A Gift for Little Christmas Eve: The Wonder that are Tiny Desk Concerts

NPR Tiny Desk ConcertsThose of us of Scandinavian extraction refer to Dec. 23rd as “Lille Yule Aften” or “Little Christmas Eve.” It’s the day for putting up your Christmas tree, decorating, and getting ready for the festivities to come. 

(Traditionally, the tree was cut and put up today, then lit with candles on Christmas Eve. I know that sounds ridiculously dangerous, and it probably is. But it is a very different thing when your tree is is being lit up one day after being cut. The year my family lived in Denmark when I was first grade, we spent Christmas with our extended Danish family and celebrated with a candle-lit tree. That said, both of the trees in my house are artificial and lit with LEDs.)

In observation of this wonderful day, I’m giving you all a Little Christmas Eve present – a collection of some of my favorite NPR Tiny Desk concerts.


Nothing can get me more distracted online than getting going watching NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. These little shows are generally acoustic sets with just a very few musicians who range from the late great Americana legend John Prine to current superstar Taylor Swift.

Tiny Desk concerts have been around for about 15 years now. They are all recorded behind the desk of a music host from NPR and then posted to YouTube and NPR’s music website.

I got thinking about these little concerts last week when I was finishing up a blog post about Swift and wanted to close it out with some kind of video from her. My searching quickly reminded me of her wonderful solo Tiny Desk set.

Once I finished the post, I spent way too much time running through some of my favorites of these concerts from over the years. And that made me want to share some of my favorites of these treasures with all of you as a holiday Christmas present.

Take your time and enjoy each of these beautiful music breaks.


Regina Spektor – Spektor is a Russian immigrant who does provocative and interesting songs from her perch at the piano. I discovered her when she did a cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps for the closing credits of the stop-action animated movie Kubo and the Two Strings. One of the great joys of this little show is when she opens by improvising a new song about being on Tiny Desk!


Wicked — This is a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz musical Wicked featuring composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz at the piano and current Broadway leads Alyssa Fox (Elphaba) and McKenzie Kurtz (Glinda) performing four songs from the show.


Chick Corea and Gary Burton – Jazz pianist Corea and vibraphone maestro Burton present 20 minutes of absolute enchantment. I was fortunate enough to see Gary Burton in concert more than 45 years ago, and I confess that it is strange to see this old man with the mallets rather than young man I heard in concert. Of course, I was a high school student then, and now I’m nearing retirement.


Taylor Swift – A solo set from the current Queen of all Media recorded in 2019.


Adele – One of those stars who only needs one name. What a voice! And I so love Someone Like You that Adele co-wrote with Dan Wilson.


John Prine – Oh, John, we miss your voice so… I was fortunate enough to see John Prine with Steve Goodman back when I was in college and we were all young. John stayed active until the end, producing his final album in 2018 featuring the heartbreaking Summer’s End. After you are finished here, follow the link to find the gorgeous video that goes with the song.


Yo-Yo Ma – Ma plays excerpts from the Bach cello suites. When I’ve looked at my year in review on Apple Music for the last two years, by far the most played music has been Ma playing the Bach cello suites. Listen to this short Tiny Desk concert and then go discover the magic that comes from any of his three recordings of the complete suites.


I wrote most of this post a week ago or so, but when Tiny Desk featured the cast of the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s darkly brilliant musical Sweeny Todd in a concert that dropped yesterday, I had to add it to my list. (If you aren’t familiar with Sweeny, the basic plot is about wronged barber Sweeny Todd who takes revenge on those who hurt him by killing them and chopping them up to be sold as meat pies made by Mrs. Lovett in her bake shop. And if that isn’t twisted enough for you, when the play was first staged, beloved actress Angela Lansbury played the Mrs. Lovett!) In this version we see Josh Groban as Sweeney and Annaleigh Ashford a “Mrs. Lovett.” The conductor is Alex Lacamoire of Hamilton and In The Heights fame.


Want to be non-productive for the next few hours? Just go Google Tiny Desk and you will get an endless list of sets to watch.

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My Favorite Christmas/Holiday Movies

Movie poster for Die Hard.This afternoon I went over to one of our local movie theaters and  purchased a pair of tickets for John McTiernan’s 1988 thriller Die Hard, which my Dear Wife and I will go see Monday. Die Hard got a rerelease last week as many people mistakenly consider it to be a Christmas movie and because the writers’ and actors’ strikes have produced a notable lack of new movies this holiday season.

