Greg Strikes Back

I do tire of how big record companies miss making ideal compilations of my favorite artists by that much. Even the best comps usually fall at least a song or two short of completion. So now that I can download songs, I'm trying to take matters into my own hands:

Elton John
Essential Elton, Volume One

Your Song
Levon
Tiny Dancer
Rocket Man
Honky Cat
Crocodile Rock
Daniel
Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Candle In The Wind
Bennie And The Jets
Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
The Bitch Is Back
Philadelphia Freedom
Someone Saved My Life Tonight
Island Girl


Elton John
Essential Elton, Volume Two

Grow Some Funk Of Your Own
Don't Go Breaking My Heart
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
Part-Time Love
Mama Can't Buy You Love
Little Jeannie
Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny)
Blue Eyes
I'm Still Standing
Kiss The Bride
I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues
Sad Songs (Say So Much)
Who Wears These Shoes?
Nikita
I Don't Want To Go On With You Like That
Sacrifice
Can You Feel The Love Tonight
Candle In The Wind 1997


Elton John
Essential Elton, Volume Three

Take Me To The Pilot
Harmony
Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy
Madman Across The Water
The One
Pinball Wizard
Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding
Ego
Chloe
Bite Your Lip (Get Up And Dance)
Elderberry Wine
Border Song
Song For Guy
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Step Into Christmas

No this isn't 100% ideal either, but for a big Reg fan, the quibbles should be minor.

As a better dividing line between Elton periods, I wish "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" could start Volume 2, but there wasn't room for "Grow Some Funk Of Your Own" on either Volumes 1 or 3. And I really like the uptempo "Funk," so funk fuck it.

I especially enjoy Volume 3, as an original jumble of EJ songs. Note that I left the #1 hit "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" off the list of big hits in Volumes 1 and 2. I decided to make those volumes all original Elton John songs (written with lyricists Taupin, Osborne or Rice), and categorize "Lucy" and "Pinball Wizard" as "quality oddities" in Volume 3.

A case could be made for the moderate 1992 hit "The One" making the Volume 2 list, but as I'm not much for post-'80s Elton, I decided to keep it off Volume 2 and represent the '90s with just his two (by far) biggest hits of the decade, "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" and "Candle In The Wind 1997." "The One" fits quite nicely on Volume 3.

Also, there are plenty of tracks that could go on a Volume Four, consisting of faves I couldn't get before, and/or minor hits I like least, so I kept them off Vols. 1-3:

Club At The End Of The Street
Made In England
Sick City
Wrap Her Up
Nobody Wins
Friends
Burn Down The Mission
Tonight
Dan Dare (Pilot Of The Future)
Theme From A Non-Existent TV Series
Victim Of Love
I Think I'm Gonna Kill Myself
Solar Prestige A Gammon
Healing Hands
In Neon
Circle Of Life

I'll also try to include at least a little post-1997 Elton on Volume 4, and maybe I'll put the big '80s-'90s hit duets where Elton wasn't Top Dog ("That's What Friends Are For" and "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me") on there as well.

Other "perfect" CD comps I've made so far: The Beach Boys (stops at 1988), Neil Diamond (stops at 1982), Frank Sinatra (stops at 1966, but a remake might include 1973's "There Used To Be A Ballpark") and Fountains of Wayne. Sad there isn't room for Out-of-State Plates tracks on the FoW comp. Those'll have to go on a Vol. 2.

Ones I want to make (for a start): Negativland, Elvis Costello, Thelonious Monk, Nat King Cole, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.

Chop Chop

A poem by our own Chester Magpie, underground pundit:

I am numb to America
She has chopped my arms off
I am in life flight
The pulsating E-train on a
broken track
Elvis lost my mind not me
His everclear plastic dna
still drifts into the river
The muttering lunatic still remembers
nothing

Big Boom-Boom

I hope that this decade we'll finally see a release of Orson Welles' lost film from the '70s, The Other Side of the Wind, so that I can see the master's last completed cinematic work. (F for Fake, released in 1974, is a little premature for a final work, since Welles continued to plug away trying to secure backing for projects until not long before his death in 1985.) If The Other Side of the Wind was shown in a double bill with Jerry Lewis' infamous and unreleased The Day The Clown Cried, I'd be in movie geek heaven. The ironic thing is, I might well end up disliking both films.

