Not Much to Talk About in Year 9 . . . Or Is There?  The above headline took my breath away when I first noticed it a few months ago on NBCNews.com: “This Oscar Winner Has the Most Supportive Wife Ever”. The wife in question is Holly Ramos, one of my Facebook friends as a result of this series of Under Appreciated Rock Band posts; and she was the bandleader in the UARB with the shortest name (Fur) coming at the end of the longest post (June 2013). Holly Ramos had tipped off her Facebook friends that her husband Tom Cross was up for an Oscar for Film Editing, and I had my eyes open during the 2015 Oscar ceremonies. It might be my imagination, but I think I remember a flash of a few seconds toward that part of the crowd when I saw Holly reacting to the announcement of the winner. In his acceptance speech, Tom Cross thanked, among others, his wife Holly Ramos and their two children. These great quotes are given in the piece on NBCNews.com, as taken from comments Holly Ramos had written on her blog before the Oscars that year: “‘This is being called the whitest Oscars ever. Tom Cross is half Asian,’ she wrote. ‘Represent, Tom Cross, represent!!’ “She also called her husband, ‘genuinely humble, gracious, kind and savvy’. “‘Tom is so hard working and focused,’ Ramos wrote. ‘He worked in a video store in High School and knew he wanted to work in film his whole life. He has never done anything else.’” The Oscar for Film Editing was awarded to Tom Cross for his work in Whiplash; J. K. Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in this film, where he played a sadistic instructor at a prestigious music conservatory. Cross has been nominated numerous times for many different awards for his film editing work, including a second nomination for an Oscar for La La Land (2016). Cross speaks of the technical aspects of his work on Whiplash (again as quoted on NBCNews.com): “‘The sync [to the music] was close but not perfect,’ Cross said. ‘We couldn’t alter the soundtrack and couldn’t slow or speed up the music; that would have been immediately obvious. I needed to line the pictures up, manually, for every drum hit. The most precise way was with jump cuts and to take out frames. And this had to be imperceptible.’” * * * I knew that Holly Ramos had worked in film as well as music in my research for the post on her punk rock band Fur more than five years ago. In silent testimony to her acumen in the acting field, Holly appears in four different photographs on the cover and in the booklet and also on the Fur CD itself. By looking closely, you can tell that it is Holly in all four pictures, but her look is startlingly different in each of them. Holly Ramos was one of the actors in a 2001 independent film that was the debut feature by Ilya Chaiken called Margarita Happy Hour. The Fur song “Sex Drive” was featured in the soundtrack for this film. The movie was nominated for a Prism Award; from Wikipedia: “The Annual Prism Awards honor the creative community for accurate portrayals of substance abuse, addiction and mental health in entertainment programming.” In fact, Holly Ramos had basically pulled an Orson Welles a few years later by writing, producing and starring in a short film in 2004 called The 100 Lovers of Jesus Reynolds; this film was also directed by Ilya Chaiken. For many years, the entry for this film on my website was at the top of the alphabetical list in the index that I at length completed around the middle of last year. There are three entries ahead of it now. I really should try to track down the indie films that Holly Ramos has been in; perhaps it is not an impossible mission. * * * Fur was a relatively early CD purchase by me many years before I described it in my Under Appreciated Rock Band post. As a matter of fact, in my mind Fur was always one of the example bands of the kind that I wanted to talk about in this series of posts: unknown or little known bands creating music that is not like anyone else’s. I would not be at all surprised if I had not owned this CD 12 or 15 years before I finally wrote about in June 2013; the release date on the CD is 1995. I have expounded on this band extensively on the UARB post that is now shown in my website. Fur is a roughcut masterpiece that wears its seams proudly; and someone who knows a lot more about it than I do could probably tell when a particular button or slide was struck on the sound mixing board when the CD was being compiled. It is as though Holly Ramos and the other bandmembers in Fur boiled down the essence of what a punk rock band is all about when they recorded their album. Most people who are not fans probably imagine that the punk rock milieu is a very narrow spectrum of music; when actually, punk rock covers the range of popular music amazingly well – for example, I have many albums in my collection that are in the “cowpunk” subgenre, that