Mr. Maleable and the post-apocalyptic partial drive

Wednesday is a flexible, changeable, make-of-it-what-you-will kind of day. If Friday is a popular dude, Wednesday is Mr. Maleable. It's mid-week (for many of us), and we bring to that whatever mood or rhythm we are tuned to by this point in the work week.  The week is flying by, the week is dragging on, three days to go, three days down, we've made it this far, the weekend is still a half a week away, I need another weekday, or whatever your fancy: Wednesday is obligingly there to soak it up and reflect it back at us.  As is fitting of a mid-point in the week, the pinacle between the waxing and waning of the workweek, today is also a full moon.  A perfect parallel for Wednesday: mooned by Mr. Maleable.

This morning's drive in, under the bright illumination of the very full moon only partially obscured by clouds, felt post-apocalyptic.  I didn't meet a single car until I was two-thirds of the way to campus.  At one point, as I crested a hilltop with a view down the valley, I saw a semi moving in the distance, but nothing shared the lanes with me until I was most of the way in.  Between the cliche full-moon-in-stormy-sky-overhead and the total lack of movement around me, it had me checking my clock to see if I had accidentally woken five hours too early or listening out for Rod Serling's voiceover (my glasses were not broken, so at least it wouldn't be that episode!).  Finally, I ran into three other cars at a stop light and then traffic seemed to flow at a normal, if still light, pace.  I even found the oh-so-common tailgating large truck for a few blocks. Back to ordinary.

Yesterday gave me a short list of long tunes, and today's shuffled playlist is a long list of short tunes, one as short as 33 second (Introduction). For a mix as eclectic as this one, it all flowed together sweetly.  From Wilco to latin folk to the Pachelbel Cannon, with even a little gospel tossed in for good measure, everyone played nicely together in the musical sandbox.

Today's complete playlist:

 - Wilco: Hell is chrome

 - P.T. Walkley: Evolution

 - Dave Grusin: Lupita

 - P.T. Walkley: Introduction

 - Thad Cockrell: Great Rejoicing

 - Arthur Fiedler: Canon and Gigue for 3 violins & continuo in D major

 - Chick Corea and Bela Fleck: Children's Song #6

- Posted via iPad

Mr. Maleable is dark and silent, svo hjlótt (so silent)

Wednesday, Mr. Maleable, is dark and silent this morning.  Colder than the day before, but impossible to see (at this early hour) what the atmospheres will bring us. Traffic is lighter, and somehow quieter.  The morning has a go-slow feeling to it, as if the morning darkness was somehow just a bit thicker than usual and movement slices through it with a bit more retarding resistance. It is a comfortable and comforting slowing down of life's pace, if only for these early morning minutes.

I really am a morning person, and I love the varied nuances of the early morning hours.  These precious early hours all have different flavors, more easily discerned before the cacophony of the day wakes and crowds in to obliterate those subtle smells, sights, scents, and sounds. They refuel me in ways that a more temporal breakfast cannot, though are every bit as solid and real.

I thought, at first, that the iPod was being lazy again this morning, tossing me two Sigur Rós tracks back to back, then three in a row.  After I got in I realized it was still set on my Sigur Rós playlist from yesterday.  So, my bad.  But it's also all good.  I frequently dial that playlist up in the office, when I'm writing, wrangling a spreadsheet, or doing other concentration work.  Their music took me through my Masters program research and writing too.  It's rich, atmospheric, often intense, and the vocals are almost always in Icelandic or Hopelandish, neither of which distract me because I don't understand either (nobody "understands" the latter, since it is a contrived language which resembles the phonology of the Icelandic language).  Pitchfork said of Sigur Rós, when they ranked the album Agaetis Byrjun #6 in their list of 100 Best Albums of 2000-2004, "Sigur Ros effortlessly make music that is massive, glacial and sparse. They are Hidden People. Children will be conceived, wrists will be slashed, scars will be healed, and tears will be wrenched by this group."

The first track this morning comes from their 2002 album ( ).  That's not a typo or missing word, the title of the album really is just a space bookended by two parentheses.  The songs are all titled, simply, Track 1, Track 2, etc.. The second track is from the later album Takk... (which means Thanks) and the song's title (Svo Hljótt) means "So Silent."  It seems a very fitting track for today's ambience.

