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Last night Candyce and I went to see the Phoenix Symphony with conductor Lawrence Golan at the Mesa Arts Center. They performed “A Musical Love Story”, which narrates the progression of a romantic relationship. If you want a good afternoon of music, make the playlist:

1. Prelude, from Holberg Suite, Opus 40 by Edvard Grieg
2. Largo, from Concerto in D major for Two Violins, BWV1043 by Johann Sebastian Bach
3. Allegretto, from Palladio by Karl Jenkins
4. Adagietto, from Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler
5. Canon by Johann Pachelbel
6. Serenade for Strings, Opus 1 by Samuel Barber
7. Serenade for Strings in C major, Opus 48 by Tchaikovsky

I don’t think you find anything more inspiring and enriching than tickets for two to the symphony. Which affirms my belief that….

Your City is Not Boring. You are boring.

I am tired of meeting young adults who complain about their city. I can understand why teenagers whine that there’s “nothing to do here” because a lot of them don’t have a car or enough money to explore their city. But once you’ve graduated from the dramas of high school, there’s nothing keeping your from enjoying your city but your own laziness. There are a thousand things to do today, you just have to get off your ass and get out there.

I am beginning to see that these “young adult whiners” do not age very well. Soon they’ll be just an “adult whiner” sliding to the Middle. Tomorrow, they’ll be the adults that the new young people come to ignore.

Thoughts on Popular Music

Let’s talk about pop music. This is a difficult subject to bring up, because it’s hard to say only a few words and be done with it. That’s why there are dozens of music magazines that have something new to write about every month of every year. In the interest of time, I will write two paragraphs:

The problem we have today is that the overwhelming majority of new music is created for and marketed exclusively to young people. That’s why the most successful bands, rappers, and entertainers come pre-packaged with an image–or even better–a lifestyle. Teens grab onto these lifestyles because gives them an identity in a time in their life where they don’t know how to be cool.

Can anything so shallow be of any lasting worth? Last night we enjoyed music that was written over the course of the last three centuries. Will any music be written in my generation that is worth passing onto the next generation?

First of all, congrats to the New York Giants for beating the unbeatable New England Patriots. I almost feel bad for Tom Brady, but not really…

Tom Brady’s name is already chiseled in the NFL record books, with or without an undefeated season credited to his arm. The Hall of Fame will reveal he’s already directed three Super Bowl victories before he turned 30. But if Brady wants to become a real NFL war hero, he needs a enemy. Nothing could add more drama than a pair of gun slinging brothers: Eli Manning and Payton Manning. Sports writers and historians are going to have a lot of fun writing this story over and over again.

Payton looks to Eli in the stands and chuckles at his chance to fulfill their childhood fantasy of clubbing Terry Bradshaw in the head with a trophy.

Second, the world should know that the NFL played tricks with the cameras last night. As the game was beginning, they showed an aerial shot of the setting sun igniting the sky behind the distant mountains west of Phoenix. My pride in our city’s natural beauty was interrupted by reality: I looked out the window and saw the sun low in the sky peaking through the clouds, but it was no where near the horizon. We had another hour or so before the sun would set. If anything, the sun would set first in our part of town, even if by just a few seconds.

I pointed out this inconsistency to the crowd in the room. Neil explained that it was cloudy, and maybe it messed with the cameras on the blimp or something. Soon it was time to watch the game, and we all forgot about it. We continued eating nachos.

Then later in the 2nd quarter we had a second aerial shot of the stadium, except this time the stadium was a beacon of light in the dark of the night. I looked out the window, and the street lights hadn’t even flickered on yet. What’s the deal? The consensus in the room was that the NFL grabbed the sunset and city light shots on Saturday night. My guess was that the NFL sped-up the setting sun to make the fans in New York and Boston feel less disoriented by spinning earth. They needed to know that their boys were close to home.

I know that people will act like they already knew that camera crews mess with the space-time-continuum all the time, but who really knows that? The facts of Fox’s “creative editing” of the Super Bowl footage is as new to me as it is to everyone else.

On a final note, this game will complicate the politics at the ESPN office. Their headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, is 2 hours and 10 minutes from both New York City and Boston. I expect that it’ll be an intense day at the office.

The Super Bowl is tomorrow and it’s here in Arizona. There’s so much hype and excitement in the city it’s hard to avoid. I’ve flown quite a bit in the past several months, and the airport shops in Phoenix Sky Harbor are loaded with Super Bowl merchandise. Although I was a little confused at first, I’m excited about the unconventional colors used in the logo. I mean really: red, turquoise, and blue?

Let’s try to figure out what they’re going for here. The red looks like “Sedona red” that dominates the Diamond Backs new uniforms that came out last season. Before they upgraded their uniforms, the Diamondbacks’ were covered with turquoise, copper, black and purple since the team started in 1995.

Teal and purple were vaguely fashionable in 1995, but I suspect that the primary reason they were chosen is because they’re Arizona colors. Really, when you think of it, it’s rare that a state in the US has loyalty to colors that doesn’t already stem from their big universities. It’s because Arizona is a geological freak show that makes for good postcards.

