In Medias Res: Saturday Night Live Music

Showing posts with label Saturday Night Live Music. Show all posts

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Things Have Changed"

That they certainly have, Bob. Sometimes even for the better.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Driver's Seat"

As far as rocking-hot one-hit wonders go, Sniff'n'The Tears perhaps can't be beat.

Saturday, July 09, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Shanghai Sky"

Joe Jackson's Big World is 30 years old this year, and just about every song on it (like this one) comes through as a delight. Such a great, great album. Give it time to build; this version is slow, but tremendous.

Saturday, July 02, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Free Swinging Soul"

Michael Hedges was a tremendous performer, whose death nearly 20 years ago is one I still mourn on occasion. This was his last great song, which this unpolished, live version of (or one nearly identical to it) is fortunately included on his posthumous Torched.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Wichita Skyline"

What it arguably implies about my city perhaps isn't terribly complimentary, but it's true, and saying (or, in this case, singing) something that is true is a compliment all its own.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Pure"

I owe this delightful, accidental discovery entirely to Chris Bertram's sad recollections of the optimism he felt about politics, ideas, and football twenty years ago. Thanks, Chris!

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Drive"

Just a plain wonderful song, and wonderfully sung, though Benjamin Orr remains missed. (Give the person with the camera a few seconds; it straightens out quickly.)

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Rainbow's Cadillac"

Melissa saw these guys just this past Tuesday. They didn't perform this song (probably my favorite Bruce Hornsby composition), but that didn't matter to me: they gave us two hours of joyous, raucous music, on guitars and piano and accordion and mandolin and violin and dulcimer and vest frottoir (I had to look up what that was called), and all of it was fun. As Bobby McFerrin commented long ago, the first responsibility of a musician is to "play"--and these guys certainly knew how to make serious music without an ounce of distracting seriousness. A tremendous show.

Saturday, May 07, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Never Surrender"

Today was my tenth graduation day as a professor here at Friends University--and it also happened to be a day on which I formally bade farewell to the largest single group of graduating seniors that I've ever taught and advised through all their degrees before. Some were driven, ambitious students, who burned through their four years on fire with goals and a grand purposes; others were students that had been derailed along the way, and struggled back, making use of second chances and pursuing back-up plans, just trying to get done, and finally move on to the next stage of their lives. Like the great majority of teachers, no matter how many times I've seen examples of both these types of students, and every type in between, the day in which they all receive their diplomas is a wonderful, hopeful, gratitude-filled experience. It brings out the whole cheesy--but in a way, fundamentally true!--sense of determination and celebration that is part and parcel growing up and growing older (and, we hope, stronger and better and wiser) in our modern age. So anyway, graduating class of 2016: this is for you.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Saturday Night Live Music: "Purple Rain"

But of course.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "The St. Stephen's Day Murders"

I'm not nearly as cynical about holidays, or family, as Elvis Costello is--but that doesn't mean I don't find this song simply, bloody delightful.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Good Intentions"

Every dorky alt-pop band from the 1990s deserved their 15 minutes of genuinely-earned musical respect, their one song that actually adds something to the three minutes it takes to listen to it. This was theirs.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Did It in a Minute"

Daryl Hall and John Oates are having a blast here. The keyboards are going wild, they're playing with feedback, everyone in the band looks freshly scrubbed and overjoyed. After more than a decade of slogging through the low-end of the radio dial and surviving the disco revolution, Private Eyes was proving, by the middle of 1982, that Voices wasn't a one-off, and Hall & Oates were reading to conquer the charts. Come and play live in Toronto, hanging out with the SCTV guys in the meantime? Why not?

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "In The Air Tonight"

So, Phil Collins is coming out of retirement. Does that scare you, this Halloween night? It shouldn't. No, Collins isn't a profound musical genius. But he's a capable, hard-working, and sometimes almost freakishly talented pop musician. So let's get in the mood to be spooked again, shall we?

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Rocky Mountain High"

How much of a defender am I of what many write off as cheesy, lazy (but in truth, often quite wonderful) 70s hippie-pop? Enough of a defender that this weekend, which I'm spending on the campus of the University of Colorado, nestled up right against the Flatiron mountains, I knew that there was only one possible choice for tonight.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Sinners and Their Repentances"

Not the greatest audio or visuals, I know--but when it comes to Bob Mould, the artist you gave us pretty much everything that was good about both Hüsker Dü and Sugar, beggars shouldn't be choosers.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Tall Trees in Georgia"

Like almost everyone (unlike Mick Fleetwood!), I discovered the folk singer and jazz interpreter Eva Cassidy too late, long after she had died of melanoma in 1996, despite my having lived in the Washington D.C. area when she was making her music and achieving her small degree of (richly deserved) fame, despite my having frequented the same Georgetown nightclub where her most famous recording was made. I had no idea that any video recordings of her performance at Blues Alley existed...and now that I've discovered them, I can't watch and listen to them enough--especially this cut, the most vulnerable on a heartfelt and passionate album of great and often haunting music. From twenty years too late, Eva, RIP.

Saturday, October 03, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Feel So Good"

I'm posting this from Geneseo, New York--which is pretty close to Rochester, which is where Chuck Mangione was born. So really, why not?

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Kayleigh"

Prog--particularly the tail-end of prog in the 1980s, like this here--gets an unfairly bad rap. It really does.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Saturday Night Live Music: "Sunset Grill"

It's been hot this week in Kansas--but still, summer's clearly at an end. Weary we are of the summer heat, but knowing we're going to miss it too. Either way, time to shut her down.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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