is, punk stylings applied to country music. As I said when I put up the post in 2013, the lyrics in the songs by Fur are conversational, like something that you might overhear at a bar. Fur did not even bother to rhyme the lyrics as best I remember. They just sang them the way they felt them. I have probably played the Fur CD 50 times at least. I could probably play the CD another 50 times, and never even begin to tire of hearing it. * * * I am embarrassed to say how long it took me to order Holly Ramos’s debut solo CD Racehorse (2006). But I will never forget to my dying day the quote that I gave from the review of the album by Gisèle Grignon in my original UARB post (“strangulation-worthy overuse” – now that is a great turn of phrase!): “[Holly] Ramos’s voice, in all its glorious originality, cunningly textured lyrics, and irresistible magnetism is, (and if anyone out there is actually keeping track, I apologize for my by-now strangulation-worthy overuse of the following word) refreshing. It’s so unlike anything else out there today, that you will be forgiven for initially considering switching the channel or flipping through your musical options for something familiar, safe and Ovaltine comfy cozy.’” But I have it now, and much as was true of the Fur CD, I fell in love with the album on its first spin. The above quote is a perfect description of Racehorse. The same conversational tone that is present on the Fur album is here as well, along with charming vocal flourishes that will be familiar to Fur fans. I have little doubt that I will rack up dozens of spins on this album as well – I’ve probably logged my first dozen plays already. The love song that opens the CD, “Thinking About You” is from a woman unable to go through her daily routine, so enchanted is she with her beau: “I’m watching TV with dirty hair now / And thinking about you / Not doing my wash or washing dishes / Just thinking about you / It’s hard to get up / I keep calling that same old takeout menu / I’m eating with my eyes closed, lying in my bed / And thinking about you”. A few verses in, a rock band joins in, and the punk edge that is in the background throughout the album becomes evident. The lyrics are sometimes stretched and other times slightly rushed, but Holly Ramos handles this easily without missing a beat. As with Fur, there is one cover on the Racehorse album, a Ray Davies song that I was not previously familiar with called “Art Lover”, taken from the 1981 album by the Kinks, Give the People What They Want. The lines in this song if sung by a man would be more than a little unsettling, but the way Holly Ramos performs them (with no gender changes), they are merely quizzical: “Jogging in the park is my excuse / To look at all the little girls / I’m not a flasher in a rain coat / I’m not a dirty old man / I’m not gonna snatch you from your mother / I’m an art lover / Come to daddy.” The other songs are written or at least co-written by Holly Ramos (there are no credits given in my copy of the CD), but some are echoes of other well-known songs: “Coal Miner’s Lullaby” has almost the same name as the Loretta Lynn classic “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, and “This Bird Has Flown” lifts the parenthetical phrase from the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. In this case, the song is about a real bird (as used in the Beatles song, “bird” is British slang for an attractive girl or woman): “One day I found a bird on my way / so one time I thought I’d make him mine / No longer wild but tame / I gave that bird a name / A dark night that bird would sing instead of fly / A sad song / I left the cage open now he’s gone / It came as no surprise / When I opened up my eyes / That this bird has flown.” How exactly Holly Ramos performs her songs in such a compelling and heartfelt manner is difficult to understand, when the same kind of performance could just as easily be a snoozefest of the sort that is endured in an airport hotel lounge. Racehorse is not exactly an acoustical album, but the arrangements are unadorned in a manner that is scarcely ever encountered in the 21st Century when even understated arrangements are glaringly insistent. I’m sure hoping more albums from Holly Ramos will come my way. * * * These annual posts normally summarize what I have written about in the past year, but in this case, there has only been one of them; and even that one is dated December 2017. But it is a good one, one of my best I think; Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records gave me some really nice compliments on it. I had been writing about the Stooges and Iggy Pop over several previous posts, and I undertook a detailed examination of the long series of CD’s and LP’s of unreleased Stooges material called The Iguana Chronicles. I also took the opportunity of writing up descriptions of many early