"Y" is for Yonder (the Wild Blue)

 










Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.

If you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay.
Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.

Come fly with me, let's float down to Peru.
In llama-land, there's a one-man band, and he'll toot his flute for you.
Come fly with me, let's take off in the blue.

Once I get you up there where the air is rarefied

We’ll just fly, starry-eyed

Once I get you up there, I’ll be holding you so near,

You may hear, angels cheer, ‘cause we’re together

Weather-wise, it’s such a lovely day,

You just say the word and we’ll beat the birds down to Acapulco Bay

It’s perfect for a flying honeymoon they say,

Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly

Pack up, let’s fly away…

© Cahn Music Company; Maraville Music Corporation

Are any of you old enough to remember when train travel was common and air travel was a big deal?  When a trip on an airplane was exotic and exciting?  When Frank Sinatra sang "Come Fly With Me" and you wished you could take him up on it?

Do any of you remember this scene?

Your dad wore his best brown suit and hat (well, back then he always wore a suit, although at the beach he'd at least roll up his pant legs and leave his coat and tie in the Buick) and your mom wore her new floral-print summer dress and lacy white hat. Airport security consisted of a middle-aged guy with a nightstick and revolver and clip-on tie who looked like he'd eaten more than his share of donuts and rocked back and forth on his heels as he gave you a wink and a nod.  You strode out from the terminal building across the tarmac toward a gleaming, streamlined airplane with either a blue or orange stripe or two red ones, depending on whether you were flying Pan Am, American or TWA.  You ascended a set of air stairs that coveralled mechanics had wheeled up to the plane and were greeted at the top by a beaming stewardess (as female flight attendants were called in that less enlightened age), impeccably attired in a neat blue suit adorned with silver wings and a smart, military-style cap.

The cabin wasn't cavernous, but only because wide-body jets weren’t yet invented, not because you were being stuffed into it like so much sausage by a bean counter corps trying to stave off bankruptcy proceedings.  Maybe your dad brought you up to the cockpit where the pilot (who almost certainly flew during the War) pointed out what the various levers and switches did and handed you a set of Junior Aviator wings that weren't made in China. The biggest challenge for the flight attendants was your little brother wanting to zoom through the cabin with his toy F-86 Sabre jet, not business travelers refusing to turn off cell phones or surly men glancing furtively about.

Jet air travel was in its infancy.  You could get on a 707 or DC-8 for a trans-oceanic flight or major domestic route, but just flying was excitement enough and you felt a thrill, tempered with a bit of healthy apprehension as you looked out the window of your DC-6 or Super Constellation and saw the mechanic standing below the streamlined engine nacelle, fire extinguisher at the ready, and each propeller slowly turn before its massive Double Wasp or Turbo Compound radial engine caught and fired in a thunderous coughing fit and cloud of white smoke.  The booming cacophony calmed to a loafing, lopey idle until the pilot deftly eased the four throttles forward together with a practiced touch, unleashing ten thousand stamping, impatient horses to urge you free of the ground.  And then, leveling out at cruise speed and altitude, the engines settled down to a reassuring, steady drone.

It was still only 15 years since those same engines powered the Thunderbolts and Corsairs and Superfortresses that helped your dad and uncles whip the bad guys in the big war.  And even though they couldn't go down and have a big time in Havana anymore since that Castro clown took over, and even though the Russkies were rattling their sabers and sending stuff into space and you had to do duck and cover drills at school and your dad looked over brochures for backyard bomb shelters as he smoked his pipe, you still liked Ike and it was still an idyllic and exciting time, full of ideas and pregnant with possibility.  And on a day like today, bobbing on invisible currents of air between puffs of blinding white cloud in the achingly, impossibly blue heavens, even the Reds couldn't spoil it.

"V" is for Vinyl

Please note: this post is about vinyl records.  If you're looking for pleather,  just keep moving.  This isn't that kind of blog.

Having been born in 1969 not only means my knees ache and I need glasses and I'm squarely in the target demographic for some of the tackier pharmaceutical ads on late night television, but also that my contemporaries and I remember some pretty rad stuff, like G.I. Joe with the Kung-Fu Grip, The New Zoo Revue, crocheted beer can hats, and... the vinyl record.
 
Most of us children of the '70s had portable phonographs with our very own 45s and LPs, and as teenagers of the '80s, we caught the tail end of an era when going over to a high school friend's house meant studying album covers and reading lyrics from sleeves while listening to their record collection, just as it did for our Boomer parents.  We were living the swan song of the vinyl record; we just didn't know it, and probably wouldn't have understood it if we had.