I love Die Hard (along with most John McTiernan movies), but it is in no way a Christmas film – it is at best a Christmas adjacent movie that happens to be set at Christmastime, but it does not tell a story with a Christmas subtext or theme.

Regular readers here know that Dear Wife and I are inordinately fond of movies – especially old movies – so it seems to be appropriate for me to put up a list, in no particular order, of some of my favorite Christmas/holiday movies that get watched at least every other year.


Irving Berlin’s White Christmas is the first on my list, staring Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney (George’s aunt), Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen. The movie is directed by Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame. The story is pretty minimal about a song-and-dance pair teaming up with a sister act to save the Vermont inn of an army buddy. But White Christmas is loaded up with fantastic Irving Berlin songs and incredible dance numbers. The song in the clip is “Count My Blessings,” my favorite from the show. As a side note, there’s a great stage adaptation of it that you might be able to see as either a touring company or at a regional theater.


Scrooged – Bill Murray’s modern update on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Murray plays a cynical television executive who is making everyone around him miserable. He gets visited by the usual specters, including Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present and David Johansen (AKA lounge singer Buster Poindexter) as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Also staring Alfre Woodard as the Bob Cratchit character and Karen Allen. Please note that this is a pretty mean-spirited retelling Dickens and not for the younger set.


The Man Who Invented Christmas – While we’re on the topic of A Christmas Carol, The Man Who Invented Christmas is an imaginative take on how Dickens came to write his holiday classic.  This little-known movie has a great cast, including Christopher Plummer and Jonathan Pryce.


Remember the Night – From 1940, Remember the Night stars Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray as a shoplifter and a prosecuting attorney who take a Christmas journey together. It also features a supporting cast of Beulah Bondi and Sterling Holloway (who you likely know best as the Disney voice of Winnie the Pooh). I confess I like this much better than the far-more-famous Christmas in Connecticut. 


 

It Happened on 5th Avenue – This 1947 movie directed by Roy Del Ruth is about a hobo/street person who moves into a rich man’s New York home every winter while the owner is spending the cold season in Virginia. It’s a silly story, but who cares? It’s funny, it’s sweet, and it has Alan Hale, Jr. of Gilligan’s Island fame in a small role. The movie was originally going to be directed by Frank Capra, but Capra abandoned the project to direct our next film.


It’s a Wonderful Life plays at our local community volunteer-run The World Theater every year on Christmas Eve, and it’s great being able to reliably see this Frank Capra helmed Jimmy Stewart classic on the big screen. Assuming you don’t know already, Jimmy Stewart plays an everyman banker who becomes convinced the world would be a better place if he had never been born, and Clarence the Inept Angel shows Stewart’s character what the world would have been like if that had happened.


You’ll notice I don’t have National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on my list here. That’s because I think it is a horrible movie that does nothing beyond mocking its main character. I fully realize that it will sell out The World Theatre for three showings every year at Christmas time. I also realize that my criticism of NLCV would equally apply to my beloved Scrooged. Oh well, who said I had to be consistent?

Some honorable mention Christmas movies that you’ve probably already seen include:

  • A Christmas Story that lives on cable TV over the holidays.
  • The Bishop’s Wife with Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven.
  • Home Alone, like Die Hard, is more of a Christmas adjacent movie than a true Christmas story. But it’s a lot of fun
  • Gremlins is a scary/funny creature feature that actually does deal with Christmas issues.
  • A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart, the Muppets and Michael Caine, or Reginald Owen, or…, or…. They all can be fun.

Whatever your holiday favorites, have a very movie Christmas!


On a completely different note, go see Godzilla Minus One in theaters over the holiday. Yes, it’s in Japanese with subtitles. Get over it. One of my favorite movies of the year.

Godzilla Minus One is an excellent look at the price we pay for war, for fighting, for fear… and what we must do to redeem ourselves. The movie tells the story of a Japanese pilot and the men, women and children who surround him in the waning days of World War II and the years following. Yes, it is a good monster movie, but it is much more a really touching story of our humanity.

It also shows that brave filmmakers with good stories to tell can still make great movies out of franchises that have been around for decades.

I have loved the recent MonsterVerse films from Universal and the Monarch series on Apple TV this winter, but Godzilla Minus One is at a whole different level. It has nothing to do with Christmas, but it’s a fantastic movie that is now moving into general release.

