Flannel Shirt

Free The Sunbird, aka Rogue Wave: Come Back To Us

This is my favorite song at this moment in history, Come Back To Us by Free The Sunbird, aka Rogue Wave, aka Zach Rogue. This is a live version done in a subway. There is an Everly Brothers feel to the harmonies, especially on the CD studio version. We're all waiting for you to come back to earth. You can't keep goin' on, goin' on...

Great shoe-gazing music.

Rogue Wave and its various iterations (based in Oakland, California) have been making music for the last decade. Zach Rogue (aka Zachary Schwartz) formed Rogue Wave after losing his job with the dot-com bust. You don't hear much if anything about them but they seem to be creeping into soundtracks all over from "Spiderman 3" to "Scrubs" to "Weeds" to "Cougar Town". Plus a lot of indie films.

Here's Rogue Wave's take on Buddy Holly's Everyday. Have a mellow New Year's.

New Year's Eve Cavalcade of Sports

This is the time of year where college bowl games and the NFL fill up the tube. The most important event, at least in Boblandia, is the Niners' game in St. Louis against the Rams. The Niners need a victory to ensure its second seed in the NFC playoffs. That means that they would be off on wild-card weekend, an important week of rest for all teams after a year of injuries.

The Rams are one of the worst teams in the league this year. They suffered an incredible number of injuries this year, so the Niners are favored big-time. It could be a rout, it should be a rout, but you always worry about that "on any given Sunday" thing.

So my pre-New Year anxieties are focused on that. I'm hoping the Oregon Ducks beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl (most of the traditional New Year's Day games have been pushed back to Monday the 2nd because New Year's Day fall of Sunday, NFL day, this year) and that Stanford goes out on top in the Fiesta Bowl. But the big thing is the Niner game, which is going to be at ten a.m. on New Year's Day. I don't know if ten a.m. is too early for Joan to make popcorn, but the holidays are the time to eat improperly.

My Blue Heron

I think. In Nikeland.

Unstable Idol

I took this photo in the early 80s. It's a statue in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and at the time it had some stability problems. I used it for the cover art of a cassette of songs I'd done, which I called "Unstable Idol". I was also thinking of folks like Elvis Presley. There's something about the boards that hold the statue in place and the wild eucalyptus trees in the background that struck my artistic eye.

Music Friday: SVT, "New Year"

New Year.

SVT was a three-piece band (guitar, bass, drums) in San Francisco at the end of the 70s.  They released a few singles and an EP but never really broke out. I liked them, they presaged the power pop movement of the 80s, although my punk purist friends dismissed them out of hand. I saw them at the Mabuhay Gardens. The bass player was Jack Casady, who made his fame earlier in the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. Maybe the purists held his psychedelic and folky past against the band, and they didn't play the generic hyper-punk stuff. I liked them. As I recall the guitarist and vocalist ODed and the band ended soon thereafter.

 

Mossy tree

In Nikeland.

This is what happens when it rains a lot.

Sean Bonniwell, RIP

As a kid in the sixties, one of my first favorite bands was The Music Machine led by Sean Bonniwell. He's passed away.

A former folk singer, Bonniwell was recognized as the chief force behind the band that honed its sound during a regular gig at Hollywood Legion Lanes bowling alley. The group's one big hit was "Talk Talk," a proto-punk single that broke into the Top 20 in 1966.

It was "the most radical single" then on Top 40 radio, "garage psychedelia at its most experimental and outrageous," Richie Unterberger wrote in his 1998 book "Unknown Legends of Rock 'n' Roll."

"Rock and roll was a teenager in the '60s, and I used that climate to express my confusion, my anger, at the injustice of the world," Bonniwell said in the book.

Although Bonniwell did not regard himself as "the grandfather of punk," he recognized that others did, he told Unterberger.

"The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders" viewed the Music Machine as one of "the most loved" but "least played garage bands of the 1960s."

The band's success was largely due to Bonniwell, a gifted songwriter who penned "torturous but catchy, riff-driven songs," according to the All Music online database. The original five-man lineup included Keith Olsen, known for wielding a fuzz box, an electronic device that altered his bass guitar sound.

Here is The Music Machine doing Masculine Intuition.

Rose Bowl controversy

A controversy is brewing in the Pacific Northwest as the Oregon Ducks prepare for the Rose Bowl against some guys from back in the Midwest somewhere.

The young woman above is demonstrating the Oregon "O". You'll see fans making this sign in the stands when the Ducks do something good on the field.

The controversy is that that this:

is "vagina" in sign language.

This could lead to confusion in Pasadena on January 2nd.

Saving our way into Depression

Paul Krugman again explains why cutting government spending in a recession only makes matters worse.

This huge move into surplus reflects the end of the housing bubble, a sharp rise in household saving, and a slump in business investment due to lack of customers.

Given this reality, it’s not hard to see why massive government borrowing hasn’t led to soaring interest rates; we’re awash in saving with no place to go. And that’s also why we’re in a liquidity trap, in which large increases in the monetary base don’t lead to inflation.

And the question is, how do people who want us to slash the budget deficit now now now think this is going to work? Unless the confidence fairy arrives, causing households and businesses to suddenly ramp up their saving despite high unemployment and weak sales, deficit reduction will only intensify the problem of excessive savings relative to perceived investment opportunities — and make the slump much, much worse.

Viagra good for some heart conditions

Viagra has benefits for the heart, besides affairs of the heart.

How sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, can alleviate heart problems is reported by Bochum's researchers in cooperation with colleagues from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester (Minnesota) in the journal Circulation. They studied dogs with diastolic heart failure, a condition in which the heart chamber does not sufficiently fill with blood. The scientists showed that sildenafil makes stiffened cardiac walls more elastic again. The drug activates an enzyme that causes the giant protein titin in the myocardial cells to relax...

"Of all the patients aged over 60 who are in hospital because of a weak heart, half suffer from diastolic heart failure" explains [Dr. Wolfgang] Linke. "Although we know that the decreased distensibility of the cardiac walls is the cause, the disease cannot be treated properly with today's medicines." In the so-called "Relax" study of the Heart Failure Network, the efficacy of sildenafil in people is already being tested. "If, for the first time, the drug is found to have a positive effect on heart failure, we would already have a molecular mechanism on hand to explain the effect" says Linke.