 

In my childhood bedroom... and at Chris and Greg's house after school

Digital music is an advance over the vinyl record... in some ways.  It's compact and portable, it's not affected by a host of physical problems that plague record playback, it's not worn out by normal use, and a rack of CDs is much less likely than your roommate's musty stack of cardboard-sleeved records to take on the lovely bouquet of spilled beer and cat pee.  The vinyl record is also pretty much a home-bound affair.  1950s car-mounted record players gave it the old college try but pretty much went the way of the Edsel (I wonder how many discs were scratched going over railroad tracks).  If you've got to roller-boogie in sweatbands and short-shorts to Alicia Bridges, your boom box is going to need a cassette player.  And what level of hell would recitals, family gatherings and car trips be for sullen adolescents without mp3 players and ear buds?

Remember this?

But as with many other objects of nostalgia, the vinyl record has qualities that have never been bettered.  Much has been said about the realism, immediacy and warmth of vinyl, and I'm convinced that when an analog signal is converted into discreet zeroes and ones, just as when an image is expressed in pixels, something is necessarily lost.

Then there is something that the quibbler or the uninitiated may complain about, but is an essential part of the experience for many of us.  We vividly remember laying down on the floor of our living room in front of the gigantic Magnavox console stereo, or flopping down in a beanbag with headphones (real ones, that covered the ears) plugged into the hi-fi.   When we lowered the tone arm onto the record's lead-in groove, that little bit of audible crackle was a Pavlovian signal to our young temporal lobes that something cracklin' good was about to happen.  In particular, I remember that anticipation just before the London Symphony Orchestra sounded the first crashing strains of the Star Wars Fanfare on our two-disc soundtrack album.

But the biggest loss with the demise of the LP has to be the album cover.  It's not just that the larger format provided a more generous canvas for groundbreaking artwork than the CD; in the '60s and '70s, especially with double albums, they blossomed into interactive mixed-media experiences, with front, inside and back covers linked conceptually, playing a joke, giving a visual pun or surprise, or telling a story.  A jewel case insert or the digital thumbnail picture next to the .mp3 listing on iTunes has no provision for the listener to punch out die-cut marching band memorabilia, open tenement windows, undo zippers or peel bananas.

Often, "new and improved" really means cheaper to manufacture, distribute and retail.  Whether it means real improvement for the consumer isn't always clear, especially in the rear view mirror.  Call me a throwback, but I'm sad that the vinyl record is mostly a museum piece.

What's your favorite album and album cover from the vinyl era, and why?  

Update: Five bonus points for the first person to give the name and artist of all the above album covers.  Two points if you know which picture is of the back cover and why, and one point if you can identify the doohickey above.  Points not redeemable outside Bakersfield, CA, terms and conditions apply, see store for details.

"O" is for Old

Did I mention I like old stuff?

Yeah, I do, and I have as long as I can remember, probably starting with a fascination with my grandparents' things. Fast-forward to 1985 and my first car was a 1964 Chevrolet Chevy II Nova SS (quite a mouthful, yes?) and I drove it for the next twenty years. It was a big enough part of my life for a blog post all its own, and it still saddens me that I had to sell it.

I don't know if I could catalog all the things I like about owning and using old stuff. An important one is that if you're driving a car made the year your parents graduated high school, you'll probably be the only one on your block. The Nova attracted a lot of attention. Granted, 20 to 65-year-old males wasn't the demographic I was aiming for, but it was still cool. Obviously it fed into my nostalgic side. The Nova was like a time machine, and I had a great time cruising with the girlfriend who would become my wife. I even had a collection of '60s nickels and quarters in the ashtray. Is that weird?

In 2006, age 42.  No trouble picking it out in a parking lot.

When it comes to actually using old things, I categorize them in three ways. The first are things that have been made truly obsolete by newer things. These would be mostly utilitarian things. Most people don't wash their clothes in a tub with washboard and wringer or watch television on a old DuMont set, and to do so would probably make them glad they're living in 2013.

Some old things are quite useable and may have some advantages over new things, but involve some definite compromises in using them. My Nova was a good example. It was functional and was actually one of the faster cars on the road in the mid-80s. But it always ran hot and didn't have air-conditioning, which is a problem in Bakersfield seven months of the year. It also had low-backed seats and lap belts only, so while I did worry about whiplash and breaking my face on the steering wheel, it was a calculated risk I was willing to take. That I often had to work on it was offset by the fact that I could work on it without a degree from a technical school.  And the $46 annual registration fee was bragging material.

Finally, there are those things in which the old version, if not superior to the new, at least has some demonstrable advantages. For me, these include shaving with old-style safety razor, shaving soap and brush, and vinyl records; more on those in the coming days.

I think I've mentioned this before, and I'll repeat it - where "new  and improved" actually means "new for no good reason but improved marketing potential," I'll take a good, hard look at the old.  Your results may vary.

