Mark’s Notes On The Go

I think I may well have been one of the few who took note of Earth Hour in one of Georgia’s newest “cities” - Johns Creek.

On one of my typically many tangents, I find it hard to accept this as anything more than a tax district.  There’s no city center and no real history. The history that was here was tiny little places like Ocee and Warsaw, unincorporated communities that were wiped from the map by suburbia.   Despite there being historic but already lost communities with names here, it has a bland name of a trickle of water a few miles from my house.

I had to laugh last year when they held a “founder’s day” celebration - as if someone the year before had built a log cabin here and cleared the land.  Ah well, I guess every hamlet must start somewhere…

At any rate, I’d been planning to take part in Earth Hour for more than a week.  Not that there’s much to plan for, sitting in the darkness for an hour.  I shut off all my lights, all my electronics, etc.  I lit some candles and had time with my thoughts.  From 8pm to 9pm, I noticed the sounds of my neighbors houses, sounds normally drowned out by my own.  I realized what a din we live in even in Suburbia.  I noticed the lights bouncing off the clouds in the rain filled darkness.  And all I could feel is small, a tiny little blip sitting here with my flickering candles.

Here’s hoping others took part…

At some point in the awesomeness that was Egypt, I finally hit the point that the Temples began to blur together. For the most part, they were awe-inspiring sites, but even awe can become a blur.

On our second day in Aswan, we journeyed to the island of Philae after our visit at Abu Simbel. Philae is another of the Nubian treasures that was moved. The island was already submerged part of the year thanks to the first dam at Aswan. The high dam would have meant it’s loss. So, another island was landscaped to match Philae, which was more or less a holy site in ancient times, with many temples. The temples were moved to the higher island.

This is one that was not a blur and stands out in my mind still…

I’ve documented elsewhere that I recently went all digital. All my music is now in the form of ephemeral bits and bytes on my hard drive (and backed up elsewhere). And my three shelves of CDs have been compressed down to a couple of binders.

Although a freeing experience, I’m still dealing with the effects to some degree. I ended up choosing J River’s Media Center to handle my virtual library of music, and have been steadily working my way through the catalog to rate all these years of music on a 5 point scale. Feels like both an un-ending process as well as a trip down memory lane. The point of rating them, of course, is so that I can build play lists of my fav stuff. My 5 point scale is 3 - okay, not a super fav but a song I don’t mind hearing; 4 - wow - great song; and 5 - ohmigod, I could listen to this over and over.

This also lead to my semi-regular rediscovery of the awesomeness that was INXS. They were one of my fav bands in the day. Although I had a few of their later releases on CD, for the most part it, was cassette, and I thought that I probably had the best of the best on Shine Like It Does, the box set released after Michael Hutchence’s un-timely death.

Now, I had copied a fair chunk of my cassettes to mp3 last year, and the INXS stuff I included in my library (unlike most of the rest) despite it’s dubious quality. I’m so glad I did. I started working my way through it last week. And although I haven’t yet finished, I already re-purchased two of the albums in digital format. Go Amazon, you’re lucky I’m on memory lane this week!

My introduction to INXS was probably when most of the rest of the US caught on to them, with the release of Kick. There’s not a song on that album that I rated less than 3, and the bulk of it is in the 4 & 5 camp. Just incredible rock music, and maybe I’m deluding myself, but I really feel like this is an album that has held up to the test of time. I don’t feel like I’m listening to music from the 80’s at all. As I said, perhaps I’m deluding myself.

I also waded through Listen Like Thieves. Maybe a sacrilege or just a poor choice of words, but it was an album that never clicked for me, and I did feel much like I was listening to music from another time. Only Shine Like It Does and What You Need got high ratings from me on the entire album. Needless to say this was not one of the re-purchased albums - and as both of those are on the box set, Shine Like It Does, I’m already golden for those.

The re-purchased albums so far are Kick and Welcome To Wherever You Are. Both albums I could listen to over and over. I’ve bounced around, so I still have a couple to listen through yet.