The full playlist:

 - Sigur Rós: Track 3

 - Sigur Rós: Svo Hljótt

 - Sigur Rós: Starálfur (Live)

Color me lucky

Mr. Maleable, Wednesday, is back. Cold and frosty, but clear (from what I can tell in the early morning dark). Sunshine is forecast, with zero percent chance of falling wetness (in any form).  A relatively mild high of 49° F (9° C) is predicted, which I can easily live with for this point in winter.

Speaking of winter, people are starting to mow their lawns already.  I heard them this past weekend.  Hello!  It's winter, folks.  Don't they know that grass grows at the sound of lawn mowers?  Now my lawn might start to grow, too.  Grrrr!

Speaking of Mr. Maleable, he is (or I am) low tide today.  Ideally, time to burrow under and wait for the revitalizing sea waves to roll back over before springing back to life.  For me, this is probably the combination of still catching up on sleep (been at a state commission meeting the last two days and never sleep well in hotel rooms) and coming back to a pent-up schedule of meetings and an inbox full of action items.

On morning's like this, I need mellow music.  Piano lounge background tinkling would be about right, or some low-key Sigur Rós or Patrick Cassidy, maybe.  The iPod, being an inanimate object, doesn't do dynamic mood matching (though the "skip that song" button can get pretty close to manual mood matching), however this morning's playlist was suitably quiet.  Even the one Beatles tune was a light folk-ish tune that always sounds more like Paul Simon than the Beatles to me. Jonny Hartman, whose deep, rich, and languid voice conjures up smokey night club images for me, sang If I'm Lucky. Lovely lyrics in this old ballad:

If I'm lucky, you will tell me that you care, 

That we'll never be apart

If I'm lucky, this will be no light affair, 

It's forever, from the start

If I'm lucky, there'll be moonbeams all around, 

Shining bright as day . . . 

You will hold my hand and you'll understand, 

All I cannot seem to say

If I am lucky, there will be a time an' place 

You will kiss me, we'll embrace . . . 

In that moment, every wishful dream I ever knew 

Will come true

If I'm lucky, I will go through the years with you

Ok, this isn't the high water mark of poetry, but after nearly 30 years of marriage to my beloved, I totally relate to this definition of lucky!

Then the set closed, as I pulled on to campus, with an old Herb Albert standard.  How many of you can say you heard Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass on your radio/iPod/changer/satellite receiver/etc. this morning? I didn't think so!

 - Phil Keaggy: Nellie's Tune

 - Jonny Hartman: If I'm Lucky

 - Jan Garbarek: Lovely Walk

 - The Beatles: I've Just Seen a Face

 - Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass: Brasilia

One-third if by bus

Wednesday, still wet but a tad warmer today.  Also, it has steadily been getting lighter and lighter with each passing morning.  While I'm still not driving in full sunrisen light, nor is it any longer in full darkness.  The rear-view mirror is still in night-mode, but that might not be entirely necessary now.  With daylight savings time coming in just another week or so, the morning lightness will soon make a big jump forward.  

Gas prices continue to edge upwards toward that behavior-changing $4/gallon mark. My daily commute, at that rate, will cost me just shy of two bucks a day. That works out to about $40/month in gas spent getting to and from campus in an average month. College employees can get a subsidized local bus pass for $45/quarter (roughly three months of travel).  As much as I enjoy my little roadster, commute travel is absolutely not the same as carving along a curvy mountain road.  The Miata sits in a parking spot all day, rarely moving unless I have an off-campus meeting at a neighboring campus (like today).  I'd love to be able to take the bus instead of driving everyday, and the savings would be measurable at the soon-to-be $4/gallon mark.  Unfortunately, state budget cuts have impacted transit schedules too.  My short 15 drive would be replaced by a two-bus one-hour-and-ten-minute bus ride with nearly a one mile hike to the closest bus stop to our house.  The latter is fine, since I try to get one to two miles walking in every day, but losing over two hours each day to local bus schedules isn't.  Maybe that will improve as gas prices increase and ridership goes up.

Mr. Maleable (Wednesday) is living up to his reputation this morning, with today looking like a make-of-it-what-you-will sort of day.  The calendar isn't exactly crowded with pre-determined meetings, but more hours of the day are blocked out than not.  Yet most of today's meetings have maleable agendas, with opportunities to be surprised by what gets covered and sorted through. 

