Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
11/29/2024
Anything goes #4
50 responses to “Anything goes #4”
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I’ve been in Seattle like once in my life but I like reading your diner reviews. Thought about them today when I was talking with some folks at the park with our dogs. There’s a grocery store in our neighborhood. It’s family owned, name is on the sign, and various people with that name are walking around when you’re shopping. The kind of thing you’d like to support. But it’s not. Their food is overpriced and frankly horrible. They got me again the other day when I grabbed a couple chicken breasts, only to see the “best before” date was literally 3 hours away. By midnight, these things were gonna go bad. And from experience, they probably cheat a little on that.
There’s a new Whole Foods down the street and the neighborhood joint has been putting up signs that read PROUDLY NOT OWNED BY AMAZON and the like, and I think people fall for it as they walk by, but are converted into corporate whores by the time they leave.
I think this is why Marx hated small businessmen more than even rich industrialists.
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It was probably illegal, but I’ve been to stores that put all the expired stuff in a refrigerated section of its own, with low, low prices. And I’ve bought, because expiration dates are largely BS anyway, but yeah, any store should be diligent about expiration dates, especially meat and dairy.
With their economies of scale plus all the advantages the giant corporations have bribed for themselves, a little store can’t compete on prices. You gotta know that walking in. You’ll be paying extra for having a store in your neighborhood with mayo when you need it, or whatever. And maybe you get better service or odd items that the giant chains don’t bother with. Or maybe not.
Then again, maybe I’m dead wrong and don’t know squat. Prices don’t work that way with restaurants — an omelet at Denny’s is pretty much the same price or *more* expensive than an omelet at a mom & pop diner. So as always, what do I know? Diddly.
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Either we live in neighborhoods or we live in housing developments. Small businesses help build and sustain neighborhoods. I’ve never been in a Whole Foods and never will.
John
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I’ve been inside Whole Foods, pre- and post-Bezos. Painfully expensive. They bought out a competitor called Wild Oats, which had a store in our neighborhood. Nice store, but expensive.
It’s a pity there’s basically no such thing as an independent supermarket. You get little tiny mom & pop groceries, pricey but friendly, and giant corporate chains, but nothing much in between.
At least in Seattle there are lots of Asian groceries with good prices on vegetables… but you can’t get cereal or hot dogs or frozen pizza in such places.
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In Tacoma, the best locally owned grocery is Stadium Thriftway. Not a huge store, but crammed with good stuff including very good produce, a nice made on request sandwich shop, a good bakery and quite good selection. The checkers have been there forever. Less than a block from Wright Park and a block from Stadium High School if you’re into castles. More expensive than the discount stores and less expensive than the big chains and upscale stores. Everybody says they’re friendly, but these folks actually are.
John
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Sounds cool. Thriftway was a local chain in the northwest once upon a time, wasn’t it? There’s still one in Ballinger and one in West Seattle, independent, apparently.
I went to the West Seattle one, found it friendly too, but stratospherically expensive. The soap I was looking for was $7 per bar, which is like $3 per bar more than they charge at Grocery Outlet.
What’s up with the stadium at Stadium High School? It’s huuuuuuuge, way bigger than any high school needs. Haven’t been there for 50 years, is it still largely roped off as structurally unsafe?
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Yes, Thriftway was a west coast grocery chain. I don’t know to what extent the remaining Thriftways are related. They might share some functions like delivery, but I’m not sure. In any case, they all seem to be independently owned by locals. As for pricing, it’s been a while. When I was working, I drove right by Stadium Thriftway and did a fair amount of my shopping there. They had, and still have, in the summer, hamburgers off the grill outside the front door for about four bucks, and they’re BIG burgers. It has to be there to bring people into the parking lot, because they can’t be making money on hamburgers. It’s those little touches that corporate food stays away from.
John
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The West Seattle Thriftway is right on my bus route, and I’d love to shop there. But everything in the place was at least a buck or two inflated.
I was spoiled by Woodman’s, the cheap chain in Wisconsin and Illinois. Huge stores, carried everything, and everything was cheap.
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Missed the question first time around: Stadium High School was built by the Northern Pacific Railroad as a luxury hotel. It was nearly completed when the Railroad failed financially, then boarded up for a decade and finally sold/given to the Tacoma School Board. It opened as Stadium High School in 1906. I think by now the entire building has been rehabbed and is, at least mostly, available for educational pursuits. If it’s not the coolest looking high school in the country I’d be surprised.
