— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
Back in the early nineties, when there were few other options for fun, free things for teenagers to do in Spokane, people would "go cruising" downtown—really, just packing the downtown streets after hours with our cars, blaring music. I suppose, where appropriate, showing off in one way or another. My brother, Christopher, and I would really have nothing to show off, but a few times we still went cruising. It was a fun thing to do with my older brother when I was 16 years old, and he was about 20.
In December 1993, at which point I would have been 17 and Christopher would have been 21, I recorded a two-hour mixtape of tracks inspired by these "cruising" outings, half of them chosen by Christopher and half of them chosen by me, for the most part each track in the sequencing switching off between our choices. The tape featured 28 tracks, and I can't remember if we ever did go cruising playing this tape itself, but I know that was the intention when I recorded it. I called the mixtape
cruisin'.
Then, in May 1995, I recorded a sequel mixtape, also two hours and 28 tracks. I called it the very original
cruisin' II. At that point I was 19 and Christopher was 22. In October 1997, I recorded
cruisin' III, when I was 21 and Christopher was 25.
I know for certain far too much time had passed by 1997 for us to actually go cruising—neither of us lived at home anymore by then. I'm pretty sure Christopher was out of the house in May 1995 as well, as Katina would have been three months pregnant with Becca at the time. So it's extremely unlikely cruising would ever have happened with the second mixtape either. In essence,
cruisin' II and
cruisin' III were "spiritual sequels" to the first mixtape. I always liked them all as music collections, though.
So why am I bringing all this up now, then? Well, Christopher's 51st birthday was a week before yesterday, on September 24. That weekend, it occurred to me that an easy, creative gift to give him would be a "Christopher" playlist, especially considering how many other people for whom I have themed playlists—for family, I have two for Mom; one for Dad; one for Sherri. I hadn't done any for siblings, but music was a big part of both Christopher's and my childhoods and teen years, so it seemed kind of like a no-brainer. I constructed the playlist on both
Spotify (so Christopher could definitely view it and listen to it in my choice of sequencing) and
Apple Music (so it would be part of my own extensive Apple Music playlists).
I texted the Spotify link to him around 10:30 in the morning on Sunday, September 24. Later that evening, he texted me back:
Awesome playlist. 👌 Now all I need is a story behind each of your picks & maybe why that order. 🤔 😃
So, I really thought about this. And, just a couple of hours later, I wrote all of this out in a Gmail draft, which I then sent to Christopher in a cascade of eleven text messages:
Do you remember the few times we went "Cruising" in downtown Spokane in your car, in like 1993? I had a mixtape of songs we would crank in the car, with half my choices and half yours. Actually I eventually made three such mixtapes (which I still have), but only the first one got much use actually cruising in the car. I called the mixtape " Cruisin' "—and "Even Flow," "Deeper Shade of Soul," "If I Had No Loot," "Breaking the Girl," "Would," "Yes ... and It Counts," "Lullaby" and "What's Up?" were all included on that first tape.
That cover of "Saturday Night" was also on the first "Cruisin'" tape, but was used again just last year, on the
tribute video I made for your 50th birthday—for which I wanted to use one of your picks for the first Cruisin' tape, and it was just the best option because all your other songs from that tape had lyrics that were just way too depressing and thus inappropriate for such a video, lol
I recorded "Cruisin'" on December 5, 1993. The second mixtape, "Cruisin' II," was recorded May 13, 1995. "Buddy Holly" was included on that mix.
A Nirvana song for a "Christopher" playlist seemed a no brainer, and it naturally should be sequenced next to a Pearl Jam song. I just like "Come As You Are" better than a more obvious choice like "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
My memories of your music listening, from the late eighties in particular, is dominated by the heavy metal bands you listened to, which evolved into grunge in the early nineties. This is why the sequencing starts with 80s heavy metal and then moves into grunge. "Centre of Eternity" as the opening track is because a) you had a long history of being a fan of Ozzy Ozborne; and 2) you once scared the shit out of me by laying a speaker face down on the grate in the floor so I would hear those spooky opening sounds down in the basement.
