo
xxxxxxxx
The cell is the turning in which a company where I worked was founded. An ‘x’ marks a company where I worked in the Third Turning, and an ‘o’ marks a company where I worked in the Fourth Turning.
You can see my flurry of positions at dot com startups (sadly I did not get rich from any of them) and how later in life I was working for more established organizations. And yes, that is a company founded way back in the Second Turning of the Revolutionary Saeculum, which is where I work now.
I thought it was a fun exercise and you might want to try it yourself!
Edit: updated in May 2023 with more recent positions. As of that date I’ve changed jobs twice since this post was originally published.
I sorted through my collection of old letters and cards. Not to dwell on the past, but to follow the dictum of Socrates to examine one’s life. I tried to order them chronologically, first in a stack, but as that proved unwieldy I layed them out on the floor by year. The oldest was from the year 2000, so there is no record of my correspondences from the 1900s. Once the sorting was done, a pattern clearly emerged. There is not much from the early 2000s, then there is a big gap in the mid-2000s, when I was isolated and having mental health issues. Then around 2008 things pick up, as I stitched my social life back together and recovered from severe depression. The 2010s stack is nice and big.
Now it’s possible I simply lost older letters. Or maybe in my despondent period I was throwing them away. But the pattern jives with this thing I have where ever since the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession my life has just been getting better and better. Not even Trumpty-Dumpty has slowed it down.
So thanks to all the friends and coworkers who have sent me invites and holiday greetings over the years. It’s nice to be able to look back at all the memories and milestones. It’s fun to see my employment history reflected in the names signed on holiday greeting cards. Oh – and one thing, people – when you are sending those holiday cards, please make sure the year is written on them so that we OCD people can put them in the right order later. 🙂