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Is Taylor Swift the new Queen of all Media?

I’m working on the ninth edition of my textbook Mass Communication: Living in a Media World. The eighth edition was written in the middle of the pandemic lockdown and talks about a time when everything was being limited.

The lockdown is over, but sadly, the pandemic is not. But even though people are still getting sick, still dying, we have returned to some level of normalcy.

Here are my thoughts about our collective desire to get together once again to celebrate living in a media world.


Back in the 1990s, radio shock jock Howard Stern crowned himself as “the King of all Media.” Over the decade he would be known for pushing limits to the breaking point on his popular talk show, having a bestselling memoir called Private Parts, and having the book turned into a hit movie staring himself.

At the time, it was just about impossible to overestimate Stern’s presence in the media world and his potential to offend. He made jokes about sexual assault and even about his wife’s miscarriage. His offensive content and constant flirtation with near profanity kept him in constant trouble with the Federal Communication Commission. One biography of Stern notes that his biggest controversy occurred when he was on the air in Washington D.C. and a Air Florida plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge during a snowstorm:

“To express his outrage over the incident, [Stern] pretended to call the airline to inquire what a one-way ticket from National Airport to the 14th Street Bride would cost and whether it would become ‘a regular stop’”

These days, Stern still has a national audience estimated to be in the vicinity of 1 – 2 million people per day with his two channels on Sirius/XM satellite radio, a non-broadcast alternative to standard radio that is not regulated by the FCC. But he does not have the outsized influence he once did.

This clip was one of the few I could find of The Howard Stern Show that I felt comfortable about posting on my blog. But also, I love The Ramones.


Television talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey took over as the Queen of all Media in the 2000s with her long-running daily television talk show, her satellite/cable network, a self-titled magazine, and her Harpo television and movie production company. When Oprah (who really only needs her first name in the media world) listed a title for her television book club, it would become an instant bestseller and a cultural touchstone. On September 13 of 2004, she even went so far as to give everyone in her studio audience a new car, in partnership with car manufacturer Pontiac. But since she closed down her daily talk show back in 2011 and is now in her late 60s, Oprah, too, has moved a bit to the background.

The Oprah “You get a car” moment.


Taylor Swift Person of the Year Time magazine coverI would argue that in the 2020s, the title of Queen of All Media should belong to pop star Taylor Swift. She is the first female artist to have 100 million monthly Spotify listeners. Swift’s Eras concert tour presale brought Ticketmaster to its knees when millions of fans attempted simultaneously to buy approximately 2 million tickets in a matter of a few hours. Eras would go on to be the world’s first billion-dollar concert tour. In addition, her Swifty fans are estimated to be spending between $2 and $3 million for merchandise each night.

The Eras Tour concert film has brought in more than $250 million box office on a budget of approximately $15 million. Of course, having IMAX tickets selling for close to $20 a seat didn’t hurt. Nor did the fact that there was virtually nothing in new in theaters due to ongoing writers and actors strikes. Those $20 tickets were a bargain, though, compared with the $235 average ticket price for the actual concerts.

In addition to being intensely popular across a wide range of demographics, Swift has also become something of a feminist icon by reclaiming her place in the music industry by re-recording her early albums owned by the Big Machine label. By releasing “Taylor’s Version” of these albums, she is taking ownership of her master tapes and giving her fans the chance to buy them straight from her instead of rewarding her estranged former manager Scooter Braun who had purchased her catalog of recordings.

Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper chain, even has a full-time Taylor Swift reporter. Brian West was hired for the Swift beat in November of 2023. West admits to being a huge Swiftie, but doesn’t see that as an obstacle to him covering the Taylor media industry:

“I would say this position’s no different than being a sports journalist who’s a fan of the home team,” says West. “I just came from Phoenix, and all of the anchors there were wearing Diamondbacks gear; they want the Diamondbacks to win. I’m just a fan of Taylor and I have followed her her whole career, but I also have that journalistic background: going to Northwestern, winning awards, working in newsrooms across the nation. I think that’s the fun of this job is that, yeah, you can talk Easter eggs, but it really is more of the seriousness, like the impact that she has on society and business and music.”

Swift has even been credited with raising the television viewership of Kansas City Chief’s NFL games because she is dating the team’s star player Travis Kelce and attending the team’s games. There are also at least 10 college courses offered about her, including one at Harvard.