Having at least one track by Metallica was also a no-brainer. "One" is the one single of theirs I can still remember from when it was first released, with the video featuring clips of the injured soldier with his face covered with a white boxlike covering that rendered him unable to see or speak. Also, including a ballad on the second track in album sequencing is relatively common, and I felt it flowed well with these tracks here.
I had a couple of Ratt cassettes that used to be yours, and you gave them to me.
I don't know if you'll remember this, but Paula Abdul's "Straight Up" often brings back a memory of you and I walking somewhere through Spokane late-ish at night. I can't remember where we were going or where we had come from. But, you were listening to the "Forever Your Girl" album on your walkman and singing along to "Straight Up." On that particular evening anyway, you were super into it.
"Arabian Nights" is the opening track to the "Aladdin" soundtrack, the CD of which I gave you for Christmas in 1992.
It seemed I needed to have at least one Guns n' Roses track. I didn't want to go the more obvious route of a track from "Appetite for Destruction" and went with the most memorable single from the "Use Your Illusion" albums instead, providing another ballad to end the sequence with. Plus, unlike "Appetite for Destruction," which came out when I was 11, the "Use Your Illusion" albums came out when I was 15 and the release of those albums is something I actually remember.
Particularly for the time when we were kids, you had unusually eclectic pop music tastes, ranging from metal to grunge to hip hop to pop. That made sequencing somewhat of a challenge, so that the shift from one track to the next flows as well as it can. Broadly speaking, I started with metal and ended with pop, punctuating it with a metal ballad at the very end, with a hip-hop detour in the middle, surrounded by a couple of detours into grunge and rock.
A few days went by. Then on late Thursday night I got this text from him:
Can you send me the track list for all of the Cruisin' tapes. I'd like to know all the songs you added too. (Unfortunately, No, I don't remember Cruisin' or the Mixtapes. 🤣
Friday morning I replied:
When I get a chance I'll make them all into playlists in their own right, and I'll share those with you.
So. All of that was basically background information to tell you how I spent a huge amount of my Saturday afternoon this weekend, while Shobhit was at a work shift. I had thought I might sit and watch a movie just for fun, but then I thought about this, and decided I would get that done:
cruisin' on Spotify, and
on Apple Music
cruisin' II on Spotify, and
on Apple Music
cruisin' III on Spotify, and
on Apple Music
I mentioned already that
cruisin' and
cruisin' II had both originally been two-hour tapes with 28 tracks (14 tracks Side 1 and Side 2 respectively). And I was able to recreate both of these almost perfectly as online playlists this past weekend, with just one hiccup: Spotify does not have the "Beautifu" remix from Prince's
The Beautiful Experience EP for his midnineties single "The Most Beautiful Girl In the World, so there, I just had to replace it with the original track from
The Gold Experience album. (Because I have iTunes Match, I was able to include the ripped version of the "Beautiful" remix track on my own version of the playlist on Apple Music, which appears to play without issue online as well.)
cruisin' III had a whole lot more of these sorts of issues, with a whopping seven tracks I could not find to add to playlists—evidently because they were obscure and/or Spokane-local choices on Christopher's side, and those bands just never became significant enough to have their content on music streaming services. So, even though the original mixtape also had 28 tracks, I could only create a playlist with 21 tracks. As a result, this playlist, as it exists online, leans much more heavily toward my choices: rather than the 50/50 breakdown of the first two playlists,
cruisin' III as a playlist is 67% my choices and 33% Christopher's choices.
And all of this is to say, I duplicated
all of these playlists on both Spotify and on Apple Music, so that I could both share them with Christopher (who subscribes to Spotify and not Apple Music, which I subscribe to) and reliably play them myself. This took a fair amount of time.
I also discovered something else, which I could not believe I had gone this long without realizing I could do: you can edit the "cover photo" for each playlist, which usually defaults to a four-image collage of the original album covers from the first four albums represented by the tracks that open the playlist track sequencing. For literally more than a decade—nearly two decades—I have just been accepting the playlist "cover photo" to all my playlists as they have defaulted in this manner.