Exhibit A: The Arizona Dbacks Debuted Sedona Red last season.

Here’s a summary of our indigenous colors:

1. Earth Tones because there’s a lot of earth here.
2. Copper because you’ll find it in the earth.
3. Turquoise because you’ll find it in the earth.
4. Purple because it pairs well with turquoise and teal since the early 1990s. It’s an adopted color that the state loves like it’s own.
5. Red because of the rock formations through the state, especially in Sedona and the Grand Canyon.
6. Oranges because we grow a lot of citrus, and the sun is pretty bright here.

So I’m guessing that the designer of the Super Bowl logo picked from this list (#3 and #5) and then threw in the spots of blue to make merchandise easier to sell to NFL fans.

This afternoon Danny and I found snowshoes in the closet, so we strapped them on and ventured out of the cabin. After about 20 minutes, we had worked up a sweat and the sun was warming up. I lifted my hoody off back and stood there shirtless for about 10 seconds. It felt so good that I tied it around my waist. Danny did the same. We spent the next 45 minutes scooting across the snow-covered valley like a bunch of bareback freaks.

Kevin spotted us from the cabin’s front porch, and he decided he wanted to get in on the fun. Danny went inside and Kevin joined me for a second trip. We explored the building sites for new cabins near the base of the mountain. We rounded the frozen lake and jumped over frozen creeks. We discovered tracks and crap from elk and deer. It was quite an afternoon of adventure.

Last night I had a dream that all adults were required to take the SAT again. The problem was that none of the test questions were visible on the page. The pages kept changing colors and sizes, so every time I looked back to the sheet of questions, it looked nothing like it did before. Plus, there were random items that ended up on my desk, objects that apparently related to this new exciting version of the SAT. There were 3 black socks, an avocado, and a photo of Ralph Machio from The Karate Kid.

There was a professor in the room who paced back and forth with excitement as I sat there trying to figure out what to do with my avocado. Some grownups started chatting away in the corner about how ridiculous this whole ordeal was, and they were violently yanked from their desks and dragged out of the testing room by police officers.

I was so happy when I woke up to realize I’m actually here in the White Mountains of Eastern Arizona. I’m a grown man who’s married and spending a weekend with his homies. I peeked through the blinds to see that the sun was getting ready to rise, so I scrambled downstairs to see if I could see some wildlife in the early morning. I got hooked on looking for wildlife in the early morning last summer at Yosemite when I was rewarded with bobcat, a coyote, and a bunch of deer. I never knew it was so much to be the star in my own Discovery Channel TV show.

So I fumbled down the stairs to catch the show. I built a fire in the fireplace and made some coffee so my homies will l have something fun to wake up to. Now I’m here typing because I think it’s too damn cold out there even for the animals. They still lounging in their animal houses up in the woods. There’s about ten inches of snow on the ground outside, and the snow drifts on the front porch are two feet deep. It’s fun looking at the snow, but it’s like staring at the same painting for an hour. You just get bored.

:::

High Mountain Rangers

1988 was a good year for me. I was nine years old and my family took a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to hang out at the beach while staying in a free weekend at a “timeshare”. (Dad described it to me like this: We get to stay here for free as long as me and Mom sit in a three hour meeting where they try to get us to buy this place.) I remember thinking those people were dumb because they obviously didn’t know we were broke. We couldn’t even buy pop tarts, much less a “combo” by the beach.

I was thrilled because we were at the beach and there would be skateboarders there like me, but I was strung out with joy because our condo was on the 10th floor of the building. I’d never stayed in a place that high off the ground before.

The adventures just kept coming. That night Katie, Kristie, and I got to explore all of the TV channels that beach people got to watch, and we came across a show called The High Mountain Rangers. The plot was pretty simple: a dad and his two sons are part of a rescue crew that saves the lives of dumb tourists lost in the snowy mountains. Check out the Show intro High Mountain Rangers on YouTube.

This show made me feel pretty cool because I lived in the mountains too and I was always in the woods. And although I was only 9 and wasn’t officially dating anyone, I liked the idea that I was a rough mountain man that was misunderstood by the pretty city girls. This was my kind of show.We got back to the mountains, I looked for the show for about a month with no luck. In college, I poked around the Internet hoping I’d find something, and didn’t come up with anything.

I just checkout out Wikipedia and found out the show was canceled after its first season of 12 episodes. No wonder I couldn’t find it on TV! It’s a shame too… You know, I might be the biggest fan that show ever had. If I had more time on my hands, I’d start an ironic High Mountain Rangers fan club online.

Over the course of writing this, it’s gone from “kinda dark” outside to a bright bright morning. The snow is a big mirror to reflect the rays of the sun, and this cabin is so bright inside I can barely see the computer monitor because of the reflections. I should point out that although it’s cold outside, my bare toes are warm right now. Radiant floor heating is the best thing in the world. By the way, I still haven’t seen a wild animal outside.