Today's playlist was short, with a sizable chunk of the time consumed by Vivaldi's Spring (a little optimistic right now, but we're getting closer!), closing with a nice high-energy ballad from Spain's Obk:

 - Brad Mehdau & Pat Metheny: Bachelor's Ill

 - Vivaldi: Spring

 - Obk: Eterna Canción

Overly shuffled

Mr. Maleable is just a cloudy and wet as Tuesday.  Which is to say no pouring, or even raining with any enthusiasm, just spitting and being gloomy wet.  Neither especially cold or by any means warm. Very Wednesday weather, in fact.

Got behind another truck this morning that was moving with an almost exaggerated slowness.  The cars behind me were not especially happy about this, but there wasn't much I could do about either circumstance. When a light at the end of one of the blocks we were traveling down went green, though, he (or she?) suddenly sped up to make that light, then went back to exaggerated slowness as soon as they determined they would make it through.  At that point I started to wonder if there was some intent to their actions, instead of the much more common state of inattention.  You do occasionally run into drivers who appear to take a perverse pleasure in attempting to control other drivers around them, maybe this was one of them?  Whatever their deal was, they turned at that intersection, so the rest of us no longer had to contend with their issues and could resume the normal posted speed. No matter how you slice it, we are a complicated species. More so the more we have to interact.

Every now and then, when I get into the office and back up the iPod to see the tunes that were played on the drive in (in the car it sits in a rear console cubby between then seats, so I can't see the iPod's screen and my stereo doesn't provide an iPod readout) I click back one too many times.  If I reverse back beyond the starting point of this morning's playlist, with shuffle mode on, I can no longer move forward down that same path of tunes.  The shuffle setting keeps track of only so many tunes backwards, apparently, then it's off creating new shuffles.  I did that this morning, so I lost track of what I listened to on the way in.  I remember/recognized several of the artists, but don't recall most of the tracks.  I know the Belle and Sebastian was an instrumental number from their soundtrack album, Storytelling, but don't know which track that is by name.  I think it was the track Fiction, but no guarantees. The Weepies track stuck in my head, and I remember the Van Morrison track.  For the other three tracks I can only conjure up the group.  Outfoxed by my own shuffle, I guess.

So, today's full playlist, such as I can recall it, contained at least the following:

 - Mew:

 - Eugene Maslov:

 - Belle & Sebastian: Fiction (?)

 - Weepies: Suicide Blond

 - Van Morrison: Little Village

 - Fred Jacobs:

Hurrah for the drinking dumping aphids of spring!

According to the calendar on my phone, it's Thursday already and it simply doesn't seem possible this week.  It was Monday only yesterday, I swear.  And the day before, and the day before that, too. Maybe there lies the issue, now I think about it.  It's been a week of Mondays.  Groundhog Day a week late.  This week I couldn't tell the Great Pretender from Mr. Maleable, Monday's Toady, or The Play Yard Bully.   I think I'll recognize the Popular Dude when he gets here, though.  I might even be chanting his name already.

I see a sea anemone
The enemy
See a sea anemone
And that'll be the end of me.
While the vicious fish was caught unawares in the tenderest of tendrils
Underneath her tender gills
     - Andrew Bird, from Anonanimal

Traffic is light and so is the morning as I toddle down the road.  Really noticeably lighter of sky than usual this morning.  Bright sunny days earlier this week, lighter early morning commute, still light when I get home - these are good signs.

And the surest sign I've seen yet that winter is in retreat and spring approaches from stage left?  On Tuesday I parked nose-first under a tree for an early meeting off-campus and came out to find aphid droppings all over my windshield.  The pitch is flowing, the aphids drinking and dumping, the machinery of growth is starting up again.

By Shipher Wu (photograph) and Gee-way Lin (aphid provision), National Taiwan University

Today's full playlist:

• Anonanimal - Andrew Bird
• It's a Heartache - Rod Stewart
• I Will Always Love You - Dolly Parton
• Anyhow - Leonard Cohen
• Andalucia - Pink Martini

The could-snow routine

Wednesday, extra-early morning. I've referred to Wednesday as Mr. Maleable before, but today he appears prepared to make a definite statement, at least in terms of weather.  A much-heralded prospect of significant snowfall caused me to set the 4:00 AM alarm so I could get up and see if we needed to make a campus delay or closure decision.  Nothing was happening at that point, so after a brief chat with the boss an easy "nothing to call" decision was made.  Of course, it immediately started to snow on our little hilltop right after I hung up, but with temps in the mid-30's it wasn't going to be a problem any time soon.