All of this led to Time magazine name Swift as its 2023 Person of the Year. In the cover story journalist Sam Lansky writes:

It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.

So instead of posting one of Taylor’s giant stage show videos, here is her solo acoustic NPR Tiny Desk concert from Oct. 16, 2019. NPR staffers still talk about how much effort they put into getting a ticket for this little show.


The media world has changed massively since Howard Stern dominated it in the pre-#metoo era of joking about sexual assault and other horrific issues that would never be tolerated now. It has also changed from an era where Oprah, star of a daily broadcast television show, could dominate our discussion of books, culture and race.

The first couple of years of the 2020s were a time of intense turmoil with the entire world shutting down in reaction to a global pandemic that would leave more than 1 million people dead in the United States alone. Perhaps people flooding to Taylor Swift’s concerts and film, constantly streaming her music, and obsessing over her dating life are part of an attempt to return to a world of normalcy again where music can be celebrated with friends, where sporting events are held with live audiences, and we can be creating the media memories that are such an important part of our shared life.

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Are Facebook and Instagram addictive? And if so, what does that mean?

We know that nicotine, meth, heroin, alcohol and the like are addictive. Biochemists can lay out the specific mechanisms that make these substances difficult to quit using. But then there is talk about sex addiction, video game addiction, TV addiction, and social media addiction. Are those real addictions? Do they have a biochemical mechanism? Lots of talk right now about Facebook and Instagram addiction – in fact 41 states are suing Meta over this issue. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Breaking news: Forty-one states and the District of Columbia are suing Meta on Tuesday alleging the tech giant harms kids by building addictive features into Instagram and Facebook — a legal action that represents the most significant effort by state enforcers to rein in social media’s impact on children’s mental health.


Why are there fewer (lots fewer!) jump scares in horror movies in recent years? (Bo0!)

TL:DR – Filmmakers are scaring us more with horror than with things that go bump in the night.

Since 2014, the number of jump scares cranked out by Hollywood has fallen precipitously.
To understand what has changed, we investigated how jump scares doubled in density between the 1970s and 2014.


 

Is Taylor Swift the “Queen of all Media”?

Remember back in the late 1990s when Howard Stern took on the title of the “King of All Media”? At the time (before he made the jump to satellite radio) he had the top-rated syndicated radio show, a bestselling autobiography, a number-one movie based on the book, and a Billboard-pop-chart-topping soundtrack album for the movie.

Has Taylor Swift hit that same point now with her hugely successful concert tour that broke Ticketmaster, has the most successful concert film of all time, and has a chart-topping rerecording of her album 1989? Ponder the question for now, but we will revisit this issue in a few days.

million at the domestic box office during its opening weekend, making it the highest-grossing concert film in U.S. history, according to estimates from AMC Theaters.


What unexpected movie can I watch to celebrate Halloween?

Might I be so bold as to suggest the 1963 Roger Corman classic Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, staring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and very young Jack Nicholson? It has only a marginal relationship to Poe’s well-known poem beyond Price reciting a bit of it at the beginning and has Peter Lorre entering the movie as a raven.

The Raven is a comic romp that tells the story of a battle between two master sorcerers. The screenplay was written by horror great Richard Matheson, best known for authoring I Am Legend. Less well known is that Vincent Price’s character Dr. Erasmus Craven was the model for Marvel Comic’s Dr. Stephen Vincent Strange. (Wonder where that Vincent came from?) The Raven is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Rupert Murdoch Steps Down From Fox Corporation and News Corp. Management

Ninety-two-year-old Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch is turning over control of Fox Corporation and News Corp. to his son Lachlan, age 52, bringing an end to his domination of conservative media in the United States and around the world. Fox Corporation is known, of course, for the Fox News talk show cable network, and News Corp.’s best known US properties are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Last week, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple penned a career retrospective on Murdoch’s legacy. Wemple writes that while Murdoch’s work with the WSJ, the NY Post (founded in part by Alexander Hamilton!), and the 20th Century Fox movie studios was significant, it was his development of the popular Fox News cable network that was transformative to American media. Wemple writes:

At the network’s launch in 1996, Murdoch placed Republican operative and television producer Roger Ailes in charge of turning Fox News into the country’s No. 1 cable news operation. Ailes eventually succeeded, on the back of distorted and often false programming that vilified liberals and served as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party — essentially a glossy, televised version of a right-wing tabloid. Ailes lasted until 2016, when a lawsuit filed by onetime Fox News host Gretchen Carlson helped expose a wide-ranging sexual harassment scandal….

