Back in Time....

Saturday morning is usually when I sit down, phone and email records at the ready, and record all of my time from the just-ended workweek. Not so much of that these days: things picked up a little bit this week, yesterday bringing my first in-person office appointment (masked, still) in almost two months, and I've got another scheduled for Monday. But while February and March were downright spooky in terms of me almost matching my number of recorded hours for the same months in 2019, April was when they fell off the proverbial cliff: almost exactly half what they were the previous April.  Some of that is artificial on the previous year's end: I filed a new Chapter 11 that month and was preparing what would become a second a month later, and those eat up a lot of hours in the early stages.  Still, that's not as much of a dropoff as it might have been, for a month that went by without a single client in my office or a single day in an actual courtroom (and, at most, four conference calls on pending cases- new state ones still can't be filed and the foreclosure/eviction moratorium was just extended until the end of August).

So that Saturday effort has turned into an every-other-Saturday one, leaving time for,.... time travel.

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In these almost two months since the Friday the 13th that changed everything, musicians have suffered as much as anyone. With the days of recording contracts and album sales long past as a reliable source of income, they need to get out and perform- and, since that fateful weekend, they can't.

But their adaptation has been quick and admirable. By the end of that first week, many of my friends who'd been reliant on clubs and concert halls had found their chosen platforms: I've yet to see any strictly music gigs on Zoom (one included music and poetry), but I've watched a number of them, either live or archived, on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.  Other friends have done their performances at home in the odd hours and then posted video links to them.  They offer opportunities to help them with their livelihoods, through posted links to "tip jars" (one recent friend graciously shared half the proceeds from hers with the legendary Buffalo bar/performance venue that is home to many local indie musicians), or to their own websites or others that sell their music.  Anytime I spend more than a few minutes enjoying one of these, I make the effort to send one or the other of those forms of thanks; the physical CDs are often slow in arriving, because often the artist themself is the one who stuffs and mails the envelope with it, and the mp3-for-sale sites are quicker but often take a cut of the purchase price (although this one has offered a few no-fee days where every penny goes to the artist).

Sometimes the experience introduces somebody new.  Last weekend, I got word from the Dar Williams mailing list (she who we went to Toronto to see last fall) that she was doing a live Youtube performance as part of something called the Sundays With Susie Series.  "Susie" turned out to be a performer named Susan Werner, who did the show with Dar as an in-the-round gig, even joining her for a duet or two, amazingly synced coming from two rooms hundreds of miles apart.  (It's archived here.)  I tracked down one of her live albums which included some of the songs she did, though not the completely different song named "Iowa" than the one Dar does (they did them both, back to back).

After watching this one, though, I got to thinking, and I posted those thoughts to some of the musicians who are Friends of Face:

How is it on your end?

I've now watched a bunch- from Zoom to Facebook to Instragram to Youtube- and despite their sometimes tech fails, when it works, it's really not that different for the "audience" than it was when you were onstage and we were in the same room listening. We hear you sing/play, and see you, and the stories you tell are not that far off.

Yet I wonder how it is for you on the other side of that little black dot. Except on Zoomy things, you can't see us, hear our applause, appreciate our feels. Yes, some of the platforms let us comment to say hello, or send up hearts or balloons, but I keep thinking it's.not the same and we should try to do more.

Which I do. If not the tip jar, I will order something from your back catalog. I promote the streams before and, if they're archived, after. If I haven't said THANK YOU enough, please accept this as a small sliver of the appreciation. But if there's anything else I/we can do to make it as real and shared an experience as you're making it for us, please comment.

It got a number of reactions, a theme being that they love and miss seeing us but love the music even more and do it as much for themselves as anything.  One responder, though, noted that he posts Youtubes as thank yous for CD purchases from him, giving you a chance to hear him sing one of your choice.

