Last Saturday I returned to good old Roaring River for a couple of brief hikes along the Deer Leap and Devil’s Kitchen trails. I lost a filling in a front incisor while eating a PayDay peanut bar in Fairland; it would be four days until I could get into the dentist and make that incident his PayDay. But thankfully the tooth gave me no trouble, only spurring me to bite more carefully and eat more slowly.
The evening meal was at the Steak Inn at Shell Knob and was particularly tasty. I’ve only been making short hikes thus far this year, but at least I was back out on the trails!
I spent most of the second week of April 2013 in San Antonio, Texas for the national conference of the National Science Teachers Association.
I’ll spare you photos from the physics workshops I attended, since the Riverwalk is so much more picturesque:
The Riverwalk (click image for slideshow)
Dinosaur Valley
I drove over 1,200 miles on this trip, but in fellow science teacher Betty Henderson’s car with her and our colleague Theresa Miller. A total of ten science teachers from Bartlesville attended the conference, with most of us meeting up for dinner on the Riverwalk each night. During the conference former Bartlesville High School science teachers Chris Bradley and Sandra Cloud, who were at the conference, joined us for dinner. It was nice to catch up with them.
We had great weather during our stay in San Antonio, and Theresa, Betty, and I had fun stopping by Dinosaur Valley State Park on our way back home.
I didn’t get any hikes in on this trip, but I traipsed so much about the convention center and Riverwalk that I did not lack exercise!
For over a year I posted each month about a “new” song I particularly enjoyed. But I became preoccupied with other activities and my new discoveries dwindled. So at the start of this week I decided to suspend that monthly task. But today my 12,000+ song music collection was on shuffle and an old Jim Steinman song was dealt, prompting me to link and write. (You can always search for my song posts by clicking on the music tag in the cloud in the right sidebar of this website.)
Jim Steinman’s bombastic rock opera is a guilty pleasure of mine. His songs are typically quite long, linking together several motifs, with extensive lyrics. Most of his best songs are dark tales of sex and sin, and Original Sin, which originally was performed by Pandora’s Box, is a classic example.
Unfortunately, Original Sin lacks the humor and interweaved contrasting motifs of Steinman’s best songs, such as one finds in I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Backand You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth. The prior song’s “Bless all the girls” segment is a wonderful and welcome break from the driving main section, and those verses take me right back to my high school days, perfectly capturing the terrible wonders of teenage sexuality. The latter song is one of my all-time favorites with Steinman’s beautiful piano licks and Todd Rundgren’s tremendous production; the closing crescendo is wonderful, and I can’t help but clap along at the end.
But of course the artist most closely associated with Steinman is the mighty Meat Loaf with the fantastic bombastic Bat Out of Hell, Dead Ringer, and Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell albums. Meat did a cover of Original Sin on his Welcome to the Neighborhood album.
No one sings Steinman better than Meat Loaf, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the original Pandora’s Box version to order the album CD (it was not available on MP3 from Amazon or iTunes), which was made with Jim Steinman and has their original takes on several songs Meat Loaf would later cover on Bat Out of Hell II.
Some of Steinman’s lyrics are especially good, right up there with other choice bits which speak to me. The scrap of verse which hooked into my ears today and drew my full attention to the song, which had been playing in the background, was:
I’ve been looking for the ultimate crime
Infinite victims, infinitesimal time
And I’m so very guilty for no reason or rhyme
This and other Steinman songs supply plenty of reasons and rhymes for this sort of guilty pleasure.
Original Sin
I’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sin
You can dance forever
You got a fire in your feet
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enough
You can fly and never land
And never need to sleep
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enough
It’s not enough to make the nightmares go away
It’s not enough to make the tears run dry
It’s not enough to live a little better every day
Everything that they taught us
Was nothing but lies
Everything that they brought us
Was nothing but bribes
But it’ll all be over now
All I wanted was a piece of the night
I never got an equal share
When the stars are out of sight
And the moon is down
The natives are so restless tonight
I’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sin
You can lose yourself in pleasure
Till your body’s going numb
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it’ll never be enough
You can always take whatever
You conceivably could want
But will it ever be enough?