Yet subsequent events demonstrated that the Fox News programming formula — Republican propaganda and high ratings — was more durable than its architects. Minus Ailes, Fox News continued its path toward reckless and biased reporting, a strain personified by now-former host Tucker Carlson. For more than six years of prime-time broadcasting, Carlson served as disinformer in chief at Fox News, a run that enjoyed the support of Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, the other top executive at Fox Corp. and News Corp.

According to the Washington Post, there is off-the-record talk that the Fox Corporation may get sold under the new leadership. Back in 2017, Fox sold off its 20th Century Fox movie studios to Disney, where it is now sadly known as 20th Century Studios.

Looking back, 2023 has been a rough year for Fox News.

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Everyone’s Gone to the Movies – The Year Sequels Didn’t Rule

It is almost fall, but it still seems like the summer movie season has a little time yet to go before we jump into the doldrums that lie in between the blockbusters and the late-fall/early-winter Oscar bait. Oh, wait a minute, perhaps there is no difference between the two, because this year Barbenheimer were two of the biggest summer films and are also the two top contenders for Oscars.


For the first time since 2001, the top three box office performances all came from first-time films that are not sequels to previous hits. Number one is, of course, the phenomenon that has been Barbie. As of today (Sept. 20, 2023), Barbie has brought in $626 million domestically and $791 million internationally for a worldwide total of $1.418 billion. That also puts Barbie at #11 on the lifetime domestic gross list, just behind 2015’s Jurassic World.

Number two is the animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie which has brought in $574 million domestic and $787 million international, for a worldwide total of $1.362 billion. That places it at #15 on the all-time domestic box office list (not adjusted for inflation), falling in-between Incredibles 2 and the 2019 Lion King remake. (I refuse to call it the live-action remake as it isn’t – it’s just a photo-realistic animated remake…)

To me, the unexpected hit of of the summer was Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer which was the Number Three movie for the year with a domestic take of $319 million and an international take of $593 million, for a global total of $913 million.

As  Dune director Denis Villeneuve put it in an interview with Variety, this success was a huge surprise because, “It’s a three-hour movie about people talking about nuclear physics.”

Villeneuve went on to talk about how Oppenheimer also helped remind people why they go to theaters to see movies: “There’s this notion that movies, in some people’s minds, became content instead of an art form. I hate that word ‘content….’ That movies like Oppenheimer are released on the big screen and become an event brings back the spotlight on the idea that it’s a tremendous art form that needs to be experienced in theaters.”

One of the reasons Oppenheimer did so well is the it brought in more than $179 million from large-format IMAX screenings. (I did not get to see it on an IMAX screen, but I did get to see it on a premium-quality theater with a giant screen and sound system.)

Domestically, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 out-performed Oppenheimer, but they did not have near the same international interest.

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Remembering A Motorcycle Ride to the United 93 9/11 Memorial on a Rainy Summer Day

It was 22 years ago this morning that I was teaching my freshman media literacy course at West Virginia University.  I had a class with close to 350 students in it. C-SPAN’s Washington Journal morning show was playing on the big screen as students gathered.  At 8:30 a.m. I shut off C-SPAN and started teaching.  When I got back to my office an hour-and-a-half later, news that our world was changing was in the process of breaking.

9/11 has always been highly personal to me.

One of my (and my Dear Wife’s) student’s father was supposed to be working in the section of the Pentagon that was hit by one of the planes. But since that area was under renovation, his dad ended up safe.

Another one of my students had a mother who was a flight attendant who flew out of the same airport the Twin Tower planes had departed from.  She was desperate for news. Fortunately, her mother was not on one of the attack planes.

One of my friends was the public radio correspondent for the area, and he ended up providing much of NPR’s coverage of the United 93 crash in Shanksville, PA.

And one one of my colleagues, who taught advertising, lost an old friend in the Twin Towers collapse.

The memory I’m sharing today is a brief story story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.

Me and my old KLRTook a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.

Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)

Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.

Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.

Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.

The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.

A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)

It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.

The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.

The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.

It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.

I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.

