Sight and Sound

Don’t laugh.  I’m going to attempt a music review.  It’s probably an exercise in humiliation, since nobody in their right mind would take music advice from me.  I can’t sing at all, and I had to drop out of flute lessons in fifth grade when I couldn’t grasp the concept of “notes.”  It only got worse.  In college I was on sound crew for a production of Iphigenia, where I played pre-recorded tapes of bass lines while the composer played keyboards live.  I never once knew what was live and what was memorex.  So, music remains a foreign language to me, but I know what I like.  I just don’t know if it’s good.

Two weeks ago I got three CDs by Enation, an indie band fronted by actor Jonathan Jackson.  It’s probably a mistake to base your music selections on whether the musician is a good actor, but sometimes you get lucky.  (Okay, bad joke.  Jackson plays Lucky on General Hospital.)  I’ve listened to my CDs many times, and I love a couple of the songs, I like most of the rest, and I dislike none of them.  Well, there is this one thing…but I’m getting to that.  First things first.

These are the albums, in the order of their original release:

Enation: Soul & Story

Soul & Story:  This album is very mellow, mostly acoustic folk, and deeply personal.  Jonathan Jackson wrote all ten songs, and one of them is about his daughter (She’s My Little Girl), and one is for his son (A Letter to My Son). 

Enation: World in Flight

World in Flight:  This is my favorite of the three, and it’s much more of a rock album than the other two.  All ten tracks are again written by Jackson, with his brother Richard Lee credited with co-writing lyrics on two songs.  Two tracks here are favorites: Permission to Dream and Everything is Possible.

Enation: The Future Is A Memory

The Future is Memory: Live from the Northwest is a live album, but the songs that repeat from World in Flight are different enough from the studio versions to make it worth having.  It’s fun to hear Jackson sing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne.  I love the last song, The Coming Dawn.

I don’t know about all the other band members in Enation, but the Jackson brothers have deeply held Christian beliefs, and their faith is reflected in their song lyrics.  I don’t have a problem with that.  I listen to quite a few contemporary Christian groups and singer/songwriters.  I just have a problem with one line in one song, and it’s not a religious reference.  It’s from A Letter to My Son, and it goes “A home without a father is a home without a gun.”  Now, I hate guns.  I equate guns with violence, and unfortunately, some people have grown up with violent fathers.  To me, a home without a gun is a very good thing.  In the context of the lyrics, which are words of advice from a father to his young son, I assume a gun is being used as a metaphor for a protector.  I still find it disturbing, but I’m not going to stop listening to the music just because I don’t agree with this one reference. 

It seems to me that Enation has a bit of an identity crisis about the kind of music they play.  Somebody who’s only heard a couple of their albums might be confused at one of their concerts.  Their albums are much mellower and less electric than the live performances that they’ve posted online at Ustream and on their YouTube channel.  Still, I haven’t been to an actual concert yet, so I should probably reserve judgement.  It’s too bad I can’t get down to Los Angeles this weekend for Enation’s acoustic concert, since I have trouble at rock concerts these days. Really loud music causes me actual physical pain, and earplugs don’t help. 

It’s been amusing trying to follow Enation on all the online social networks available these days.  Lines get crossed, misunderstandings happen, and certain information is either out-of-date or just wrong.  Now, this isn’t criticism.  I find it a form of entertainment.  For example, a couple of days ago, a flier was posted on Jonathan Jackson’s facebook fan page that seems to say that this weekend’s LA concert is going to be broadcast live on Ustream.  But wait, could this actually be a reference to the live concert from two weeks ago?  There’s nothing on the Enation facebook fan page or website to clarify the information, and the tweets from the band don’t mention it either way.  Yet.  I’m watching and waiting.

Update: Enation tweeted that the LA concert is not going to be broadcast online.  I hate twitter, but it can be useful at times.

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This is a completely different subject, but it’s too exciting not to write about.  I got new eyeglasses today.  I can see!  My old glasses were so scratched that it was like viewing the world through a fog bank.  Now colors pop and everything is sharp again.  The scariest thing is looking at my hands.  When did they get so old?  Naturally, I’ve avoided looking in the mirror. 

 I ordered these new glasses from an online store for the first time.  It was terrifying, but it was so cheap that I couldn’t resist.  I used Zenni Optical because they are located in the Bay Area.  The total cost—with high index lenses, non-reflective coating, frames, clip-on polarized sunglasses, case, an extra fee for the strong prescription, tax, and shipping—came to $53.80.  I think that’s terrific.  The order took exactly two weeks.  The glasses are fine, but the frames do need some adjusting, so I will have to take them to a walk-in optician and hope it won’t cost too much to get them fitted to my face.

Hello, world!