But, then I saw on Spotify that you can upload your own image! This seemed like a perfect thing to do with the
cruisin' tapes, which I still have, and for which, as I did tons of tapes of this sort, I made homemade inlay cards (tape covers). I took all the tape covers out and took pictures of them all so I could upload the tape covers I had originally made, as the playlist cover photos. (The
cruisin' III cover is a collage, including the original track list, so it can be seen which ones are missing from the playlist.)
Discovering this feature on Spotify, I went to check whether you can do the same with Apple Music playlists. You can! So I updated those too.
I can only upload one image per playlist, but with all the
cruisin' covers pulled out, I took several photos of each: the front cover; the back cover with the track list; the entire inlay card unfolded, photos of both the front and the back. The
cruisin' III cover was the biggest challenge, because the track list on that one was not typed directly onto the cover like the first two were, but actually computer printouts, cut and pasted onto the cover with rubber cement. The problem is, the rubber cement used in 1997—twenty-six years ago—long ago lost its effectiveness, and I no longer have rubber cement. (I sort of take that back: I found a nearly empty bottle in my desk drawer this weekend. But it was also so old that what little was left in the bottle had completely dried up.) The little white cutouts kept falling or moving around, no matter how carefully I tried to handle the cover, pulling it out and putting it back into the cassette case.
I'm glad to have digital images of them all now, anyway. Honestly this means I can probably just throw the tapes away now. The images are all now in
a dedicated photo album on Flickr.
The photo taking, editing, and uploading—and then, of course, texting Christopher the link—also took a pretty good chunk of time. Basically everything I did for all this took up my entire Saturday afternoon this weekend. I was meant to meet Shobhit in Belltown for a show were were going to after he got off work, and I very nearly lost track of time. I only barely managed to both make myself dinner (I made rice to have with the last of the potato & eggplant dish Shobhit made earlier in the week), and catch a bus downtown. I rushed over to catch a #8, really getting the last bus I could catch and still get to 1st & Battery before Shobhit did.
— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
The show we saw was an "
Underground Cabaret" at a new venue: Base Camp Studios, literally in a basement under an art gallery. The space itself was cool enough that I took a
couple of
photos before the show started, but I was rather surprised to discover that there was nothing but the stage and some folding chairs set up down there—no bar, or anything. Just dark space in the room behind us.
Shobhit had texted me photos of some drinks on deep discount from Total Wine & More earlier in the day, asking if he should buy them for us to have at the show. I had said it was unlikely to be appropriate to bring our own drinks. These drinks did not much appeal to me anyway, but once we got to the venue, it became apparent we could have easily brought our own drinks.
The performer was one of the eight District 3 candidates for Seattle City Council that Shobhit had run against in the primary. They were the youngest of them all, and we went to the show because they had texted Shobhit a flyer for the show, inviting us. I had no idea what kind of show it would be, or what kind of demand there would be. When we got there, with a stage consisting of a single grand piano and a microphone with speakers, there were maybe 20 folding chairs set up. We were the first to arrive.
I don't think any more than ten people came, in the end. Maybe fifteen.
The show consisted of nine classic songs, some of them showtunes I think. It lasted about forty minutes. There was an admission, in the middle of the show, that the entire set had been rehearsed one time before this.
This was a ticketed event. They were $20 each.
There's a lot more I could say about this show, but given how public this blog is, it's best that I exercise caution here. I think what I've already said is a bit borderline, but at least I haven't mentioned their name so this post won't come up in any Google searches about the show or anything. And: Shobhit and I hadn't gone out "on the town" for any kind of event like this on a weekend evening in ages, probably several years. So I can say this for it: it gave us something to do.
— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
As for Friday evening, I spent that one taking myself to Pacific Place downtown to see the 40th anniversary rerelease of
Stop Making Sense, the concert film of the Talking Heads, which I loved.
So that brings us to yesterday, when I met up with Laney to see a movie we had both been really looking forward to seeing, called
The Creator. In the end, she
rather agreed with my
very mixed feelings about the movie. I gave it a solid B, which I stand by, but it's only even as good as that thanks to the visual effects and production design. The story is a mess.