I go way back with Mark, to Ithaca days. In years since, I've been to his shows with Eleanor (several) and Emily (at least one), and reconnected with him in the past year or so.  We have two of his CDs, but also own an older and for-now-unplayable set of cassettes purchased from his Rochester area shows in the early 90s, so I found the digitized version of one of them and requested his anthem to our common former home.  The answer to that request came yesterday:
 

Watch on YouTube

It's one of his most requested songs- ending a live performance with it when I heard him last year on WVBR- so I asked for another favorite of ours as a backup.  It's about an old couple still in love, and he'd played this one previously: Minnie and Maxie McGee.  What he didn't know until now is that Eleanor and I named a pair of young trees after those characters before we left our first house in Rochester- and I sent him this link to my retelling of THAT tale from back in 2014.  I haven't been by that house in a few years- next week will be my first Rochester stop since early March- but last I knew, THAT old couple still in love is still out on their lawn:)

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I saw Mark's posting of that video before running errands at the end of the day yesterday. Eleanor wanted sushi and salad from an Asian fusion place we've come to love, I ordered a few curries for me, made a Wegmans and wine run in between, and as I started home, with our local stations in commercial, I tuned for the first time in ages to a long-running sports talk show out of Rochester I've been listening to since right after I moved there just over 35 years ago.....

and, somehow, managed to catch it on the last night it will ever be on.

( It's time to talk sports! )

I've never met Bob Matthews in person, but for close to 15 years I spent most nights after 6 p.m. listening to him. In the years when Eleanor was home during that time slot, I tended to record it for later playback on my car drives (she took to calling it the "Rant and Rave Show" and that name has stuck with me as well), but compared to the over-the-top testosteronery of the medium today, it was pretty mild.  Bob gave Rochester sports a spotlight they rarely got elsewhere on the radio, both before and after "sports talk radio" became more of an established thing nationwide. (Remember, ESPN didn't become a nationwide force until the mid-80s, and New York's WFAN dates only to 1988). The main out-of-town exception was, then and to the end, for the Buffalo Bills: the show's ascendancy matched that of the team, and through the Super Bowl years, the slow fall and long decline and final rebound of the current era, Bob always gave the team's supporters (at the end including the final night, the annoying but consistent "John the Optimist") and opponents (the crotchety "Mister Negative," long gone but replayed on a clip on the final show) a chance to, yes, rant and rave about their favorite team.

The cast of regular-caller characters, some there the whole time with others coming and going, included eternal Yankee fan "Hey Bob!," loyal LA rooter Shanti a/k/a "Dodger Blue," Syracuse supporter "Beast of the East" and the Amerk regular known as "Hockey Puck."  Bob's show (and his then-newspaper column) became the flashpoint of debate in the early 1990s over replacing Rochester's aging baseball stadium in a decrepit neighborhood; he staunchly supported it, while the traditionalists were led by a regular who went by "No Stadium Joe" (usually to a chorus of boos cued on the soundboard).  Joe went away when the fight to keep Silver Stadium seemed lost, but also lost his cred sometime before that when someone discovered he lived in, and rented out ballgame parking spaces in, the neighborhood of the old ballyard. Bob ran nightly trivia contests, to which game tickets were often a prize, and I won my share of them over the years. Favorite among them was scoring seats for me and Emily to the final regular season game at that old dump on Norton Street.  I wrote out a memoir of that night, now going on 24 years ago, and somehow never managed to post it here.  Here's a link to it.

He'd also get calls from the teams' representatives; when his station had the rights to Bills games, he'd do an hour or two a week with a coach, GM or player (except one insufferably stupid quarterback who he passed off to another sportstalker to do the show with), and would get game-night previews from "the beeyotiful Rochester Community War Memorial," from "Don Stevens, the voice of the Amerks" or other reports from whichever broadcaster or GM was repping the Red Wings that year.  Over the years, despite never meeting him, he became part of my extended dysfunctional family. I knew he liked his spaghetti from Red Fedele's and his wings from the joint that, ironically, became one of those Chapter 11s a year ago. He'd occasionally do movie reviews, with some choices that you'd expect (war movies, as a former Vietnam vet), but not entirely removed from the circle of Little films that we enjoyed ourselves, too.

Bob retired from the newspaper (or what's left of it) a few years ago, moving his column to a three times a week deal on the sponsoring radio station's website. That died this fall, leaving open the likelihood that the show would soon go.  As reported by his former paper and as I heard him say on the final night, he was not fired, furloughed or bought out, as many media people have been in recent weeks.  It was just time. 