***

It's been nearly 25 years since I wrote my last article for The Oregonian newspaper, in March 1981. My last story was on the Oregon state high school wrestling tournament, and the lead paragraph forced a mention of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane into a story on prep wrestling. The tournament was being held in a Portland high-school gymnasium that was clearly too small a venue. I likened it to the vastly overweight Welles trying to fit into one of his old Kane outfits. I was about three months short of my 19th birthday, and I'd already covered five state tournaments, and written dozens of bylined articles, for a major metropolitan paper.

Two months later, with most of the story opportunities for sports clerks like myself having dried up -- and me not getting along well with the new sports editor -- I quit the paper, and I never again worked for a city daily. It would be seven years before I got another newspaper gig at all, writing for the student paper at the University of Oregon. And it would be 18 long years before I finally got to write for another city paper: a part-time freelance job at a small-town Oregon newspaper that lasted about three years, before again the opportunities for paid assignments dried up.

I tried getting my old job back at The Oregonian in 1982, 1984, 1992 and 1994. The first time, I originally applied for a sports clerk job at the Oregon Journal, a "liberal" competitor paper (even though both the O and the OJ were owned by the same company.) And it looked like I was back in...until word came that the Journal would be ceasing operations. Journal employees were transferred to The Oregonian, and when I inquired about an Oregonian clerk job I got the impression the sports editor didn't want me returning to his department. The Journal editor who'd been willing to hire me suddenly became cold to the idea, now that he had switched papers.

The second time, my old editor was no longer in sports and I got a job interview (the last time I ever was allowed upstairs past security) with two people who'd been there during my 1979-81 stint at the paper. We had a nice chat (or so I thought), but I did not get rehired. That hurt.

After I returned to Portland in 1991, having spent four years away in Eugene and Seattle, I applied again. I now had a bachelor's degree in Journalism, and thought maybe that would help me get back in. Didn't even get an interview, nor did I get one when I tried one last time in 1994.

I wonder if my Oregonian personnel file has a note from the (now dead) sports editor, recommending that I not be rehired, ever. He was a gruff sort, and I was a confused and somewhat flaky college freshman. The previous editor and I had gotten along fine, when I was still in high school, and I'd gotten an amazing amount of choice assignments for one my age. But with new management came much less writing work, and more friction.

Twenty-five years later, there are at least four Oregonian sports writers from my day who still work at the paper: Ken Goe (who was the prep sports editor then and my immediate supervisor), Paul Buker, Terry Richard and Norm Maves Jr. If they were prompted to recall my time there, I wouldn't be surprised if they remembered the "confused and flaky" part more than the unusual amount of choice assignments I got, for my time at The Oregonian certainly didn't end well.

***

Ken was the name of a kid I knew in grade and middle school in Gladstone, Oregon in the 1970s. We were never close buddies, but we saw each other around a lot and had plenty of conversations -- sometimes friendly and joking, sometimes sour and biting. I remember Ken primarily now as the person who told me that he'd seen a story of mine read on the PBS kids show Zoom, circa 1973-74.

In my fifth-grade class, which I think Ken was in, I'd written a tongue-twister story called Big Banana Bubble Gum. I long ago lost my copy, but as I recall, it was a simple tale of Bob giving Billy some of his "Big Boom-Boom Banana Bubble Gum." He then gave some to Brenda, and Barry, and Barbara, and Bonnie...and just about any other B name I could think of. As the gum sharing continued, it became "Bob's, Billy's, Brenda's, Barry's, Barbara's and Bonnie's Big Boom-Boom Banana Bubble Gum."

The teacher, Mr. Carl Conte, did a great job of reading the story to the class, getting lots of laughs. It went over so well that I figured I oughta to try sending it to the Zoom people in Boston. It seemed like the kind of thing they'd dig.