Even without the weather apps, television reports, Twitter feeds, and Web sites telling me it was going to snow, the early morning sky was blaring its intent.  There is something about the sunrise before pending snowfall that creates a particular melon-orange glow unique to this condition.  I don't know if this is a Pacific Northwest phenomenon or if the same sky conditions show up elsewhere, but after almost 50 years of seeing PNW skies, I know that look.

Once I'm up, for the most part, I'm up.  So, I set off on the usual morning routine about an hour and half earlier than usual and came on into campus.  The roads were wet, but clear once I got off our hill.  Even there it was just intact slush that disolved under the first tires to hit it.

As for later today... well it sounds likely we will get snow accumulations and decisions about evening classes tonight and campus closure or delayed starts for the next couple of mornings look likely.  I'm just leaving the 4:00 AM alarm set for the remainder of this week.

Because of the hour (and, probably, the threat of weather), there wasn't much traffic with me this morning.  A few cars were crawling along with exaggerated caution, most were simply driving as normal.

No iPod in the car this morning, since I took Ruby.  She of the four studded tires provides a bit more traction should the weather get worse before I leave for home this afternoon, certainly a bit more than the Miata in un-studded winter tires.  Icy hill insurance.  NPR kept me company on my short commute.  I don't keep as much music on my iPhone as on my old (now, in technology terms especially, very old) dedicated iPod, but I have my Sigur Rós playlist so I'll get my office concentration music anyway.

Here's hoping the snow skips us enough to keep things running for our students all through today!

Hardly at home to anyone

Wednesday, and very wet.  Forecasters tell us we should see lots of rain, especially up in this mountain ranges on either side of us.  That means, for many folks, flooding. When I started my short commute this morning the rain was misty with occasional very large drops kerwhacking down on the canvas top of the Miata.  The latter became more frequent until, by the time I reached campus, it was simply raining steadily.

If Wednesday is indeed Mr. Maleable, then I intend to mold him into a much-needed productive day with uninterrupted time to focus on a couple of outstanding projects.  As Wimsey says to Bunter on occasion, "I'm hardly at home to anyone."  Or, as the reclusive Garbo is supposed to have said, "I want to be let alone."  Let's see if Wednesday is that cooperatively moldable.  I have my doubts.

The music this morning was beautifully paired.  From the steering-wheel tap-along-ability of Jimmy Buffet to acoustic bluesy vintage Bruce Cockburn.  The first three tunes were related by their similar rhythm, though about as far away from each other as possible in terms of their lyrics.  Fountains of Wayne did their recent cover of the classic Burt Bacharach tune Trains & Boats & Planes, a big hit for Dionne Warwick back in 1966.

Each one of these tunes have well written lyrics and the last three can stand as excellent poetry even without the music.  Cockburn's If I Had a Rocket Launcher, one of his better known songs, makes the strongest stance of this group of tunes. Written in Chiapas Mexico in 1983, after visits to Guatemalan refugee camps (through OXFAM Canada) about the atrocities he saw being committed there.

Here comes the helicopter -- second time today

Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away

How many kids they've murdered only God can say

If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay

Compare that with the much more laid-back narrative of Mama Just Wants To Barrel House All Night Long: 

I was up the road on easy street

Watching everybody stand around and cheat

A man comes up and says, "Move along

Down to the corner where you belong"

But mama just wants to barrelhouse all night long

I hear the city singing like a siren choir

Some fool tried to set this town on fire

TV preacher screams "come on along"

I feel like Fay Wray face to face with King Kong

But mama just wants to barrelhouse all night long

Hmmm.... seems to be a Cockburn lyric week for me so far.  Maybe the iPod is rewarding me for having noted two of his songs yesterday as well.

Today's full playlist:

 - Jimmy Buffett: Margaritaville

 - Fountains Of Wayne:  Trains & Boats & Planes

 - Bruce Cockburn: If I Had a Rocket Launcher

 - The Guggenheim Grotto: Map of the Human Heart

 - Bruce Cockburn: Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long