Lots of the famed-and-fortuned called in, despite it not being pre-announced that this would be his final show The major shareholder of the Red Wings, the team's 40-plus-year organist (whose bobblehead sits on my desk), the impresario behind most of professional soccer in town, former co-hosts and professional guests, but a lot of just regular callers. Not a lot of the name-glossed crowd, although a few made it in, but people did who were there for all, most or maybe just a slice of his 35 years and around 8,200 shows on the air. It would have been fitting if he'd made it to exactly 8,222, but I doubt anyone could keep an exact count of them.

Oh, and those regular people included me. I got to say one final thank you, and encouraged the Wings' owner who was on right before me to give the man some more recognition than the small brick and larger plaque honoring him in their Soon To Be Renamed ballpark.  He agreed that his childhood hero Luke Easter would be a good choice and in my opinion, Bob's image on the outfield wall along with Luke and Joe and Morrie and the other 8,221 would be an even better accompaniment.

And so, good night from, and to, NewsradioWHAM1180inRochesterNewYork.


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Offtopic of post: remember a few weeks ago that my journaling software had to be reset to work with a Dreamwidth update and I never had to? I have to.  Posting this directly on the DW site, then off to remember WTF I had to do....

 

Back so soon?

Why, yes. Just to see if the fix worked.

So here- couple of goofy pictures to see if the uploads still work:



Saw this guy as I was dropping something off for Eleanor at the store yesterday. My thought: Personally, I woulda flipped that tire about two months ago.

And all the continued Wading In DeNial about the mess we're in, mostly coming from crazed righties.  The strategy now seems to be just announcing, Yay it's over! and pretending that it is, if necessary through hiding the death counts, stopping further research into the disease, and reversing the criminal convictions of those who've already been busted for breaking the rules.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it is- the immortal Saint Garry propesied, more than 40 years ago, that Nixon's Energy Czar would, one day, solve the 70s energy crisis by simply announcing that he had:



And don't get me started on the more extensive "arguments." I get email blasts from Crazy Carl Paladino, who continues to push the myth that this massive killer is a No Big Deal hoax to get the president*.  This one came midweek, accompanied by photos including this one:



The site, somewhere unspecified in Upstate, was "obviously erected at great cost to the taxpayer and manned by at least 30 State Police, National Guard, techs, and nurses, who have nothing better to do than stand around this site freezing in the cold As you can see they have no customers at 2:00 PM today. When asked a tech said they had 3 or 4 people come for testing over the past 2 days."

To which I replied:

Really now. Was it advertised? And open to everyone or just designated emergency workers? I know when Eleanor was briefly potentially symptomatic  at the end of March, she couldn't GET tested. There has YET to be any announcement of universal availability of testing in this state. Hey- instead of bitching about it, maybe you could've shown some actual cooperation a few weeks ago and arranged for Niagara Square to be turned over to a drive-thru test site for your maskless shotgun-and-pickup crowd, instead of running it as a Confederate States of America rally.

Carl then goes on: "Most people believe the whole COVID thing is an overblown Flu exaggerated and promoted by useless elected officials and a press looking for a story to panic the public." Ride you and the horse you fucked, Carl. Tell that to the World Trade Center bombing worth of people dying of this "overblown Flu" EVERY DAY in this country. Tell it to the client I did intake on today who just buried her husband to it, or to the family of my boss of 11 years who succumbed to it in April.

Finally, we're told it's all about Cuomo's "own vanity." Because what Governor DOESN'T want to deal with a multi-billion dollar deficit without the luxury of printing money to bribe his way out of it like your boy in DC has?

Have you been tested, Carl? One of the symptoms is sudden pulmonary embolism, which results in clots going straight to your brain and cutting off all intelligent thought. Trouble with you, though, is: we'd never know.

Dude doubled down on it the other day, sending another one where he claimed that an anonymous nurse confessed to overreporting COVID cases because hospitals make more money off the diagnosis.  In his expert medical opinion, this pandemic, while "serious," is really just the flu and is a big hoax to stop our great and glorious President from being re-elected.

As in the one who still refuses to wear a mask, even in a mask factory, and even when meeting with 90-plus year old WWII veterans- and who has at least three confirmed cases of it within the White House sanctum sanctorum.

We can only hope....

Annnnd... it worked on DW- now to check crossposting.... check.... and fixed on both computers.... check....