John
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I’ve only been there once, and don’t even remember the school building, only the stadium.
So the premise was, they’d stage football games, maybe outdoor concerts, to draw people to ride on the railroad and stay at the hotel? I kinda like the idea.
The school must be pretty dang cool too.
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In case you live in an area in which there’s been a small nuclear accident and you can’t pull in distant web sites, after game 7 (of 14) the World Chess Championship between D Gukesh vs Ding Liren is tied 3.5 – 3.5. Tomorrow is a rest day.
John
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https://www.chess.com/tv seems to be a link for live coverage. Not sure whether you gotta pay, or maybe it’s free and the moves are interrupted for beer commercials?
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We’re 8 and out, so I’m replying down here. The hotel preceded the stadium. The high school also preceded the stadium. The stadium was proposed the year the high school opened and was constructed in time to host President Teddy Roosevelt. The high school was (re)named after the stadium, not the other way around. It strikes me as an historical oddity. This was back when Tacoma was the City of Destiny without any irony. Now there is irony in such abundance that we export it.
jtb
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And it was built over Old Woman’s Gulch, says Wikipedia. I collect oddly-named places. Bitter End, TN. Good Grief, ID…
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I bought a Casio keyboard a long time ago from Jafco and I can play the Beverly Hills Cop theme song and the first 7 notes of Star Wars A New Hope main theme. I’d be down to make some music. We can use my elderly mom’s garage for our sessions. She won’t hear a thing. We can smoke some weed in the garage too if you want! But we have to kind of try to mask the smell.
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Always looking for historical coincidences and diamonds in the sky, I note that Jafco disappeared from the formerly great state of Washington in 1986, the same year Beverly Hills Cop came out. So I suppose, depending on your performance skills, that you got there either just in time or a liiitle too early. The weed could go either way.
jtb
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The weed’s gone a long way and seems to still be going.
Jafco was here when I was growing up, but I barely remember it. Wikipedia says if acquired by something called Modern Merchandising in 1972, then by Best Products in 1982, then all the Jafco stores were converted to Best stores, and Best went belly-up in 1997.
Fossilized capitalism.
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Not much for making music, sorry, but if you make it I’ll listen. I can definitely help with masking the smell.
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. . . and fer godsake, make singles, not albums. Just tryin’ t’help.
jtb
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Damn. I just wanted to make music. Just wanted to jam. I didn’t know that I had to audition. Mom will be disappointed. Told her I was going to have a friend over. She was going to make some meatloaf.
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No auditions here. You’re in the band, mate.
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I hope this is already on the movie list, but here’s an “I”. . . “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. Wonderful, subtle film. 2022.
jtb
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Been there, done that, and it was spacey indeed.
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Sorry, I remember it now. I’ve had to catch up on the Voyagers in the last decade or so because I was kinda busy while they were executing close encounters with planets (before the Web, launched before CNN existed — there was mostly the Nightly News and newspapers). My work shit seems trivial now, and I was married a couple of times during the journey — still am, but only to one woman, which seems to be enough.
When I read your review for the first time I remember thinking something like, “Doug is a fine writer, but this little movie summary is some of the best writing I’ve ever read: every word is right, every thought is coherent, this is big boy writing.” I remember thinking that, because that was what I was thinking again about ten minutes ago when I reread the writeup. You know I’m not saying all the other writing is shit. But sometimes inspiration drives competence to new heights.
John
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Well, shucks, mister — thank you. The movie is indeed inspiring.
Let’s hope the Voyager team survives Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency.
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If government were meant to be efficient, we wouldn’t have sent these two incredible vehicles into the cosmos in the first place. But you already knew that.
John
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Which brings me to this, alphabet be damned: What Voyager deserves is a double feature — “The Farthest: Voyager in Space”, a 2017 documentary about the Voyager mission, starting with Gary Flando’s 1965 discovery that the solar system would become configured to take advantage of gravity assist all the way to Neptune for launches in the second half of 1977, and would not again be so configured for 176 years: this meant that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had about three years to plan for a huge project and get funds allocated — maybe a billion dollars — to give the project a chance of success. The movie is narrated by a cadre of very old planetary, propulsion, and imaging scientists who answered the call and made Voyager the most important and most successful space-based project of the 20th century. The film ends with an enormously controversial photograph of the Sun’s planetary system taken from beyond the orbit of Neptune, with Carl Sagan riding to the rescue and Chuck Berry providing the celebratory music. This sets the stage for the second feature, the above-reviewed “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”, and really gives the work of the ageing engineers context.