After more than a year of periodically watching the show to see if my submission had made it on the air, I was about ready to give up, until I ran into Ken one day and somehow the old tongue-twister story came up. He said he'd seen it read by "the Oriental girl" on the show, and she'd had fun reading all the B words.

Too perfect and too cool...if true. I don't remember Ken being a particularly dishonest person, but when you're 11 or 12 and you want to get attention, sometimes little white lies can be awfully tempting. He may've figured that it probably happened that way, even if he didn't personally see it.

If Ken was telling the truth, I've yet to see a single shred of other evidence that the story was read on the show. After Zoom returned to PBS in the '90s, I e-mailed the show website to see if WGBH, which produces the program, had archives of old story submissions going back to the beginning. I never got a reply.

There is a Zoom "Best of the 1970s" DVD out, and I hope to see it sometime. I think it's unlikely that my story made the cut, but if there's any public record of it being read by "the Oriental girl" (Bernadette?) it would probably be there.

Earth Shaking

This summer I became a distant family relation to the Mayor of Portland, Tom Potter. So distant, in fact, that I'm not sure what term to use for my relationship to Hizzoner: I'm married to a cousin of the mother of the bride who married Potter's son.

The mayor and his wife were, of course, front and center at their son's wedding. At the post-wedding party I spoke briefly with the groom, but missed out on talking to his parents. (My wife, typically a social butterfly in these kind of gatherings, had a few friendly words with them.) I did, however, happen to make brief eye contact with the mayor right after I used the port-a-potty. My brush with fame.

I mention this not just to shamelessly namedrop -- I also attended a high-school class with the son of the previous Portland mayor, Vera Katz, and interviewed Vera for my college newspaper -- but to point out a comment Mayor Potter made last spring in a Willamette Week interview (linked above) that seemed a bit strange at the time, but now seems prescient, in the wake of how ill-prepared everyone was for the Hurricane Katrina disaster:

What's an issue the public isn't paying attention to right now that you anticipate spending a lot of time on in the next six months?

(B)eyond our ability to respond to a terror attack, there's a concern I think is even bigger. An earthquake on the scale of the one that caused the South Pacific tsunami would devastate Portland. Those early-hour responses are going to make the difference between saving lives and losing lives.

He also mentioned school improvements, and readiness against terrorism, but it was mentioning the earthquake possibilities that got the most attention. For me, it brought to mind a comment I heard on the radio in 1989, after the big Loma Prieta earthquake that year, from longtime Oregon Legislature correspondent Russell Sadler. He said a big earthquake here is inevitable, and "Oregon is not ready."

This morning, The Oregonian came out with a story about the area's earthquake readiness. There was a earthquake here in 1993 that did some damage (including major damage to the old campus of Molalla High School), but there hasn't been a huge quake recorded here since 1700. Well before Lewis and Clark, even -- which isn't necessarily a good thing, as the area gets increasingly overdue for something that's happened an estimated 20 times over the past 10,000 years:

Such an earthquake "will happen at some point," said John Pennington, the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It could go tomorrow." If it does, Pennington said, referring to how some soils turn to mush in a quake, "downtown Portland is liquefaction zone central."

And unlike a typical earthquake of a few seconds, the magnitude 9 event would last up to 5 minutes, buckling structures that could withstand a smaller quake.

The last Big Quake struck Jan. 26, 1700, and one estimate gives a 10 percent to 20 percent chance of another in the next 50 years.

The 1993 quake came not long before I started dating my wife-to-be. It happened in the early morning, as I was lying in my bed, in my downtown Portland apartment. In my half-asleep state, as I felt the apartment shake I thought maybe a giant semi truck was passing on the street below. It was only later in the morning that I turned on the radio and found out what had happened. That was a relatively small quake, and thoughts of the "Big One" give me visions of Irwin Allen-esque disaster.

***

Last week, Willamette Week did a story on the Portland-area readiness for various disasters:

As far as seeing the disaster coming, the Big Quake could happen "any day now," says James Roddey of the state Department of Geology. "Here in Portland, there is going to be an incredible amount of damage."

