Bad Neighbors, Good Fellas, Great Music

Monday, 25 July 2011

I’ve had a string of bad luck when it comes to neighbors.

When I was a kid, my bedroom window faced the street, and across the street lived a couple of greasers who were always fixing their car. For some reason, their vehicles needed to be jumped every night at 10:00 pm.

Later, we moved to a townhome and the two guys who shared our driveway drove their remote-controlled toy cars incessantly.  This wasn’t so loud, but it was a whining, squealing noise that we heard all day during the weekends. Finally, my Dad acquired a frequency jamming device and stopped their hobby cold whenever they tried to engage in it. I loved this bit of subversive problem-solving. However, my bedroom shared a wall with another neighbor, and they partied with loud, pounding music every Friday and Saturday night. I pounded on the walls a couple of times, but they just pounded back.

When I moved into a duplex with a friend of mine, the man who lived upstairs was also a problem. Actually, he was a freelance photographer, so his job took him away for long weekends. But when he returned, he returned in full-force, pounding (and ‘pounding’ really is the best word here) his girlfriend at the most bizarre times of the day. It was quite difficult to sit in my bedroom doing phone Witnessing while upstairs I heard an amalgam of bed groans and lady squeals.

When Jennifer and I moved into an apartment, I was again submitted to a loud neighbor. I would pound on the ceiling with a yard stick I’d acquired from the State Fair until, one night, I hit the ceiling so hard that I broke the stick.  A couple of years later, I awoke to policemen knocking on our door. They wanted to know if we’d heard any loud noises that morning. “Why yes we have,” I said. Later, I found out the loud noise was the sound of a gun, and that the woman upstairs had been murdered.

Jennifer and I next lived in a townhome, where the woman next door didn’t seem to mind that her son built a band room in their garage and practiced his drums at 5:00 in the morning. When I brought this to the woman’s attention, she claimed to have no idea her son was doing that. Yeah, right. What a liar.

When we moved to a house, I thought our problems were behind us. But there was a guy whose property butted up to ours. He practiced bow hunting right there in his backyard, and would shout to his dog all weekend to fetch. The dog ran from yard to yard chasing after fake pigeons. One morning, I spotted an arrow in the siding of our house.

But I think the worst neighbors I’ve ever had are the ones I have right now. Not only can I hear the arguments and TV shows in the apartment right next door, but just outside our windows is an 18-story building – filled with people on government assistance. Since most of them have no jobs, they have no compulsion to go to bed at any decent hour. One particularly horrible individual has spent the last three summers working on his car until after midnight each day. He starts it up and lets it loudly idle for about ten minutes before peeling away. The car has no muffler, and it’s so loud I can hear it three blocks away. Other neighbors sit outside talking about how awesome their unemployed lives are, and still other neighbors are too stupid to know their car alarms are going off all night. More than once, I’ve had to leave notes under people’s windshields telling them to shut off their goddam car alarms.

Man, I hate car alarms.

Anyway, today, I looked out the window, across the parking lot and saw an old woman sitting in the shade. I’ve seen her there before. She lives in the 18-story building and, when the weather is just right, she comes out and parks herself (she’s in a wheelchair) under the shade of a tree. Her cat sits on her lap, or jumps off and sits in the cool grass for a few minutes. After a lifetime of terrible neighbors, it’s nice to see someone who doesn’t announce their presence, bt just sits there and enjoys life.

And while I’m not a praying man, I gotta admit, THIS IS THE BEST PRAYER I HAVE EVER HEARD. Amen.

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

This evening, Jennifer and I watched the pilot episode of the Sopranos.

I gotta say, my initial impression is how amazingly mediocre it was. I mean, it wasn’t a bad show. It just was, well, nothing special. I guess I was expecting more since, you know, it’s often ranked as one of the best television shows ever.

In case you didn’t already know, the show centers around an Italian-American family who lives near New York City. They’re involved in mob activities. They’re Catholic. Despite seeming to be annoyed with their relatives at every turn, they have an inordinate attachment to their family. And, even though they’ve all been in America for probably their whole lives, they like to throw around Italian phrases and just act obnoxious to each other. They owe each other favors. It’s all very cliche, really. In fact, it smacks of a poor man’s version of Goodfellas, which, of course, is already a poor man’s version of The Godfather Trilogy. The similarities are so strong that the script writers felt compelled to include explicit references to these films during the course of the show.

About the only thing unique is the scenes of Tony Soprano visiting a therapist. Well, even that’s not so unique. I already saw it in Analyze This.

Still, I’m willing to give this a chance, much as I know most shows don’t really shine during their pilot. Perhaps I’ll have a more glowing review in a few months. Capiche?

Wednesday, 27 July 2011

While on the drive home from work a few days ago, I visited Cities 97, a station I usually avoid due to the smarmy DJs and faux-variety. But what could I do? All the other stations were playing commercials, and public radio was spending their 10th straight hour talking about the namby-pambies in congress.

I had never heard the song before. A woman was singing, and there was chanting in the background. There was a driving drum beat. I left the song on, thinking, “hey, this isn’t too bad.” After a minute or so, I started to pay attention to the chanting and I noticed that the singers were saying “rolling in the deep.” This made me realize that the song I was listening to was Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” a song title I only know because I keep track of the number one songs and this song had been #1 for about two months during May and June.

This was fascinating because I almost never like the #1 songs anymore. (“Hey,” you ask, “if you don’t like the music on the top of the charts, then why do you bother tracking it anymore?” That’s a great question, I’ll answer it in an upcoming blog.) In fact, I just checked, and I’d have to go back three years to the last time a song went to #1 that I did not totally think was god-awful. Most every song in between then and now has featured some guy or girl rapping to some synthesized music beat, or worse: they’ve simply stolen a decent song and bastardized the hell out of it. The ‘singers’ don’t even really sing, they just autotune their voices and, as if on cue, about two-thirds of the way through the ‘song,’ a person of the opposite gender – who is way cooler than the main rapper if it’s a guy, and way hotter than the main rapper if it’s a girl – breaks in with some fast rapping lyrics that are supposed to blow my mind by their slavish devotion to the formula. If you don’t believe me, CLICK HERE to listen to and see the music video for the current #1 song, a piece of crap so bad that it’s only saving grace is that it will be forgotten in months as it sinks into the sameness of the thirty #1 songs before it.

Speaking of music videos, today I had to watch the “Rolling in the Deep” music video, just to hear the song again. It’s a wierd music video that, I feel, detracts from the song (as do almost all music videos that are not made by either Michael Jackson or Weird Al). I don’t know why there’s a ninja fighting with cocaine, or why the drummer is squished under a staircase, or why Adele doesn’t even feel moved enough to stand up, but it wasn’t that bad, as far as music videos go.

Anyway, I’m just saying: It’s nice to see that a non-pile-of-crap ascended to the top of the pop charts for once.

Oh, and speaking of #1 songs, here’s a site of Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers. It doesn’t get much better than that.