OK, that’s my idea of a double feature.
John
The second feature then is the above reviewed “
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It’s on my list for an out-of-alphabetical viewing in the near future. Curious to see if it’s as good as your review!
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Motherfuckers had me when they played Rose Royce’s “Wishing on a Star”. It just got better from there. You can’t fast-talk me into buying Arizona scrub land, but play the right music and I start packing my old jalop. I am precisely the right age to be a child of the 60s, and for good or ill, that’s who I am.
jtb
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Game 8 in the World Chess Championship is a draw. Now tied 4-4. Need 7.5 to win. If the two players are tied after 14 games, they will play Rapid. If tied after Rapid, they will play Blitz until one remains. OK, maybe not as exciting as the English cricket side going to India, but exciting in its own way.
jtb
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Is there a good guy here? All I know is, an Indian dude and a Chinese dude, but I like *both* cuisines.
R U serious tho? If it’s tied they play speed chess? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard since Dean left the kitchen. It’s like the new ‘ghost runners’ in baseball extra innings. Play baseball, play chess, but don’t play games with the games.
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Since there is a separate rapid/blitz world tournament every year, and the World Chess Federation holds their traditional chess tournaments every two years, I don’t know why they can’t just keep playing until somebody wins a game. When world chess and chess players were poor, before Bobby Fischer, I understand that an extra week in a hotel room might have been a burdensome expense, but now it’s the World Chess Championship sponsored by Google. The prize money should cover an extra week OK. In case you didn’t catch it, the Bad Guy here is Google.
I followed World Chess from Kasparov through Magnus Carlsen, but haven’t been following it closely recently. These two gents both seem OK to me. With Communist countries one always wonders about manufacturing champions, but you still have to put in the work.
John
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I sort of doubt that anybody here wants to spend nearly an hour and a half with Jeff Baxter, who has been Skunk for so long I had to check the web to remind me of his first name. But his story about Andrés Segovia alone is worth the price of admission which is an hour and a half of your time — hardly free, but my time comes pretty cheap these days.
Skunk played with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, but spent much of his career as a studio musician, playing potato chip jingles and movie backgrounds. OK, he also did some work for the Defense Department and Jimi Hendrix when he was Jimmy James. As it turned out, his friendship with Hendrix continued until Jimi’s death, which didn’t take long, all things considered.
Specifically, this is a one-on-one interview with Rick Beato, who hosts a damn fine webcast. I don’t agree with Skunk’s politics, but it’s hard to disagree with his solos on “Reelin’ In the Years” or “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” or any of his many Doobie pieces. (Obviously, I’m a serious Steely Dan fan and not so much with the Doobies). But I couldn’t hit pause, even though it was free and I really had to piss. I guess that’s compelling content. Here it is . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLT9LUVcISg
as always,
John
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I’ll give him an hour and 23 minutes, but it’s gotta be in the background, listening only, as I do other things. I heard another ep of Beato’s show a couple of years back, and he’s good. Baxter’s gotta be good too, since I’ve actually heard of him. Hope they’ll explain why he’s called Skunk.
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Doug, that’s a legendary secret. There are guesses and hints, and it couldn’t possibly matter, but the guy creates such beautiful music that there are a few relics like me who are at least mildly curious. This interview, which, as you indicate, is well done, is also a little sad. Skunk hasn’t been on top of the world since the Doobies broke up for the fifth time. And they might still be touring. He looked damn old in the interview and I looked up his age and he’s a year older than I am. OK, now I’m a little bummed.
John
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Maybe it’s sad if you’ve been following the guy all his & your life and it’s obvious he’s closer to the end than the beginning (as are we all).
To me, it wasn’t sad at all. Here’s an old, old man with more enthusiasm about what he does than everyone but about a dozen people I’ve known in my life. Joyous!
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I like your perspective and it helps. Glad you enjoyed the interview. And as someone interested in music, I can’t think of any solos offhand that I enjoy more than Skunk’s on Rikki Don’t Lose That Number. He’s sort of known for his fairly sparse solos. Not exactly Led Zep, and there’s something pleasant about that. If you’re hitting the right notes, why add more?
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Which makes me wonder, what about the wrong notes? Who’s the Anti-Skunk — the worst, least talented but still ‘successful’ studio musicmaker, in your opinion?
