Charlie Watts' Golden

Overheard:

The key to Led Zeppelin is that somebody is always playing a counter point. You can hear that. ~Jimmy Page

I know that Page was talking musically, but the phrase popped into my head as I began write a tribute to Charlie Watts who will celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary in October.

Through all those years of temptation, one guy stays true and faithful. That's sort of a "counter point" isn't it?

I always thought Charlie Watts' rock drumming was deceptively simple. It wasn't hard to copy. His jazz drumming is another story. You can tell he's an old school drummer by the way he holds his sticks: traditional grip.

Here's Johnny Depp narrating Keith Richards' version of the time Charlie Watts slugged Mick Jagger.  [skip to 3min 43sec for the violent part, but watch the whole thing for context]:

Stop Making Sense (1984)

From Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984):

I adore the floorlamp stage prop. And who among us didn't fall in love with Tina Weymouth?

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me around
I feel numb, born with a weak heart
Guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground, head in the sky
It's okay, I know nothing's wrong, nothing
I got plenty of time
You got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money, always for love
Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight 

Home, is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this is where I'll be, where I'll be
We drift in and out
Sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
And share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up
Eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head

French Wit And Wisdom

Years ago while living in Cleveland, I signed up for a "correspondence course" to teach myself French. In the pre-internet days, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a number of such courses.  They sent me assignments which I completed and sent back through the mail.  I haven't done this sort of thing recently, but back then at least I had the feeling of connecting with a real person.

The French course had two textbooks, both written by a UW-Madison professor, Joseph Palmeri. There was a grammar book with exercises and there was a companion reader entitled French Wit And Wisdom:

The book is a real treasure. You can see how well worn mine is. It's clearly Palmeri's labor of love and reflects a lifelong harvest of pithy French wit on all of life's salient topics.

Here's the table of contents:

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The book is bilingual, having the original French on the left-hand side (along with author and citation) and Palmeri's translation on the right. This is a sample page set concerning work and happiness:

The book is available on Amazon. Check out the review by his grandson: link

"Radiation...You Hear The Most Outrageous Lies About It"

A favorite line from a favorite movie--Repo Man:

So in delving into the early history of radiation, I think I'm fact-checking myself into outing a falsification.

More later.

meanwhile, added:

Early radiotherapy

My Replacement Is Here

The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'

Inside You The Time Moves And She Don't Fade..

That Chicken had a lot of Gall!

Gallium, named after France (or was it a chicken?), lies just west of Germanium in the periodic table. An imaginary (Imaginot?) line separates them. Actually, both Gallium and Germanium are metallic but a clear demarcation runs diagonally east of Germanium, separating the metals from nonmetals--the "haves" and the "have nots" in terms of sharing the electronic wealth:

Once upon a time I briefly worked for an oil company in Cleveland. An older material scientist (whose name escapes me) once showed us interns a neat trick in the lab. He melted some Gallium metal (it melts in your hand) and showed us how a sheet of Aluminum will absorb Gallium (like dissolves like even liquid metals). The older gent, who was a British ex-pat, explained that during WW II, the RAF feared that the Germans would sneak over and sabotage their planes.  In those days, aircraft were often made of unpainted Aluminum.

Here is a video showing how Gallium wrecks an aluminum coke can. Imagine some nefarious kraut doing that to an airplane's wings.

________________________
Actually, Aluminum is not absorbing--rather, Gallium is invading.

The reason that Gallium liquifies is related to why Copper is so ductile and bears repeating: if you give an atom a perfectly filled sub shell along with one extra electron (the 31^st one), the metallic bonding will be weak and non-directional. It all makes perfect sense to me.

50 Years Of MyTunes: 1984

Let It Be by The Replacements. The jangling guitar solo on the first song I Will Dare kind of sounds like Peter Buck from R.E.M. -- and so it is!  Unsatisfied is the anthemic masterpiece from this, the first of three very good successive albums by the Replacements. It's still hard for me to grasp how and why these guys didn't make it commercially.

Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü. Hüsker Dü took their name from a children's board game. link  They, along with Prince and The Replacements, put Minneapolis on the map of American music. I owe my introduction to these bands at this time to a friend named Bill Amundson who then lived in Fort Collins, CO.

Couldn't Stand The Weather by Stevie Ray Vaughan. SRV pulls off a cover version of Hendrix's Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). This is about as close as any mortal got to covering Hendrix.

Learning To Crawl by The Pretenders. This was the album I saw them play in Akron OH, while I lived in Cleveland.

1984 Singles/Video


Drive by The Cars. This song will forever remind me of a girl I dated in Cleveland around this time. I didn't have a car then.

Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper. Another MTV classic from around this time.

Eight Miles High by Hüsker Dü. Pure metallic angst. This song was released on a 45 RPM single on STT records.

Repo Man by Iggy Pop. Never released as a single to my knowledge. The version I know and love is from Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man. The entire soundtrack for that movie is a great screen capture of that time.

The Ghost in You by The Psychedelic Furs. I know why that song haunts me.

(Don't Go Back To) Rockville by R.E.M.

Pride (In the name of Love) by U2

Panama by Van Halen. Though already formulaic and beginning to choke on hubris, they still crunched enough to catch my attention with this one.

Mad As A Hatter

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones that are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.~ Jack Kerouac

I once met someone who went mad. He was a professor at a small state university. He was one of those guys who had been been well-schooled back east but, finding no place at the table there, headed west and carved himself a niche at lesser place.

His niche was electrochemistry-the science of what happens at metal electrodes in contact with chemical solutions. He used a special type of electrode called a hanging mercury drop electrode which, as the name suggests, was a hanging droplet of mercury which comprised the electrode. The beauty of the method was that the mercury droplet was the actual working electrode immersed in solution. The droplet, being metallic, was in electrical contact a capillary of mercury in contact with a reservoir of fresh mercury. An applied voltage made cool things happen at the interface: ions line-up in layers, mimicking what happens in things as mundane as milk colloids and in nerve cells. Other electrodes tend to gunk up quickly but the beauty of the hanging drop method was that the electrode could be clipped off and a fresh one rapidly "grown" from the reservoir. This allowed very precise and ingenious time-dependent experiments, faster than a person could analyze. His wife was a computer programmer (she was also a professor, but in the Electrical Engineering department) and her programming skills came in handy. Together they were the first to develop such computer-controlled experiments in 1960's.

His wife passed away in the early 1980's and he was one of those guys who lost interest in life afterwards. They had no kids (that I knew of) and had put all their love and legacies into their students and papers instead. By the time I met him he was erratic, irritable and quite likely mad. We blamed mercury. After he died (he flipped his car on a rural highway, leaving everything to his cat) his lab was cleaned out. There was mercury everywhere, in every crack and crevasse. You couldn't open a drawer without little balls of the stuff rolling and bouncing around inside. So yeah I think the guy was as mad as a hatter.

Urban Reclamation: Help Wanted-None

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Spuren Noch Zwei

Cleveland (1984)

Spuren Noch

Cleveland (1984)

Hart wie Kruppstahl

I forgot to mark this yesterday:

On this day in 1796 the city of Cleveland was founded by Gen. Moses Cleaveland.

linkage

Urban Reclamation: Gardens On The Tracks

Cleveland Flats (1984)

That photo is for Jason (the commenter) who likes photos of weeds growing where you least expect them.

Suburban Reclamation

Taken somewhere in Cleveland (1984)

They're Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets Out

Somewhere east of Cleveland, OH (1984)