After doing the Shred for the last six weeks, most of the workouts are ingrained in my head, so I’ve been setting a timer, picking an artist, doing my exercises to YouTube playlists for about 30 minutes. Yesterday was the Kinks; today was Beyoncé.
I can’t seem to embed today, so click on the images below for two of my favorite videos. The common thread seems to be pets.
Added benefit: though I’m not usually one to be ‘inspired’ by other people’s bodies, I have to fess up that Beyoncé has helped me get through a few workouts. The fact that she’s curvy but incredibly fit is at once impossible to achieve (it’s called genetics) and somehow inspiring to me, as someone with a curvy frame. Maybe it’s just that she’s one of the few celebrities out there that I think embodies true sexiness and glamour. Yes, I’m probably overthinking this, but isn’t she pretty much the queen of glam? Even when she’s riding around on a cat?
p.s. on a stalker-esque note, I happened upon a site that told me Beyoncé’s height and weight, which happen to be almost exactly my own dimensions. Hm, then why don’t I look like her?
Amazingly, I’ve never seen Saturday Night Fever. I kinda hate John Travolta, but I think I could get beyond the Pulp Fiction association long enough to enjoy his performance, especially because he dances like a fool and all the music is the effing Bee Gees.
Incidentally, I taught circus arts at a summer school for three summers, and I choreographed one of the group acrobatic numbers to this song. Twelve and thirteen-year-olds dancing, leaping and cartwheeling to this is pretty freakin great:
By now, most everyone has heard of Flight of the Conchords. Season 2 is now on HBO, I hear. But for those of us who don’t have television or cable, Netflix is the way to go. I just got Season 1 in the mail, and it’s about the greatest thing in the world. Here are two of my favorite songs from Season 1:
I like me some smooth jams, so Oakland-based artist Bart Davenport immediately piqued my interest. The video below is part smooth seventies, complete with bell bottoms, triangle playing and swing pushing, and part modern dork (juggling and awkward dancing, anyone?) I think I like it.
Let us also appreciate how hip he looks in concert:
I like v-necks on men
And as a bonus, look how charming he is as he duets backstage with my high school rock hero, Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips:
I don’t remember how I found out about Don Lennon, but I loved him the second I heard him. He writes songs with a critical eye and a deadpan humor about awkward encounters in dorm rooms and not really feeling the love when Dave Matthews mania swept college campuses back in the day. With song titles like “Junior Year Abroad,” “African Dance Class” “Really Dave Matthews” and “Gay Fun,” I feel like he’s speaking directly to the sense of humor of a liberal-arts-educated, cynical shy person who feels just a *little* bit superior and different — i.e. me.
An example or two of his lyrical brilliance: “When you own all his albums, and you’ve memorized the words / it’s kind of weird to look up on stage, and think ‘oh my God it’s really Dave’” (“Really Dave Matthews”); “You see there’s always more than one way to have fun / and if you’re really freaking out about it / relax: it’s only gay fun” (“Gay Fun”); “We put a man up on the moon but we’re afraid to put a man upon our bodies” (“Our Bodies”).
This is the only decent video of his I could find, but I recommend checking out his MySpace, or one of his albums.
My husband and I got a package in the mail from my cousin in Utah today. He included a book of a political/cultural persuasion for my husband. The two of them met the summer before last and now gchat and talk on the phone all the time about politics and sports. My cousin also sent a copy of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago for me. His inspiration for including this was probably that the title has my name in it. Either way, I’m enjoying it immensely, even though I’m probably a bit late to get on the Bon Iver bandwagon. I just love simple music done well, and I especially love weird, evocative folk. I also love that the album was recorded in an isolated cabin in Wisconsin. It’s the kind of album you listen to in your car and then bring inside your house to keep listening to.
It’s been a rough week. Seemingly every company in my industry is laying people off. There have been talks at work of the same. My husband and I have been strategizing about what to do if I lose my job. We’ve also been talking about moving somewhere near the mountains, like Nevada City or Montana (that’s where he grew up). Then there were the dogs: the one we brought home and later took to the shelter, and the ones I returned to their home. So, in the spirit of last Friday, I think it’s time for more sweet sounds from the late 70’s: what I like to imagine as a simpler time. I’ve had this one stuck in my head non-stop for the last week:
As you know, I recently discovered a large case of cds which had been hiding out under the passenger seat of my car for the last two years. After I had my fill of Wilco, I moved on to Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator). This is one of the saddest-sounding of Gillian Welch’s albums, and also my favorite. The Welch-Rawlings songwriting team has the uncanny ability to make songs that sound both vintage and new at the same time. They seem to manage to borrow from the past in a fresh, non-cliché kind of way.