After the movie, we walked over to Rainier Square for one more stint with a picnic lunch on the public terrace while we still have nice enough days for it before the year closes out. And even after receiving far heavier rain than normal at the start of the week, with days to one degree or another wet straight through Friday morning, the weekend, while somewhat cool with highs around 61°, was nice and sunny. It made for perfect picnicking weather on the first day of October.
Also: I opted to bring a thermos full of chai rather than a cocktail. Laney brought her standard can of beer, which amused us as it made this the first time we did a "happy hour" when she had an alcoholic beverage but I did not. But, I wanted a hot drink, and adding alcohol to chai does not improve it. It's easy to offset the delicate balance of flavor in chair with the smallest amount of something foreign to its usual recipe, which can alter the flavor significantly. Trust me, I've tried. It just never works.
We have another, actual Happy Hour at Chuck's Hop Shop scheduled for Saturday two weeks from now. Yesterday's outing was a little more impromptu because we saw the weather was going to be nice, we were seeing a movie downtown, and the lovely new and renovated Rainier Square terrace is an easy walk from Pacific Place. I still need to walk there with Shobhit.
At Laney's request, when we got into the lobby at Rainier Square Tower, I took her photo
with one of the art installations, which she loves. I texted it to her and she posted it to her Facebook page last night.
This time, we sat in the badded chairs at the far end of the Lower Terrace from the elevator, so we were close to overlooking University Street. I took a photo of us using the timer, at Laney's request, with both
the greenery and the buildings behind us. It makes for a very good shot, I think.
Later in the evening, after I walked back home, I finally decided, after all these visits to Rainier Square and photos I've taken of the renovation and construction (particularly of Rainier Square Tower) since 2018, to create
a dedicated Flickr photo album for the overall Rainier Square redevelopment. It starts with a shot I took in February 2018 of the entire block demolished with the exception of Rainier Tower (the old skyscrper with the tapered base), moves on with several shots I have of the new, Rainier Square Tower under construction, and then includes photos of the finished tower from just about every angle imaginable, and then many of the photos I have taken of the finished renovation of the terraces, from visits with both Alexia (during our Seattle Architecture Tour in September) and now, for Happy Hours, Laney. The album currently has 61 shots in it.
Anyway. Laney and I met up at 11:20 at Pacific Place, and I'd say we parted ways at maybe 4:30ish. We spent a good five hours together yesterday. I came home and chopped vegetables for the pizza Shobhit decided he wanted to have for dinner, but left them ready to put on after I then went to write my movie review. When that was done and we had the pizzas made—which were very good—we watched three episodes of season four of
Sex Education on Netflix. That show's consistency of excellence is very impressive.
That said, there's a character whose mother dies, and this always gets me. I don't seem to matter what movie or show it is, if someone's mom dies, it makes me cry. And although this character's mom was a drug addict and mine wasn't, in both cases it was still a very complicated relationship, and the show explores how grief works with the loss of that kind of parent. It really got to me. I think maybe stories about losing a mom will continue to, for the rest of my life.
— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
In other news, I just had a Zoom lunch with Karen. These are usually on Fridays, so, whew! I'm glad I happened to check my Google Calendar.
She had gone to Massachusetts for her father's funeral, and then went on a knitting retreat in Port Townsend, so this was our first virtual lunch since September 13, two days shy of three weeks ago. You'd assume we had a lot to catch up on, but not really; we talked about
Sex Education (the show), which I had to bring up because of its characters who are wheelchair users; I told her about the plans to have Jennifer visit next weekend and how we're going to the Northwest Chocolate Festival; I also told her about the redeveloped Upper and Lower Terrace at Rainier Square, because why not? Karen is an architecture consultant and so I knew it would hold at least some interest.
Oh! Fuck, I wanted to ask her how the construction of her second house in Tulalip is coming along. I completely forgot. Next time, I guess. I need to get back to work now. (Or spent more time doing actual work. I spent a lot of time on this post. Don't tell anyone.)
— पांच हजार चार सौ इक्यासी —
[posted 1:05 pm]
