Dedicated

 

Having a Spotify subscription is sort of like getting a treasure map of music gold. And so it was that I rediscovered the remarkable vocal trio Wilson Phillips and their 2012 album “Dedicated.”

It’s over 25 years now that Sarah was starting high school and we were taking March Breaks in Arizona. Back then the “girl group”  composed of the daughters of Brian Wilson / John and Michelle Phillips were all over the FM top 40 stations in Phoenix and Tucson. Their debut album was the biggest ever by a female trio – bigger than the Supremes if you can believe it. Then they were gone from the charts as soon as they arrived it seems.

Flash forward to 2012 and these “girls” were now working moms in their 40s. They had reunited off and on since 1992 – and to mark 20+ years of collaboration decided to put together a tribute album to the music of their parents. They chose some of the great hits of their parents’ respective 60s groups, plus some more obscure songs they personally loved. It was more than a collection of covers – despite the fact that one song is a cover of a cover of a cover. No indeed; this was the music of their lives.

They have given these classic Beach Boys and Mamas and Papas songs their own personal touch, They pay homage to the original arrangements but don’t ever try to duplicate them – how could they? The tour de force on the album is the a capella version of Wilson’s masterpiece “Good Vibrations,” where vocal harmonies take the place of that signature theramin riff. Carney Wilson does a pretty good Mike Love impression too.

The result is quite wonderful – so good I hope to convince my son-in-law to play it for the grandkids (who are real oldies fans.) It’s time they got an education on the music grandpa loved back when – by a group their mother liked. How else to learn the history of Rock and Pop?

 

Impulse Purchase?

 

 

I read an article today about how Costco Canada was getting lots of sales through impulse purchases – like an instant massager – no, NOT instant messenger, instant massager.

That seemed rather weird to me. I mean, who wants to look for serendipity in a place where random shoppers conspire to block the aisles and play bumper cars with your cart, where you have to run the gauntlet of Zamboni-like floor sweepers and folks hawking all sorts of free food samples, where they move the kitty litter around the store every week or so, where you just want to buy your massive jar of dill pickles and get the heck out to the jammed parking lot?

I am the king of the non-impulse purchase anyway. Just give me a grocery list, send me out and I’ll get everything on that list and nothing else.

However upon reflection I have to admit that a couple of times I did make an impulse purchase in Costco. These were IT items:

  • My old D-Link router was obsolete and not giving a good signal in remote parts of the house. Costco had an excellent price on a new D-Link N router that actually targets the wifi adapter wherever it is located. That router has given excellent service and is delivering the signal I need to type this post.
  • I was in the market for a better monitor for my desktop – the old one had washed out color and was hard to read. Again Costco featured a really nice LG IPS monitor at about $50 less than I had seen it anywhere else. Voila!

So I went into the store not expecting to buy but did. Now I suppose you could argue I might have got something similar at Best Buy or Amazon, but the fact remains that Costco was in the right place at the right time. Be that as it may I am not about to go on a treasure hunt in Costco anytime soon for a set of steak knives or a Ronco slicer/dicer. No way.

The article also mentioned that Costco has tapped into some other basic consumer fears/motivations like scarcity, possible discontinuation of items, choice but not too much choice, the fact you have to pay to play. They treat their employees well and it shows when you check out.

But it’s still not the sort of place I’d visit for the sheer joy(?) of discovering that special item.

Nostalgia

 

 

I’ve been taking film and digital photos for close to 50 years now. I got started with a relatively primitive Yashica 35 mm rangefinder back in 1970. For about 15 years I concentrated my photography on slide film – which meant I needed a screen and projector to view my handiwork.

I later converted to color print film and most of the next 20 years are documented that way in photo albums. I was a late convert to digital photography and only threw in the towel on film around 2007.

Most of that reluctance to go digital was nostalgia I admit. Even when I got my first real high quality autofocus camera in 2002 I stuck with film. I have a fine Nikon F80 film camera setup now gathering dust in the closet as a result. The lenses can be used after a fashion on a modern DSLR but the camera body is toast for all practical purposes.

Consider the above photo taken in 1981 with the Yashica. Actually by then my technique had improved a lot and the lighting was good at the Tower of London that day, so the old 35mm camera did an OK job. In bright light I often got out of focus pics – never knew why – maybe just a bad photographer.

Sadly, film had other disadvantages that nostalgia cannot deny:

  • Loading and unloading even with cartridges could be fraught with danger. I had more than one film ruined by sloppy handling.
  • You only got a few chances to make a good image. You had only 36 shots with a cartridge of 35 mm color slide film or 24 with prints, so you needed to be perfect every time. I never was.
  • Film could and did get expensive over the years.
  • Color slide film was slow, did not have a lot of contrast to begin with and it tends to fade as it ages.
  • Color prints are difficult to store if you have a lot of them. Trust me.
  • You have to figure out some way to scan and digitize film if you want to display them today or post them on the internet. That goes for both slides and photo prints.

Above is one of the last color slides I took back in 1985. You can see some of the problems here even though by this time I had a quality manual focus Nikon FE camera and some mid-grade lenses for it. Contrast is a definite problem with a black steam tractor silhouetted against a bright sky. The sky is “blown out” even after white balance correction on the slide scan.

 

Here is a color print from 2003 taken in Italy. Not a bad scan, although I was at the mercy of the print provider to get the color right and then I could make a scan with the result. This was with a high quality Nikon camera body and Nikon lenses. so about as good as you can get with film.

Shortly after this I started to dip my toe into digital photography and either my technique got better or the digital cameras did. Either way I am I am much happier with the results.

Digital photography has advantages nostalgia cannot overcome:

  • Once you buy the camera, images are limitless and essentially cost zero. Take as many as you want.
  • You transfer your pics directly to the computer or the Internet.
  • The camera gives you much better contrast and huge ranges of film speed. Autofocus takes your bad vision out of the picture.

Here’s an example of what a Panasonic Lumix camera the size of a deck of cards can do. Taken in November at La-Seyne-sur-Mer, France. No blown out sky here on a dazzlingly sunny day. Easy to transfer and post.

At first when I went out to photograph my life, all I had was a smallish rangefinder camera and some packs of film. By the time I got to Italy in 2003, I had a camera body, 4 lenses, flash and even more film. Today I have the Lumix and that’s it. I have come full circle and I don’t feel nostalgic at all.

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