releases by Bomp! Records, as well as other peripheral info as I usually do. The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, the Iguanas; once again, as with past UARB the Rip Chords (who had a big surf rock hit in 1964, “Hey Little Cobra”), I started my UARB post on the Iguanas during the month before someone finally wrote a Wikipedia article on the band. As I said before in one of my recent posts, I don’t think I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being among the UARB’s. * * * When I first started loading up individual webpages in my website on the bands and albums and songs that I had written about in my Facebook posts, I began to wonder if I would ever finish that massive undertaking – ultimately, it amounted to more than 10,000 webpages. I was keeping an eye on the gap between the current Facebook post and the one that I just finished putting into the website, and it seemed to be holding steady at about 2½ years. In other words, setting up the web pages was taking about as long as I spent to write up the post in the first place. At length, I got to the more recent posts that were made on a quarterly rather than a monthly basis; and I finally started to narrow that gap. I got encouraged and pressed hard to wrap that up. I now have everything sorted out and indexed and laid out on the website, as of sometime in the middle of last year. * * * Sometime in there, I got wind of a new version of Google Sites that was coming out. “Classic” Google Sites that I had been using for the website all along was going to be phased out, and “New” Google Sites was coming in to replace it. Over the years, I had noticed little improvements and odd idiosyncrasies in Google Sites, until ultimately, there was a top-notch text editor available. It has color capability (I am using a half dozen colors regularly in these posts), “curly” quotes ( “ ” and ‘ ’ instead of " " and ' ' ), a lot of nice looking fonts with ‘Bold’ and ‘Italics’ buttons, 5 or 6 font sizes, indenting, left / center / right justification, links between the web pages – pretty much everything that I could ever think of using. From the little tidbits I saw online, I knew that the change from Classic to New Google Sites could not possibly be good news, so I put off checking it out directly. The links between the webpages is what I most worried about, particularly since I had nine different websites on Google Sites. They all “talked” to each other just fine now, but on New Google Sites, who knows? Early on, only two of them had a button that allowed conversion to New Google Sites; finally, all nine of them got the big button, so I guess it was at least feasible. Finally, I decided to set up a New Google Sites. My earliest website didn’t convert on the first try, so I tried the newest one, and it went through okay. As it turned out, the links were fine, and the fact that everything was spread out over nine websites was evidently not going to be a problem either. But all of the features of the text editor vanished – all of the color, all of the indenting, pretty much everything. In short, all of the copy on webpages in New Google Sites looks the same. That is never going to work for me, and I am not going to settle for that under any circumstances. Eventually, I will have to find a new home for my website; but meanwhile, Classic Google Sites is a great set-up that I am going to use until it goes away. Right now, I am making a pass through all of the webpages, one by one; so that they will have the same features and the same colors and the same links. One of the most time-consuming aspects is putting in the curly quotes everywhere; they were probably in less than 20% of the webpages before, and in hardly any of the Wikipedia excerpts at the beginning of most of the webpages. Mostly I am using the [ALT] key plus four number keys to put them in. The left quote – “ – for instance is [ALT]-0147, which are all of the left hand keys in a row. This isn’t just a vanity thing; having two kinds of apostrophes also throws off the alphabetizing in the index. In order to make sure I catch them all, I figured that the best way was to do them alphabetically. So far I have gotten into the F’s; I have only been doing this since mid-August, so that’s not bad for well under six months. This includes all of the extensive writing on Allmusic, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. I am trying to get through it as fast as I can (having retired as of the first of the year will definitely help), not only because I have an as yet unspecified deadline before Classic Google Sites goes away, but also because I doubt that I will ever find a text editor that works as well and has as many features as this one. I doubt that I will get much new writing about music done, but I have other priorities now. |
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