"G" is for the Good Old Days

Circa 1982, I was a preteen boy more interested in airplanes than just about anything else (with certain of the girls at O.J. Actis Junior High a close second). I knew with absolute certainty I was going to grow up to be a pilot, no question. I read about aviation, built model airplanes (I know, not exactly guaranteed to get said girls' reciprocal interest) and loved going to airshows. It was at one such show on a spring weekend that I crawled around and under the immaculately restored B-17 Flying Fortress Sentimental Journey and happily forked over three of my dad's dollars to walk through it. Afterward, standing in the shade of her broad wing, surrounded by the sounds of radial engines and Glenn Miller pumped out of the tinny PA system, I remarked to a trim, gray-haired gentleman in a leather flight jacket who had flown in B-17s during the war, “Sometimes I think I was born forty years too late.”

I’ll never forget the man's reply.  “Ah, don’t ever say that.  Everyone is born when they're supposed to be.”

Even at the know-it-all age of twelve, I immediately recognized the wisdom of his words. I knew he was telling me that every age has its share of good times and bad, challenges and opportunities, and that it's up to everyone to seek out the adventures of the era in which they find themselves.

I'm still insufferably nostalgic, though. I've always loved old technology, old films, old music, old style, and I still think there's a lot those things can teach us. There are so many things about people's lives in earlier times that I find fascinating and think ought to be preserved and not forgotten.  I think old people are a treasure.

But as the noted American sociologist Billy Joel observed, the good old days weren’t always good.  It’s one thing to want to hold on to the good stuff from the old days; it’s another to forget there was bad stuff, too.

So I’m glad to have missed out on a time when lots of Americans still thought that Hitler fellow over there had some pretty good ideas.

I’d hate to have seen American citizens be robbed of their property and herded into barbed wire enclosures in various badlands because they had a surname from the wrong country.

It would have been scary to see so many children my age in leg braces and iron lungs.

  

I don’t want to return to an era when “separate but equal” was perpetuated in law instead of recognized as a baneful fiction, when sitting down at a lunch counter could be a radical act.

I'll pass on thinking it was ever okay for a man to manhandle or otherwise disrespect a woman.

I’m glad I wasn’t around to see America's veterans come back home to be spit on and slandered.

So I see nostalgia for what it is and keep it in its proper place on the shelf. I keep loving old cars and motorcycles, and listening to Sinatra and shaving with a mug and brush and wishing I wasn’t so paranoid about letting my children play outside.  And I gratefully live in the present, ever looking for God’s purpose in having put me in this place and this time, right here, right now.

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"C" is for Change

If there's one thing most people would agree is constant in life, it's change, and that's certainly true of the things we use. The history of things is the story of how they are changed in the uneven but inexorable march of technology.

There comes a time when many of the things we use are developed to a point of seeming perfection. We don't always recognize it at the time because we're continually looking to improve and innovate, and it's only after we've innovated a thing away from a state of beauty, elegance and simplicity and toward excess weight, needless complication and superfluous ornamentation that we realize we've gone farther than we ought, or than was really necessary. Remember the lithe, elemental Datsun 240Z and its techno-luxury descendant the Nissan 300ZX?

Some things are perfected but are a technological dead-end. The Samurai's katana wasn't replaced by an improved sword; rather, the firearm rendered the whole concept obsolete.

"Don't worry, Gronk.  Chainsaw just passing fad."

Other times we think a thing has reached a state of goodness that couldn't possibly be improved upon, then, suddenly, new technology comes along and upsets the apple cart and progress begins again. Think of the mechanical wristwatch - for over three hundred years it was improved, refined, seemingly perfected, but still a mechanical watch. Then came the 1960s, and quartz movements and digital displays, and suddenly it was a whole new ballgame.

And what is perfection is seldom clear, even in hindsight. It's hard to frown about technology making watches more affordable and more accurate, yet to me, some significant things were lost: style, the work of artisans, the wondrous interplay of miniature jewels and cogs and springs, not adding electronic batteries to our landfills. The thing is, probably no two people will agree on exactly when something has been perfected or even whether it has. Fortunately, the new doesn't always supplant the old; in the case of watches, electronics peacefully coexist with mechanical escapements, and there are more choices than ever to satisfy both me and my more tech-minded counterparts.

You can probably think of your own examples. Maybe you agree with me that the bicycle reached its apogee of grace and goodness in 1986, or, like me, prefer analog watches and instruments to digital ones. Maybe you're a recurve-shooting archer who looks askance at the cams and pulleys of a compound bow. Do you think the story of the automobile is a big anticlimax after your '66 Beetle? Are you a cook that shuns microwave ovens and prepackaged meals? Are you one of those audiophiles for whom nothing can match the music from from a vinyl LP?

I'm not a Luddite or contrarian. I welcome the real progress brought by technology, but I also recognize that some good things get lost along the way and that some change is more about marketing hype or reducing manufacturing costs than about real improvement for the consumer. Five-blade razors? Really? Forty dollars for a ten-pack of refill cartridges? Are you kidding me?

What's one of your favorite objects of enthusiasm? When do you think it reached its state of perfection, or do you think the best is still yet to come? I'd love to hear from you.

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