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Doug, tape is cheap, and volatile and non-volatile memory chips are even cheaper. Studio musicians are ubiquitous and global. There are thousands of guitarists playing that solo, even 50 years later. You can hire almost any of them for union scale, and many of them for less. So your question is probably more like, “Who freezes up in public performance and regularly hits the wrong note?” I’ve never been much of a concert guy, and I haven’t read about such a successful group / fuckup performer, but one might exist. In general, absent a contract, such a player would simply be fired and replaced with another brilliant player.
In the 60s and 70s, band members regularly mounted the stage pretty fucked up on drugs or alcohol (yeah, I know it is). I went to a Sly and the Family Stone concert where, even through relatively crappy public amplification equipment, I could hear guitars hitting the wrong chords and the drummer hitting the wrong drum at the wrong time a few times, because I knew their catalog fairly well, and I knew what notes or beats were on their albums. That was expected in the drug era.
But herein lies a tale. Rikki Don’t Lose that Number, the last cut Jeff Baxter played on for Steely Dan before he jumped to the Doobie Brothers, has a fantastic introduction by Victor Feldman on the flapamba that sets the funky tone of the song. The writers/producers (mostly Donald Fagen with some help from Walter Becker) created the song that way. But when their label went to release the first single from the album Pretzel Logic (with Rikki . . . on the A side) the label guys decided the song was too long for AM radio, so cut the introduction entirely off the 45. So if you bought the single or only heard it on AM radio, you entirely missed the legendary Victor Feldman.
There ARE no dogs in the studio. There are the men and women who can play the charts as written, and there are many brilliant players who can enhance what’s on the charts. The short answer is at the end of a wandering comment.
John
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I thought maybe you were messing with me, but no, the word of the day is… flapamba! Always assumed the opening was someone playing a keyboard and someone else tapping a pencil against a tin can.
The answer makes perfect sense, and the question was stupid. It’s like asking who’s the worst, least talented second-baseman in MLB. You could analyze the stats and come up with an answer, but whoever it is would be the 31st-best second-baseman in baseball, which is still damned good.
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Oh no, William & Mary won’t do…
All the tech talk — the history of steel guitars before the Bixby Electroharp invented pedals to change pitches, steel guitars had four necks, with tuning twists all over the place — is of course well beyond my spectroscopic ken, but it’s reassuring to hear two experts discuss such intricacies.
Man, the solo in “Ricky Don’t Lose That Number” is sooo sweet and perfect, even to a guy who’s no audio gourmet.
The story he starts telling at 1:20:00 is flat-out fantabulous.
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Still learning the software here. It looks like once we’ve gone eight levels deep on a threaded conversation, “reply” is no longer an option, so let’s meet here instead.
There was once a red hot mamacita of my minimal acquaintance, and some said that if you played the right music she might start plucking my old jalopy, if you know what I mean and I think you do, but I never found the right music and my jalopy remained unplucked.
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Trump choosing almost ENTIRELY Ceos and Billionaires PROVES he’s going to HELP the Working Class! Billionaires and Ceos LOVE the Working Class!
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FRIEND of the poor! INSPIRATION for the downtrodden!
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The working class shoots back when fired upon. Not always or even usually, but often enough to keep the Kevlar folks in business.
jtb
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The masked gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson seems to have brought Americans together unlike any event I can remember since 1980’s “miracle on ice.” Little grief for the victim, whole lotta praise for the perp. Even a right-winger of my acquaintance isn’t able to work up a good head of aghast.
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You’re probably just a year or so too young to remember the TV show, but Robin Hood was a thief who was celebrated by the locals. He was careful to only steal from people who had way too much gold in the castle, or at least had a castle in which too much gold could be stored.
jtb
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I remember the legend, and especially the movie, which is one of the greats. But Mr Hood only stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He didn’t seek out and kill the rich, shooting them with specially etched bullets.
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He didn’t kill them in the TV show, or, it sounds, in the movie(s), but the Robin Hood legend goes back 600 years and more, and some of the stories and poems are not entirely pastoral. A few portray not just an archer, but a swordsman, who was not adverse to running his sword through his “victim’s” torso. There are certainly elements of many of the poems, fables, stories, and pseudo-histories of violence, rendered on behalf of “the poor” which was most of the population of England because the “business class” was pretty small and substantially licensed by the monarchy.
I’m just saying that some of these old stories get cleaned up for visual media: Robin Hood kicked ass in many of the verbal legends.
jtb
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I like to think the legend is based on a real guy, who was a real badass. I’d have no problem then or now if Robin Hood has a sword and a penchant for slice-and-dicing.
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