Roddey's main concern is the fault off the Oregon Coast, which is gathering pressure like a knuckle waiting to crack. When it does pop, the resulting magnitude-9 earthquake will be bigger than anything ever in California, as big as what hit Sumatra last year, and its effects could rival Katrina's, Roddey says. The tremors from that could conceivably trigger three smaller earthquake faults running through the heart of Portland. Says Roddey, "Bottom line is, no matter how much work Portland has done, nobody is ready."

Health officials say another top concern is the avian flu, strains of which appear to be rapidly evolving and which experts say could wipe out millions worldwide in the very near future-like a new bubonic plague. Other concerns cited by emergency officials include a Sandy River flood, the volcano under Mount Hood, and, of course, a terrorist attack, either nuclear or biological.

It's not widely known outside the Northwest that Mt. Hood, a bit southeast of Portland, is a potentially active volcano, and has a good chance of eventually wreaking Mt. St. Helens-like havoc. In the late '80s, when as a University of Oregon student I worked for the campus News Bureau, I did a story (which, as I recall, was inspired by a class assignment I did) about the geology of the Mt. Hood volcano and area readiness in case the volcano erupted. The USGS person I spoke with gave me the impression that the Hood area will be at risk for volcano eruptions for a long time to come.

Things We Did This Summer

It only took nine years, but we finally put a new set of patio furniture in the backyard this summer, and it really enhanced the summer experience. Beyond the Sunday family breakfasts on the patio table, there were the evenings I spent sitting on a new patio chair, drinking lemonade and listening to Air America on the radio (or talking with my son), and looking up at the stars.

Our backyard is on the edge of a small town, next to a large field, so it's nice and quiet, and ideal for contemplating the vastness and mystery of a summer night sky. When I look at stars, I often think of something I heard Carl Sagan say on his Cosmos TV series. He was talking about Einstein's views on space and time, and he said that when one looks out into space, one is essentially looking out into time.

I note with wonder that the starlight I'm seeing is many millions of years old, and that any distant creature who might see the light from our sun won't see it until long after we're gone. It brings to mind a passage from Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, where one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters was trying in vain to apprehend, via a drug experience, a pure and unfiltered perception of the world, separate from the distance between object and perception that time creates. He couldn't do it and neither can I, for all perception has an element of illusion built in.

***

Since 2002, the summer months have been marked by my family's yearly theatre participation, at the Molalla (OR) Community Theatre. For the fourth straight year, my wife and kids performed in the summer musical -- this time it was "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" -- and I again wrote the MCT press releases for the local media.

Pictured in photos: Pamela Hough, Ron Palmblad, Devon Seale, Ken Willeford, Kim Packham. Click on photos to enlarge.

That's my wife Pam on the far left of the black & white photo, playing the harridan Domina. In both photos is our family dentist, "Doctor Ken," playing Domina's husband Senex. (Both Ken and Pam were hilarious.) The girl playing Philia in the color photo goes to high school with my daughter, and acts in high school plays with her. The boy playing Hero in the top photo accompanied my daughter to school dances last year. It has become like a family affair, for many in the MCT group.

Hard to go wrong with Larry Gelbart's words and Stephen Sondheim's songs, and there were several funny moments in the MCT production -- the father (pictured in the top photo) and son who respectively played Pseudolus and Gloriosus both hammed it up beautifully -- but when you have so few tryouts for roles that a nine-year old (my son) can play multiple adult roles (as a Roman soldier, slave and citizen) you know it's small-town community theatre, and slack must be cut.

I work at night, which has precluded me from trying out for a stage role, for better or worse. That didn't stop me from making a fool of myself singing karaoke at the cast party, however.

***

I also got to read the new Harry Potter book The Half-Blood Prince this summer. As the household only had enough cash to buy one copy, and I was on a waiting list for the library copies, I had to wait until after my daughter finished the book we bought her (it only took her a couple days.) I was willing to wait until my son finished borrowing it -- until it became clear that he was putting off reading it (he still hasn't finished it), and so I took it upon myself to start reading a chapter or two a morning, before the kids got up. During this time, my library copy came in, and I finished the book reading that. For the next HP book, the final volume of the series, I'm gonna save money to buy my own copy, dammit!