I’ve listened to these two over and over the last few days, and I just fall in love again to the sound of this band and feel much sadness that I never saw them live (and the bands I make the effort to see live are not a huge number). And I feel sorrow again that Hutchence is gone (a decade later this year). Maybe his best work was already behind him, or maybe we missed out on the genius that was yet to come. We’ll never know.

I know technically INXS is still out there making music, but I loathe reality TV and the stunt with picking the new lead singer soured me such that I never have listened to any thing post-Hutchence.

It’s interesting to re-tread these steps again. I’m not prone to doing it. Although I often obsess over past decisions, second-guess myself, etc., music has always been one space in which I moved forward. I hardly have any greatest hits collections. Even moving into the world of CD’s, I purchased maybe 4 or 5 CDs that I had previously owned as cassettes. I sometimes forced myself to stick a few older CDs in my car changer just so I didn’t lose sight of a band that no longer was or wasn’t producing anything I enjoyed anymore. I have never been a fan of radio stations that only play music from certain decades And I’m always shocked and dismayed when I hear someone say they don’t make good music anymore. The music a decade or two decades ago or what have you was so much better. Statements like these just floor me. I wonder if they really listen anymore.

Anyway, that said, I’m going to go listen to Kick Again…

Despite the tons of pictures I still have to go through from the Egypt trip, the weekend found me continuing my spring cleaning.  I had a closet with two stacks of comics to file.  I won’t say how long I had put this task off but it’s not a short time.

I began sorting everything and hauled out all the boxes and rapidly figured out that I was surpassing the volume of boxes I had…  The first answer wasn’t buy boxes.  The first answer was time to thin the herd, which I do pretty much every time I have to go through this practice - which may surprise many.

What surprises me this time was what I started to put on the chopping block, my very oldest, most war torn comics.   My earliest comics are heavy in the lands of Harvey Comics and Archie.  I haven’t opened any of them in… wow… I can’t imagine how long.  And as I had long ago decided they weren’t worthy, most of them weren’t even stored properly, just slapped in boxes.  So, it seemed a natural thought, toss them.  I got as far as un-boxing them.  I was right there, and then I caved… wow…  it seems so silly to say that I couldn’t do it.  In the end, they’re just material things, not my memories, not my childhood in physical form, but now wasn’t the time.

I’ve got about 1/3 of them stored in bags on boards now.  Waiting for more to come along with the boxes.  I spent the past few nights hunched over them with the bags.  My back is going to spasm soon!

Even without reading them, which I’d like to do but I sure don’t know when I’ll have time, they sure sparked a lot of memories.  I was surprised I could look at the covers for many of those early now-painfully-un-cool comics and remember when/where I got them.  They are attached on some cellular levels in my memory to so much of childhood.

They are also just plain eerie to look at.  As I bagged old Archie comics, I watched the fashions change, but the stories never did.  Even in my childhood, Archie seemed strangely out of place, dressing in the present but living in a very 1950’s sort of perfect Beaver Cleaver America.  Truly strange.  I took a peak at the Archie website today, and you can read some comics online, looks pretty much the same.  Archie still seems at first blush to live and behave like he’s in 1950’s middle America but is dressed up to reflect the first decade of the 21st century…

Anyway, if you need me, I’m in a dusty corner remembering my childhood through older eyes…

It really doesn’t seem like over two months since I visited Abu Simbel. This incredible temple was constructed under the rule of Ramses The Great, one of the most well known of the pharaohs. We literally had to be on the bus about 3:30am to make this trek. It was totally worth it.

I even managed to get past the somewhat artificial feel of the site. As mentioned in my blog from Aswan, the temple was in the path of flooding by the newest of the Nile dams. It was cut into blocks and moved piece by piece to higher land with an artificial mountain surrounding it. If not for the preservation work of the 1960’s, the temple would now lie beneath Lake Nasser.