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Riding Up North – Wheels on Walls Part 5

This is the fifth post in a series of images from my travels for the  Wheels on Walls motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored  by Team Strange Airheads. For it, I need to collect photos of my motorcycle and rally flag taken in front of outdoor murals. The primary goal is to get photos of murals featuring wheeled vehicles. I can also collect up to ten that don’t feature wheels in them.  The winner of this year’s grand tour will get a lovely plaque and bragging rights for the year, and everyone who finishes will get an enameled pin. 


Last week I rode up north to the Twin Cities to see my dad and siblings as well as go to the Minnesota State Fair. A wiser person than I would have taken a vehicle with air conditioning, given that the high for the day was slated to be close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. But I was not smart. I took my motorcycle and managed to survive: I drank a lot of water and Propel from my Camelbak, and managed to collect another four Wheels on Walls murals on the round trip.

My frequent riding partner Mike went with me for half the day last Wednesday. Given the forecast, we headed out at 6:30 a.m. with a stop at Central City, NE’s Waffles and More cafe for breakfast. It was there I discovered my insulin pump had decided it didn’t want to talk to my continuous glucose monitor (CGM) via Bluetooth anymore, so I had make a call to pump support services to get things up and running again. From there it was on to Clarks, NE. Clarks is a town of just a few hundred people, but still has two murals and Clarks Trikes & Bikes – a Gold Wing and trike-conversion shop.

August 22 – Clarks, Nebraska. Mural with map of Nebraska and a roadster.

August 22 – Clarks, Nebraska, mural 2. This one is a traditional pioneer scene with an ox-driven covered wagon.


The ride home on Saturday was much nicer. The weather had changed to be almost 40 degrees cooler. I had planned for the Clarks murals, and I had been looking for another one on the way north that I didn’t find; but coming home I found several grayscale murals in Le Mars, Iowa portraying first responder and military scenes. Le Mars was also where I stopped for lunch each way.

August 26 – Le Mars, Iowa. The first of several grayscale murals in town that I discovered on the way home when I had to take a detour into the central part of downtown.

August 26 – Le Mars, Iowa. This one, featuring the War on Terror, was somewhat hidden down an alley. There were also several small panels on nearby buildings, but since I can only have two murals per town, I haven’t included them. This one was somber, featuring a funeral scene, airplanes and helicopters. 


I mentioned up above that I went to the Minnesota State Fair while I was in the Twin Cities. While there with my older brother, I got to see my old college friend Jane McClure at the Hamline Church Food Hall where they were serving the wonderful Holey Hamloaf Breakfast Sandwich. I also got to meet up with my motorcycling buddy and dear friend Bishop Matt Riegel, who was in town delivering home goods to his daughter, who now lives in the area.

Always fun to see the great local journalist Jane McClure at the Minnesota State Fair.

Myself (in my Team Strange tee shirt!), my brother, Bruce, and Bishop Matt. Matt felt compelled to the try the crispy lutefisk steamed lotus bun at the fair. My brother and I did not…


You can view all of my Wheels on Walls Grand Tour posts here.

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‘Great 78 Project’ Works to Preserve Vintage Recordings; Big Music is not Amused

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” John Keats:

If record companies had their way, there would be a lot of really sweet music out there. Let me explain.

The music streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and Amazon Prime all have deep libraries of recordings, but the emphasis always seems to be on what is popular and new. After all, their job is to get people to pay for access to music, and most of what people want access to is new.

Motorized gramophone  Mounted on card.-  Originally housed in Joseph Sanders Collection Box 5. From Library of Congress

Motorized gramophone photo from Library of Congress.

But there is a lot of music that predates streaming, predates, MP3s, predates compact discs, predates cassettes, predates 8-tracks, predates vinyl LPs, even predates 45-RPM singles. These are the recordings that were issued on the original commercial music format – the 78-RPM shellac disk.

The format was developed by young German immigrant Emile Berliner who arrived in the United States in 1870 at age 19. He wanted to create a recording format that would record sound on flat discs rather than Edison’s cylinders. And he wanted a format where you could make multiple copies of a recording so that people could buy copies of it and listen to it again and again.He called the player for these disks a gramophone, and for decades they were the way to listen to music at home.

So there was a huge amount of music recorded in this format. Unfortunately, it’s way too hard to access this music today. First of all, these discs are fragile and prone to taking damage to the sound on them with lots of clicks and pops. Second, few people have the equipment that will let them play these disks. And, finally, these discs are rapidly disappearing, and when the last copy of a particular recording disappears, it is gone forever.