The biggest debate about the new book has been, is Harry's longtime Dark Arts teacher, Severus Snape, a good guy or bad guy? Please allow a bit more HP geekery while I speculate:

Snape did say that HP must be saved for the Dark Lord, which would make sense in the possible context of Snape being a bad guy. But it really isn't clear whether Dumbledore was pleading for Snape not to kill him, or pleading with Snape to kill him -- probably a deliberate ambiguity on HP author JK Rowling's part. One shouldn't forget how Snape saved Dumbledore earlier in the year; and it would be Snape-like to be offended when Harry calls him a coward, because he knows how as a double agent he's being anything but a coward.

I suppose there's enough contrary evidence and ambiguity that Snape could be, in the end, an agent of Voldemort. But as I try to get into JKR's head, with its flair for the cinematic, my gut tells me she wants Alan Rickman (who plays Snape in the HP movies) to go out playing a (martyred?) hero, not a villain.

Perhaps the biggest pathos of the final book will be Harry finding out too late how important Snape has been to the cause.

***

My kids started school last week. Day by day they move closer to adulthood -- it won't be long now for my daughter Vicktoria, who has begun 11th grade. Already she got her school picture (they took it on registration day this year), and minus the braces, one can clearly see signs of a soon-to-be adult in the photo. She's always been a bright light -- consistently high grades, exceptional extracurricular activity and all that -- and I am so proud of her.

The fall musical at the high school will be "Annie," which was the first MCT play my family was involved with. Pam played the choice role of Miss Hannigan in that (really a wonderful performance, near the level of Carol Burnett and Kathy Bates), and it would be a kick if Vicktoria won the role of Hannigan for the new production. But because she's smaller than most of her classmates, she's probably better suited to be the lead, Annie -- and that, too, would be a kick.

My son Andrew has begun 4th grade, and it trips me out to realize that my baby boy's almost 10 now. He continues with his love for drawing, and last week I took him to my old friend's art studio in Portland to get a taste of the artist lifestyle. Andrew showed my friend his notebooks of anime-style drawings, and it was very gratifying to see the two artists hard at work on projects: Andrew doing his first charcoal drawing, of Harry Potter playing Quidditch in the rain, and my friend doing a charcoal drawing of his young "apprentice."

Link It Down

Two additions to the list o' links: another strong lefty political blog, Wark Harkavy's The Bush Beat; plus a consistently funny companion to the "Overheard in the Office" blog, Overheard in New York. Go ahead, bite the Big Apple -- don't mind the maggots.

For your geek pleasure, here's The Art of the Mix, a site featuring lists of many first-rate homemade mixes. (Hopefully I'll add some of mine there sometime.) And Eric Newport aka Kethinov has done a nifty summation of all the Star Trek episodes and movies up to the recent Enterprise series.

And finally, for you bloggers who wonder if you have a blog or a blog has you, step back and take a few deep breaths and read this helpful online pamphlet from The Nonist about "blog depression." You're welcome.

They're Tryin' To Wash Us Away

Steve Gilliard, who does rhetorical fury better than just about anyone online, goes nuclear about the big debacle in the Big Easy:

Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question. Rick Perry is trying to save his ass, but it ain't working. NOLA looks like ANGOLA and that ain't flying.

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

Word, with a side of red beans and rice. When you have the appetite for it again.

Scan The Man

Got a new HP printer/scanner this week, and finally can get some more photos online. Slowly but surely I catch up with the cyberpack.

The older shots from '62 and '80 are scans of copies of the original photos (still in my father's possession, as far as I know), and so the resolution isn't as good as I'd like, but it'll do.

Click on the photos to enlarge.




The (not so) great debate in Las Vegas, 2004.





Fat and fairly happy. With son in the Bahamas, 1998.





With mother and brothers at the White House, 1980.





Baby Greg in San Berdoo, 1962.