My heart has been sideways all week, ever since the new Britney Spears record came out.

I am a sucker for well done pop music, and I always have. Going back to my early days, when my mother engulfed me in pop music from the 50s on forward, I loved well made pop.

I morphed over time, and by the early 1980s I could not stomach pop music. By the time of “Don’t You Want Me” by Human League, pop had become pure factory music. I moved on, and had to drop former favorites one by one (Journey, Styx) as they sold out to the Market Gods.

The market, as it had from the beginning, also turned out its own favorites. If you had the right look and could sing a little, they would surround you with enough professionals to present you in the most marketable way. New Kids On The Block, Vanilla Ice, Backstreet Boys and many others were pre-packaged and sold more on the basis of style than musical merit.
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Atlantic Rhythm & Blues …

…Can I Change My Mind…

…I’m In Love…

…Too Weak To Fight…

Resistance is futile. Immerse yourself. There is no other way.

As far back as I can remember I have been a music lover. I grew up in suburban New Jersey to the sounds of WABC-AM and WCBS-FM (Golden 101!). ABC played contemporary pop and CBS played oldies, mainly songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s. My mother seemed to know all the words to all the songs, and had perfect recall for song titles and the artists who performed them.

I remember I went to New York City with a friend once and we wound up at something called The New York Experience, sort of a museum of modern New York. There was a jukebox there with the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” on one side of a record, and their lesser hit “Whispering Bells” on the flip side. When I got home I quizzed my mother: what was on the flip side of “Come Go With Me”? I was so proud to tell her, once she gave up. She responded with a quizzical “Oh”, because those songs had been released at different times.

I hadn’t yet learned about reissues…

I discovered FM when I was 16. A student in my high school home room brought in a single of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a truly remarkable song for 1976. I asked why I hadn’t heard the song before and she sneered “because you listen to AM”, the “AM” curling out of her mouth like an epithet.

My radio only got AM! Oh…..

I bought a cheap combo player from a friend that had AM/FM/turntable, and found some pop stations with better clarity than AM. It took a couple more years to find progressive FM, and then I was home.

WNEW-FM was THE progressive, album rock FM station of the 1970s. OK, WMMR out of Cleveland was also famous, but FM signals do not travel as far as AM signals; I had no chance of picking up a Cleveland station in New Jersey.

Dan Neer, Dennis Elsis, Allison “the night bird” Steele, and the king of them all, Scott Muni. They didn’t have slick, huckster voices. What they had was a passion for the music. WNEW also played live concerts from up and coming performers such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel and Meatloaf. I would lay in my bed at night and listen to these concerts, transported, transfixed. The most joyous days of my childhood were those nights.
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…or a ham or whatever you stuff into your face on Thanksgiving. Go be with your family.

Take a break from the worries of the world…

…they’ll still be here tomorrow.

Ladies, remember when you went gaga over the latest teen hearth-throb? Think back to when you were 12 or 13, just beginning that transition from tomboy to little lady. And then you first saw Jordan Knight or Justin Timberlake, and something strange happened inside your chest and you felt weird but in a good way?

Welcome to our world, ladies. Except, we men, well many of us, we worship at the alter of sports.

We tend to be huge fans of the game itself, whatever game it may be. Many of us do like more than one sport, but we typically have a favorite sport.

And within that sport, we typically have a favorite team. And we typically made that connection when we were very young, perhaps 8 or 9.

Maybe it was Dad’s favorite team. Maybe we liked the uniforms. Maybe a player we worshipped played for that team.

My father was a Johnnie Mize fan. When Mize played for the Giants, my father was a Giants fan. When the Giants traded Mize to the Yankees, my father, still young, switched his allegiance to the Yankees, where it remained until he died, only last year. He took his allegiance to the grave.

As will most of us. Once a fan, always a fan.

I have several strong allegiances, to which I will admit now: Basketball: the New York Knicks. Baseball: the New York Mets. Football: the New York (OK, Hackensack, NJ) Jets.

When I was younger, had more discretionary income (before discovering the joys of being a parent 5 times over, that is), I was like any other Jets fan, attending as many games as I could, booing when they sucked, cheering like a maniac when they did well. Over the years the Jets have had, it seems, far more losing seasons than winning ones, far more years when they were among the worst than when they were among the best.

Still a fan. Just an irritated fan. (OK fellow Jets fans, fill in the blank: Rich _______ Kotite.)

This year may be different. Even if you know next to nothing about sports, even many of you ladies who only tolerate sports because your boyfriend is basically a sports lunatic, have heard that Brett Favre retired from the Packers after 800,000 years as the most exciting quarterback in the solar system, then changed his mind, decided that the Packers didn’t really want him back, and accepted a trade to the Jets.

Hallelujah! And so forth. The Jets finally did something to make their fans proud. They finally said to the pack, we ain’t following, we’re leading. You react to us for a change.

We appreciate it.
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The same 16 year old daughter who learned last week of the perils of shoplifting, recently asked permission to get a tattoo. She will be 17 soon, and 18 is the legal age of consent for such things, and she wanted it somewhere on the back of her neck, and her 18 year old sister was going to get a similar one, so I agreed.

Two nights ago my daughter informed me that she now wanted the tattoo on her wrist. She had even checked to make sure that this would not disqualify her from being a nurse, something we had discussed.