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Yesterday was one of those days when nothing worked for me.  We’ve all had them, I suppose.  It started the first thing in the morning when I was surfing my morning lineup of sites.  I was on zap2it.com checking out the Emmy nominations that were just announced.  I was delighted by some, like Jim Parsons for The Big Bang Theory and Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton for Friday Night Lights.  Naturally, I was disappointed that certain names were missing from the list, like Zach Gilford for Friday Night Lights and FNL for best drama series.  I’m happy about Alan Cumming’s nomination, but his name was spelled “Cummin” in the list.  Being the annoying person that I am, I typed the correction into the comments section.  The site’s obscenity filter changed my correction to “C******” and then blocked me from further comments.  Poor Alan C******!  Imagine having an innocent name that can’t bypass site filters.  Not that Mr C himself is innocent; nobody could mistake that. Anyway, I wonder how long I’ll be blocked…

The afternoon came, and I sat down to watch General Hospital.  It was a pretty good episode, with some humor added to the mix after a tense week.  Lucky Spencer was looking good in blue.  Then the last ten minutes of the show were preempted for breaking news about the Oakland BART police shooting trial.  Well, it’s been a big story and the news was important, since a verdict had been reached and it was about to be announced, but still.  Couldn’t it have waited ten minutes? 

I spent part of the evening attempting to watch Enation’s online concert on Ustream.  You guessed it.  Technical problems.  Not with the band—they were fine.  I guess my DSL isn’t fast enough, because the image was mostly frozen, and the sound came and went.  To the right of the screen was a live chat scrolling along, and it moved more than the band on my computer.  It took me most of the concert before I managed to login to the chat, and then my computer froze.  I was sitting there feeling critical of the chatterers for their spelling errors, then discovered that I couldn’t even manage to spell ”hello” correctly in the chat window.  I gave up.  I’m going to try to go back to Ustream later and watch the archived video, but I don’t have much confidence that it will be any better on my setup.

While I was writing this post just now, my computer glitched and I almost lost this whole entry.  Fitting, isn’t it?

One Thing Leads to Another

The San Francisco Frameline Film Festival was held this year June 17-27th, showing LGBT films from around the world.  It’s the oldest LGBT film festival, and this year they had an Andy Warhol retrospective and many films from South America.  This was my second year as a volunteer.   I like to staff the hospitality table, where volunteers and staff greet the filmmakers.  It’s great fun, and as a volunteer you get a movie voucher for every shift you work.  Unfortunately, I’m still recovering from this malingering virus that’s been going around, so I had to cut back on my shifts and missed seeing most of the films on my personal list.  I did get to see the opening night film, a BBC production called The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, about a Yorkshire woman from the early 1800s who left coded diaries about her various romances with other women.  It was based on a true story, and it was sure different from Pride & Prejudice! 

I didn’t get to see the closing night feature, a film called Howl about Allen Ginsberg, starring James Franco.  Franco came to the screening, so I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to check him out.  I’m not obsessed with Franco like I am with a few dozen other actors, but he’s certainly on a roll right now.  The Film Festival showing came just before Franco’s return as a guest star on General Hospital.  Now, I can follow a couple of other soaps (I grew up with a mother obsessed with Days of Our Lives), but I’ve never watched General Hospital regularly enough to follow the storylines.  In spite of that, I started tuning into GH this last week to see Franco.  A few trips over to soapnet and wikipedia helped me to understand key plot points.  A friend who used to watch filled me in on more background character info.  This same friend loved Jonathan Jackson as Lucky Spencer (back in the 90s), so I started paying particular attention to him.  Next thing you know, we’re watching Jonathan Jackson in Tuck Everlasting and On The Edge, and I’m spending hours on YouTube watching GH clips of Lucky from 1993.  And this is how one of my obsessions begins. 

And it won’t end until I’ve watched every video, rented every DVD, checked out every website and fansite, linked up on twitter and facebook…it’s exhausting, but at least with the internet everything is faster.  Before the internet, DVDs, and even VCRs, it used to take me ages to work through one of my actor obsessions.  I would search through the TV guide looking for movies that were airing (yes, kids, there actually used to be movies shown on regular, non-cable TV!) and take endless trips to the library searching through periodical indexes and microfiche machines looking for information.  As a teenager I kept a card file of my favorite actors and all their roles—my very own low tech imdb.  Now with everything at my fingertips on the internet, I can zip through an actor’s entire body of work  in days and weeks instead of months, so then I have to move on to somebody else.

So at the moment it’s Jonathan Jackson.  He’s a musician as well as an actor, so a couple of his CDs should arrive in the mail this week.  His band is called Enation, and I like the brief clips I’ve listened to online.  I have no idea if I’ll actually like a whole song.  My taste in music is obscure, eclectic and weird.  Most people wouldn’t even call it taste.  It was a risk ordering the Enation CDs, but I love ordering music from CD Baby, and their summer sale is awesome (selected CDs, three or more, five dollars each).  The best part about ordering from CD Baby is the email you get when they ship your order.  I would describe it, but I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.  Just order from them and see, if you haven’t already. 

Enation is doing a free online concert this Thursday, and here’s the poster:

Enation internet concert

I’ll be checking it out.  Hopefully my CDs will have arrived by then so I’ll already be familiar with some of the songs. 

Well, I’ve got to go back to YouTube now.  I’m up to early 1994, and little Lucky Spencer is in the hospital trying to avoid a mob hit.  Tomorrow I will tune into the current episode of GH to see who survived the car bomb.  It’s such a full life.