Listening to Time (The Revelator) reminds me slightly of my room in the college-owned house where I first listened to it in Walla Walla, Washington. My brother had made me a copy and sent it to me that Fall of 2001, and I listened to it non-stop, completely entranced. I even recall working the term ‘revelator’ into one of my English essays. However, the imagery of the album is powerful enough that the songs don’t remind me of external memories as much as they do the songs themselves. This was another breakthrough record in my opinion, showcasing darker and more complex songwriting (I seem to like that, don’t I?), and establishing Gillian Welch and David Rawlings as the torch bearers of great American folk.
I have seen them in concert maybe ten times and they are always captivating. Here they are performing a track from that album:
If you want more, check out this version of Miss Ohio at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last year in San Francisco (I was there!) Rawlings is a god. They’re not letting me embed it, but do watch it – it’s truly great.
I went to see The Mother Hips at Café Du Nord on Friday with a friend I’ve known since high school. We’ve been seeing this Northern California-based band in clubs around San Francisco since we were sixteen. It’s hard to describe exactly what has drawn us to the Hips over the last ten years, but I usually ascribe it in equal parts to the following:
1) The hotness of frontman Tim Bluhm:
Can you guess which one I'm talking about?
2) Some of their music is really fun to rock out to (in my opinion, their best albums came out in the middle of their career – Shootout, Later Days, The Green Hills of Earth – but anything earlier than that inevitably gets the crowd moving).
3) Nostalgia + a guaranteed good time. A typical Mother Hips holiday show, which is always a week or two before Christmas and almost always at the Great American Music Hall, involves me, my older brother, and a gaggle of friends meeting at my parents’ house in San Francisco, imbibing coffee and then whiskey, and piling in a bus or someone’s van to go downtown and arrive at the GAMH hopefully right before the Hips go on – usually around 11pm. They play the favorites and never disappoint, nor interrupt the music with too much banter. And they almost always play one long satisfying set with minimal jamming and noodling around.
The Hips don’t draw a musically sophisticated crowd – indeed their audiences tend to be dominated by former Chico State frat boys – but it’s a fun crowd nonetheless, and one that I am proudly a part of. By Friday I had spent the better part of the week representing my company at a tech trade show, on my feet all day and exhausted from talking, but once Tim and Greg and the rest stepped on stage and played the first notes of an instantly recognizable favorite, a big smile spread across my face. As one of my brother’s friends (one of the Christmas show crew and a near-doppelgänger of Tim Bluhm’s) put it: they are musical comfort food. If you’re interested, here’s a sampling.
I came to the conclusion, after a few solid weeks of feeling bleak about the world, my skills (or lack thereof), and my day-to-day life, that it was time to consult a professional about my career crisis. I set up a noon appointment for an initial phone consultation with a career coach and found a quiet place at work to talk – i.e. I parked my car in the parking garage across the street.
I was impressed with the guy’s demeanor, and the fact that he had recently gone through a similar phase of not being happy at a job and finding a way out. For some people, getting advice from someone in their immediate age group might not seem appealing, but I feel like I can get in to this. He says his methodology involves determining strengths, values, and personality traits and finding careers that will match. I strongly believe that my personality (ISTJ last time I checked) plays a large role in how I experience the work world, so I’m eager to see how this all turns out. Once I formally decide to work with the coach, I will write more about it.
In other news, my husband made elk burgers last night. His dad is very much into bow hunting elk and deer – in fact in he grew up eating mostly meat his dad had hunted – and on his visit this month back home, my husband brought back a freezer’s worth of last winter’s bounty. I consider myself 85% vegetarian (the years I spent being vegetarian as a child and vegan as a young adult have left their mark on my eating preferences forever) but I’m open to the idea of wild meat (none of the evils of factory farming to atone for, right?) so I suggested we try some. Although drier than I imagine a beef hamburger to be, I found them surprisingly palatable and non-gamy. The heirloom tomatoes, aioli, cheese and home fries that accompanied the elk meat didn’t hurt either – it was a gourmet version of burgers and fries to be sure.
On a final unrelated note, I was surprised and hugely amused to find out on Saturday night that my mother (whom I have never known to like any popular music, outside of the Beatles and my brother’s band) has a bit of a secret obsession with this guy:
I think I get it. He’s from Utah (as is my mom), is innocent and cute, and has a nice voice to boot. I don’t watch American Idol but I understand the appeal. It’s all about the making of a star, and he seems to have that je-ne-sais-quoi that goes beyond looking and sounding nice. As an added bonus he’s got a very positive, not-yet-jaded vibe (I suppose that comes with being seventeen). So much so that a 50-something who doesn’t normally like anything more popular than Steve Reich can be found rocking out to his single while cleaning the kitchen. I personally think it’s adorable.
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for me. His inspiration for including this was probably that the title has my name in it. Either way, I’m enjoying it immensely, even though I’m probably a bit late to get on the Bon Iver bandwagon. I just love simple music done well, and I especially love weird, evocative folk. I also love that the album was recorded in an isolated cabin in Wisconsin. It’s the kind of album you listen to in your car and then bring inside your house to keep listening to.