I said “No way.” No visible tattoos. Uh uh.

She sort of didn’t handle it well. I’m sticking to my guns anyway.

From this side of the fence, my attitude is that she can do what she wants in a year. She’ll live another 70 or so years after that. Small percentage of time to have to wait.

From her side of the fence she wants it NOW! She may as well KILL HERSELF! How can I be so COLD? I already said YES! What’s the big DEAL?

One day she will be a parent and have to make these decisions. Then, she will understand.

She and I have had a very rough year, mainly because she has had a very rough year. No doubt, in her mind this is just one more crappy thing that happened this year.

As a parent, of course we want our children to be happy. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my childhood unhappy, and it didn’t kill me. I learned early in life to live with disappointment. I see no harm in not getting what we want sometimes. It teaches us that life is like that: sometimes wanting something is not enough.

Hey, I want her to be successful. Do I have any control over that? No. I can set her up to be successful, give her the opportunities to acquire the tools to be successful, but she still has to want it, seek it and make it happen. She has given me many reasons this year to wonder where her head is at.

As I like to point out to her, she is five minutes away from being out the door. She has to pull it together while she still has the chance.

She brought home three Fs on her report card last week. I had to take away her cell phone because she refuses to put it in her locker at school and instead uses it during class. She’s been grounded for weeks over this, and that grounding will continue until her grades rebound.

Would I love to make her happy on the tattoo? Sure. Is it any big deal whether she gets a tattoo on her wrist today or a year from now? Not really. The difference is, it will be her decision to legally make.

Until then, I represent the simple fact that it’s not her choice. She can’t have everything she wants when she wants it. Some things she wants, she shouldn’t want at all.

My dear daughter learns everything the hard way.

Sheryl Crow sings, quite beautifully, “No one said it would be easy…but no one said it’d be this hard.”

Indeed.

We’ll make a regular Saturday habit of taking a break from the issues of the day, and reflect on some things that go on in our everyday lives.

About a month ago, as I was sitting at a friend’s house with my wife on a Friday evening, relaxing before going out, I got a call from Claire’s in the local mall. They had my daughter.

I have five children; my second oldest is 16, and she’s the one they had. Claire’s, in case you don’t know, is a teenage girl’s dream store. They sell all sorts of jewelery, most of it plastic, all of it relatively cheap. Girls on a school-age budget need to shop too, right?

On this parrticular day my 16 year old daughter decided that she was attracted to a $6 pair of earrings that she also didn’t really want to pay for. In other words, she wanted them but could not justify the price.

She was an easy mark. The store manager easily observed my daughter slipping the earrings into her pocket, stopped her at the door and brought her into the back room.

That’s where I found my daughter when I arrived at the store, surrounded by store management and mall security. They were waiting for the police to arrive.

Claire’s has a zero tolerance policy against shoplifting. My daughter was about to be charged. 

The policeman came and took his report. When he found out that my daughter was over 16, he informed us that this meant she was being arrested. “Cuffs?” I asked. “Yes,” he nodded. “Walked out in front of her friends?” I asked. “Yes,” he affirmed.

“Do you need me for any of this?” I asked. “No,” he replied.

“In that case, I’ll meet you at the police station,” I said, and left. I had no interest in watching my daughter being perp walked through the mall. This was her humiliation, not mine.

She was inside the police station for at least a half hour, and when the officer escorted her back to the car, he advised me that he was recommending my daughter for a shoplifting class, which takes place once a month and is an alternative to conviction for first time offenders.

When she went to court, my daughter was told by the judge that most of his cases involve teenage girls, and many of them were from Claire’s. He approved her for the class, and this morning she went.

I should say, we went. Parents of minors are required to participate. (I think that’s a great idea…)
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A man I’ve known since high school, a man of integrity, a man with deep principles, took me to task for failing to go far enough in my interview with Tavis Smiley.

His lack of respect for the way I approached the matter was the final rift in a difficult friendship. He would consider himself more honest than I am. I consider myself more honest than he is.

He has studied Marxism and spent his adult life advocating the complete overthrow of capitalism, replacing it with a pure workers state. He belongs to a socialist party, and has for decades.

I believe that mankind will eventually organize itself in some manner which resembles that structure, but I do not believe it can be rushed. I believe that humans evolve behaviorally, and when they are ready for the next phase, they accept it.

Sometimes we forget how long we’ve been on the planet, and how far we’ve come.

He believes that I should have declared Obama a traitor and the two party system a sham. He believes I should have advocated the immediate abolition of capitalism. He was unsatisfied that I specifically mentioned “workers” instead of Obama’s mantra “the middle class”; he was unimpressed that I included all peace-seeking people of the world in my area of concern. He seemed not to care that I had declared all of the ideas of the current era of capitalists to have “melted down.”

I felt that I had delivered strong words, that I had attempted to begin a dialog regarding what should be possible in these next four years. I intended to have a lot more to say about that, and in future posts I will do exactly that.

My friend was utterly disdainful of my intention to seek to influence others by approaching them on their terms, and having a conversation about what is possible and what is necessary.

By the way, my former friend the revolutionary lives a quite comfortable bourgeois life, as do his revolutionary comrades.