Which is why The Great 78 Project is working at digitizing millions of sides of 78-RPM discs. While the most commercially attractive of these recordings have been remastered, cleaned up, and put on LPs or CDs, there are huge collections of these recordings that are orphaned and would eventually disappear if people such as the Internet Archive were not working at actively saving them. The recordings in the Great 78 Project are straight digitizations that are not cleaned up or modernized. They sound just like they would if you played the disc on a gramophone.

So it would seem that a project like this is nothing but good, right? Preserving the history of recorded music. Maybe the recording companies would even want to help support this kind of work financially? That would be a big NO.

According to a post in the Internet Archive Blogs by Chris Freeland, record labels including Sony and Universal Music Groups have filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for copyright violation.

While the following is likely not legally relevant, it is important to note that this is a non-profit project to preserve recordings and make them freely available for everyone. These digitizations can be used for teaching, research, and entertainment.

Interested in listening to these recordings while they are still available? Click the image below to hear a sampling of the many recordings in this archive.

Just a sampling of the hundreds of thousands of vintage 78-RPM recordings available at the Great 78 Project.

 

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The Lessons of Barbenheimer Shake Up Movie Industry

The standard narrative this summer is that audiences are tired of going to theaters for movies and would rather just stay home to watch streaming. Audiences stayed home in droves from one more Indiana Jones flick and didn’t show Mission Impossible the love analysts were expecting.

Audiences clearly are tired of franchise movies that have revisited the well too many times.

Conservative critics tell us movies are failing because they are “too woke,” whatever that means.

And yet…

Disney/Pixar’s Elemental was written off as one more Disney failure after having a $29 million opening weekend. But seven weeks into release, it’s brought in $148 million in domestic box office and a total of $424 million globally. Normally a big movie will fall off 50% or 60% after the first weekend, but Elemental held in surprisingly strong with declines in the 30s or even the teens some weeks. Families with kids found their way to the animated feature for weeks after release. It’s not a huge Disney hit, but certainly no disaster.


And then Barbenheimer weekend came along and surprised everyone.

Barbenheimer, as you no doubt know, is a portmanteau combination of the titles of the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer that both released on July 21. Now “everyone knows” that studios try to stagger release of big movies so that they don’t have to compete for audiences.

But these two highly anticipated movies went ahead with the same date – perhaps thinking that there was little overlap between a three-hour-long WW II biopic from director Christopher Nolan and a fashion doll-based fantasy from director Greta Gerwig.

But then something odd happened.  Gerwig and Barbie star Margo Robbie showed off on social media that they had opening day tickets to Oppenheimer.  And MI’s Tom Cruise proclaimed he was going to both. Going to a Barbenheimer double feature became the chic thing to do. But with the two movies having a combined run time of close to six hours with trailers, that’s a pretty big commitment.

Now the last time I did an insane double feature was in the summer 1989 when I went to the Cinerama to see the 70mm re-release of Lawerence of Arabia in the afternoon and to a regular theater to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the evening. Nearly six hours of movie in one day – one an epic, one a popcorn muncher. Lots of fun, but would have been better spread out over a couple of days.

Nevertheless, I made it to Oppenheimer with a friend at a big screen theater on opening weekend and to Barbie the next week with my Dear Wife. Both movies were wonderful, and the two movies were very, very different. But what did they have in common? They both benefited from being seen in a theater with an engaged audience.


Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were expected to do well, but no-one (except maybe Gerwig herself) expected either movie to be as successful as they have been.

Barbie  ended up taking first place in the box office, earning $162 million on its opening weekend, the best North American opening for a movie solo-directed by a woman. And Oppenheimer brought in $82 million, Nolan’s best opening for a non-Batman movie. Barbie unquestionably had the bigger opening, but it’s worth noting that Oppenheimer runs three hours plus trailers and so has fewer showings per day. It also is a dark, serious, R-rated WW II bio pic about the creator of the atomic bomb. Not exactly summer popcorn fare.

Now, three weeks following release, Barbie is still number-one at the box office, having brought in $459 million in North America and more than $1 billion globally. Oppenheimer has dropped to third place but still brought in $28.7 million for a domestic total of $228 million. On a budget of about $100 million, Oppenheimer has done an excellent $500 million globally.

So what does all this mean? It’s hard to read too much into this other than that in the summertime people love to go to the movies when there’s something new and interesting to go see!

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