You weren't the first one to misunderstand the lyrics of this song.
The late Ernie Freeman, who wrote and conducted the strings, had misunderstood the song's name and came to the sessions with his score bearing the title "Like a Pitcher of Water." Finding this both irksome and slightly amusing, Simon had the score framed and hung on the wall of his apartment after the session.
I think I got that it was a relationship song from the beginning. Now I'm trying to think of a song where I totally changed my interpretation of it after years.
But while I try to think of something, this reinterpretation of The Beatles "She Loves You" is pretty great.
I use the think Boys of Summer was called Poison Summer. It was about nuclear war and everyone was dead with the narrator describing his memories of a woman and how he still loved her after she died.
I wonder if Paul Simon ever read Kafka's very short story about being a bridge.
https://genius.com/Franz-kafka-the-bridge-annotated
Having a teenager in the house is really taking me back to my own teenage years. But I guess I can't blame him for it.
I think I learned here what "Brown Sugar" was about.
The Rolling Stones are more overrated than the Eagles.
The Eagles are the most popular band that everybody hates.
The Rolling Stones are still better than the Eagles, but the Eagles tend to be more accurately rated.
Journey is a far more appropriate band to hate passionately.
10n is right. But I kind of like Journey.
The worst concert I ever went to was Eagles. They're garbage live.
I saw the Rolling Stones live. Pearl Jam was the opener.
I saw Neil Young in the mid 90s and Jewel opened when we had no idea who she was. We remarked that she had a good voice.
AIPMHB, McCullough's The Great Bridge is good (but goes to shit once the main cables are up). Similar recs would be welcome.
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Appropriate thread to announce NMM to Sylvain Sylvain.
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I think The Eagles might have been fine if that "Best of The Eagles" album hadn't become the most overplayed record in the history of radio.
The coldest concert I ever spent was summer with the Eagles.
I saw the Eagles in 1980 and they were OK. The internet tells me they opened with Hotel California, but I don't remember it. Roy Orbison was on first and he was great.
I saw Journey when Gregg Rolie was still the voice; the Santana penumbra was a definite plus for them. Well, among the mostly male following. I'd already moved on when they got a singer and a style designed to appeal to the ladies.
I think the Eagles suck, but so does The Big Lebowski.
I saw the Rolling Stones live. Below on the bill were King Crimson and Family. It was a very good day.
The Big Lebowski is a sophomoric extrapolation of the difference between Altman's "Long Goodbye" and Hawks' "Big Sleep." Seriously, watch them back-to-back or interleaved. Everyone accuses Kubrick of being an unfeeling director, but the Coens are talented shitposters, and they borrowed a lot from their source for this.
To emotional swerves and aging, the biggest change I think about is how different contact and friendship are in middle age versus decades ago (at least for me and a few other people I know). Easier to quickly make good friends when there's not that much life history, when shared perspective on current circumstances is most of what there is.
Maybe that assessment of the gradient is an expression of privilege at having a family life that's basically been an asset. My dad's childhood wasn't like that, and he's doing better now with other people than he did decades ago.
I liked this analogy in the OP:
Now I think that a large part of growing older is a dulling-and-fine-tuning of the emotions. It's like a palate: when you're young, flavors are very intense and nuance is lost on you.
I saw the Rolling Stones at Pontiac Stadium when I was a freshman in college. To give you a sense how long ago that was, it was their very first farewell tour.
The opening act was Iggy Pop, and he was booed off the stage after just a few songs. The second opening act was Santana.
As for the Stones themselves, I couldn't say whether they were good or not. I was up in the nosebleed seats with my roommate and his friends who I didn't like that much, so it wasn't much fun.
As a little kid I always used to wonder who "Richard Stans" was when we did the Pledge of Allegiance every morning
28: He invented the dawnzer, which gives off a 'lee light'.
I taught the kids the Life In Hell "I plead alignment to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow" pledge the other day. No wonder the nurse is mad at me.
I've seen the Stones three times. Once while they had Mick Taylor on guitar and he and they were awesome.. The other times not so much.
I took my then 13-year-old daughter to see Ratdog in a tiny little theatre in Milton Keynes in 2003, and just now found a soundboard of the show on archive.org. The bass player, who apparently started off as a sound engineer in Abbey Road when the Beatles were recording there, was really a lot of fun.
I always figured the pitch for The Big Lebowski was "it's a noir, but literally every character is an idiot."
If I had the stamina, it would be interesting to watch The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and The Big Lebowski back to back.
The odd thing about The Long Goodbye (the movie) is that it is usually described as a parody, but it doesn't particularly feel like a parody. I mean, there's humor in it, but overall it's played pretty straight.
The key point is the White Russians are awful.
33: I read that Jeff Bridges asked the Coen brothers "What does Lebowski learn over the course of the movie?" and they had to convince him that he learns absolutely nothing.
No learning, no hugs. Unless sex is extreme hugging.
When a man manages to be so utterly laid back that a woman realizes his genes must be propagated, they have a very special hug and then an awkward conversation while she holds a pose designed to expose her cervix to as much semen as possible.
38:. Moby teaches Sex Ed! New podcast on Spotify!
It doesn't get more romantic than
"I don't want the father to be someone I have to see socially, or who will have any interest in raising the child himself."
"The World According to Garp" did that better.
33: This is the key to more than one Coen brothers movie. So Burn After Reading is an espionage movie populated by idiots, etc. The wikipedia article on it is pretty funny:
Pitt, who plays a particularly unintelligent character, said ... when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause, and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine'."
Another plug for the excellent "Fiasco", a game in which 3-5 people and some dice improvise their own Coen Brothers movie. "A game of powerful emotions and poor impulse control". Last game we played ended up with a golf buggy chase from Mar a Lago to Palm Beach International Airport featuring a Chinese agent, an escaped convict and a real estate developer.
45. If I won the lottery I'd seriously consider funding that movie.
One of the staff have, probably in her mid to late 20s, was asking everyone yesterday, " Who's Paul Simon?" Sic transit gloria mundi.