Happy Birthday, Shelby! We are so proud of you, and so glad you are part of our family and we are part of yours. Your beauty, talent, compassion, humor, dedication, devotion, and love inspire us and make us ever grateful to God that He brought you and Michael together. Enjoy the 5k race and your weekend at the lake. More dreams and adventures ahead!

We Love Shelby! from Bruce Edwards on Vimeo.

A tribute to Shelby on her birthday!

Random thoughts while waiting on the Time Warner internet guy who’s coming to install a cable modem.

• It’s because of the erratic outages in our formerly Verizon DSL line that we’re getting the cable modem one installed, so it’s ironic that the day before installation, Time Warner has massive outages.
• Went to see Eat, Pray, Love,and was motivated only to do the first (Eat) after watching it. It’s unfair to call it self-indulgent, because that’s what it’s about, one divorcee’s expensive tour to find out how selfish, self-absorbed, and oblivious she is. Julia Roberts was born to play such a woman.
• We are headed to Twinsburg and Akron this morning (if you know who shows up) to see Grandpa, shop a bit, and maybe—maybe—try to get into the Melt in Lakewood. It’s “Blackout Fest” there–candles and flashlights only.
• The San Diego Padres are currently the best definition of a team I know of, and are pressing toward the NL West Championship. Lance Berkman had approved them as one of the teams he would go to in trade. Wish he had gone west.
• Yes, that’s me in first place in the Yahoo Fantasy Baseball League two weeks in a row. All of my players are doing their jobs and I’ve only had to suspend one or two them. Seriously, my combination of judiciously selected rookies (Stanton, Posey, Castro, Johnson), wily veterans (Keppinger, Halliday, Bell), and sluggers with banner years (Uggla, A Gonzalez, C Gonzalez) make it a treat to read the box scores on my iPad every morning.
• Sebo’s surgery—I hate the thought of it having to be done so young, no matter how localized and quick it may be; but he has Uncle Mike as a mentor and endurer, and so I am not worried.
• Tuesday Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin arrives and I expect to be enthralled the rest of the evening.
• Friday we will head North to celebrate Shelby’s birthday! Yay!
• Saturday we will head South to Joan’s Uncle Merle’s house outside of Columbus for a family gathering and BBQ.
• The picture is from last night’s Global Connections welcome, where I was asked to represent the university. Only met one East African this time, Gabriel, who is studying for his MBA.
  
  

  Welcoming at GC

• It’s 9:25—where is that Time Warner Guy, anyway?

Emmy’s Summer Adventures from Bruce Edwards on Vimeo.

Filmed by grandpa July 30 through August 1, 2010. It includes her EPIC party celebration set up!

Believe it or not, there was a time when Christopher Cross was considered an alternative artist. And Glen Campbell did a cover of God Only Knows.

And Linda Ronstadt was the envy of any and all balladeers because she sang the songs of The Eagles and Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon, an amazing song reservoir for her to choose from.

And Jennifer Warnes, known mostly as the other voice on duets with Joe Cocker or Bill Medley on movie soundtracks, was on TV every Sunday in the late 1960s on the celebrated Smothers Brothers Show, may have the most relentlessly melancholy yet loveliest voice that few people have ever had the chance to treasure.

It’s Sunday night, August, 2010, and I am re-reminiscing tonight about those times. The extra “re-” is because this is double reminiscing— these are memories of memories, a nostalgia for past nostalgic feelings. “A dream within a dream.” All of the albums I am listening to tonight (albums, LPs, all in pretty good shape, on a turntable) are artists and songs that are saturated with the original feelings associated with them, double-layered with the feelings I now associate with those days. (A list of them all below, with your indulgence.)

Some of them remind me of being young and wistful and creative; others of college days and courtship with Joan; many more our early marriage, and then distinctly, each one of our children. I can remember, with surprising clarity, where I first bought them or listened to them and the fine details of their album cover. Downloads, convenient and efficient, are not so easily tracked, and one songs fades into another these days. But LPS are possessions that possess me, reveal me to myself. Hopelessly outmoded and tactilely fragile, vinyl has a thereness to it that MP3s can’t match.

These recent events were occasioned by two things: (1) Jimmy Webb’s new release of contemporary duets of his old songs (Just Across the River); (2) Mary and Justin having been here to scour the basement storage room for memories and orderly organizing. (Mary provided the organizing.)

Jimmy Webb, now 61, is a native Oklahoman who found his way to Hollywood in the 1960s and wrote some of the most magisterial melodies and lyrics of the era (“Macarthur Park,” “Up, Up and Away,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”) But he didn’t stop writing; or performing. Just nobody noticed. But he has recently been back at it in a more public way. His songs, in a less profound way than Brian Wilson’s, but still real way, captured some visions of my youth, and then, later, my early adulthood.

One thing leads to another, and re-finding Jimmy Webb, led me to listening to his albums; and then to others (after a cleanup of the vinyl surface), albums long stored in the basement of Village Dr. and now Dakota Court, compelling me to reconnect with albums and songs that I found I still remembered the lyrics to, and still affected me.

No one, no song has taken their place, nor could they. There really is no place for the discovery of a Jimmy Webb in today’s various, vast internet music world; nor for listening to without nostalgia or irony, the songs of Linda Ronstadt or Jennifer Warnes.

But for me, to hear them is to hear a whole generation at once, a whole era that has passed or is passing. They don’t let go of you, these songs, forty years later, pre-CD and pre-MP3. I can’t remember precisely what The Postal Service or Death Cab For Cutie sounds like, nor any of their lyrics, but I can quote from memory just about any Jackson Browne song or Warren Zevon lyric.

Why is that? Partly, because I listened to these over and over and over; their portability resides in my mind not in my cassette or 8 track player; and, partly, because there was not as much access to variety and diversity, and my head was only filled with 15 or 20 artists at a time, not 135 or 1350—all who all have new releases out this week and are as nearby as a download. But I also think it comes down to, simply, that these may be memorable songsmiths, and they are unsurpassed.

If you want to try to capture some of my ardor, go to your used vinyl store and see if you can locate any of these albums. Some of them, sure, are available on CD or through download, of course, but it won’t quite be the same as sitting there on the floor, and reading liner notes, and placing the needle on the LP, carefully on the turntable, so you can savor the function and fantasy of being enraptured 45 years ago.

This is something my children and their children can perhaps learn to reconstruct. A Sunday afternoon, spent listening to far away tunes, an oblique connection to their dad or their grandpa, glimpsing in some small way what it might have been like to be him, to live in his times, and to listen to what he considered melodious and lyrical. A map to his soul, a memory of his memories.

1. Glen Campbell: Reunion; Southern Nights; Greatest Hits;
2. Christopher Cross (eponymous album)
3. Linda Ronstadt Hasten Down the Wind; Don’t Cry Now; Simple Dreams; Living in the USA
4. Crosby, Stills, and Nash (eponymous album)
5. Jennifer Warnes: The Right Time of the Night; Shot Through the Heart; Best of Jennifer Warnes
6. Jimmy Webb: El Mirage

Sebo and Pseudo Disagree from cslewisnews on Vimeo.

Made by Michael Edwards; edited by his dad.