You know that it will never be enough
It’s not enough to make the nightmares go away
It’s not enough to make the tears run dry
It’s not enough to live a little better every day
Everything that they taught us
Was nothing but lies
Everything that they brought us
Was nothing but bribes
But the lies are over now
All I wanted was a piece of the night
It never had to get so dark
When the stars are out of sight
And the moon is down
The natives are so restless tonight
I’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
For an original sin
I’ve been looking for the ultimate crime
Infinite victims, infinitesimal time
And I’m so very guilty for no reason or rhyme
So now I’m just looking
And killing some time
Endlessly searching for the ultimate crime
I’ve been looking for an original sin
One with a twist and a bit of a spin
And since I’ve done all of the old ones
Till they’ve all been done in
Now I’m just looking
Then I’m gone with the wind
Endlessly searching for an original sin
I’m applying for a license to thrill
Going out on the edge
Moving in for the kill
There’ll be hell to pay someday
So put it all on the bill
Cause we’ll always be paying
And paying until
We’re beyond expiration
With a license to thrill
Planned obsolescence has been a driver of our consumer culture since the Great Depression. I tend to resist it with respect to durable goods: my car is 12 years old and has over 200,000 miles on it, and my home repairs include appliance repairs, rather than replacements, whenever practical. However, the fast pace of technological development forces me to upgrade computers and related devices more frequently. I tend to buy high-powered desktop systems and use them for about five years, but I’ve been replacing my iPhone every two years and have frequently replaced my Kindle book readers and iPads.
The internet churns at an even faster pace. Companies and services come and go, with a long list of services I once relied upon which are now essentially defunct. I don’t particularly mourn dead online services like CompuServe or WebShots, but they certainly were useful to me in their day. But it is disruptive when the plug is pulled on a service you still rely upon. In a couple of weeks CableOne, my internet service provider, is pulling the plug on its webpages service, which forced me to relocate/recreate some websites with new providers. But what really has irked me is Google.
Google has a history of creating extremely useful free services, luring me into relying upon them, and then killing them off. This has happened with Google Notebook, will happen shortly with Google Reader, and will happen later this year with iGoogle. Slate has a nice Google Graveyard where you can put a flower on the graves of services you loved in their day.
My iGoogle homepage
I use iGoogle as my homepage, having set it up with a number of RSS feeds which show me the latest articles from a variety of favorite websites. That includes a list of articles pushed to me via Google Reader. I like to scan article headlines from certain sites and always read certain webcomics via Google Reader. Now I have to shift over to an alternate service for my RSS feeds and I might as well switch my homepage to a new service as well. What a pain! These services are not obsolete for me, even if many people now rely upon Twitter instead of RSS, dip into the random posts by their Facebook friends, or use FlipBoard and the like on tablets to see news articles.
Thus far I’m playing with igHome as an iGoogle replacement and it looks like Feedly is a good replacement for Google Reader, but no one has written a Feedly gadget for igHome yet, so I’ll keep using iGoogle and Google Reader/Feedly for now.
My last day of Snow Break 2013 in Kansas City was spent at modern art museums. I struggle with much modern art, especially the less representational modes, but recently I got a real kick out of the modern art pieces at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. So I braved return visits to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
I dislike the spider motif at the Kemper, based on the sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Given my frustration with much of modern art, I’d prefer they play off their Crying Giant sculpture by Tom Otterness. For example, a close friend of mine loves Capri by Brendan Cass, while I struggle to appreciate his bold abstracted style of landscape painting. But we both enjoy the huge portrait Count Basie by Frederick James Brown.
I then drove miles westward to the Nerman Museum on the campus of Johnson County Community College, where security guards kept a careful watch as I progressed through each gallery. The museum cafe featured some nifty cylindrical light fixtures which caught my eye, but Do-Ho Suh‘s Some/Onewas the real eye-catcher with its large hollow robe composed of gibberish-covered dog tags.
I’m impolitic and crass enough to interpret Tomory Dodge’s Wasteland as a commentary on much of modern art, but I did appreciate Stephan Balkenhol’s rough-hewn wooden Man Lying on Platform. My favorite painting was the abstract Miasma (2) by Marc Handelman, which is a dark version of his sunburst painting Miasma. The much better (2) version is more powerful at a distance than close-up.
It was a snowy drive back to Bartlesville, a fitting conclusion to this Snow Break.
Meador Manor 
