Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song performed by Los Lobos
Written by David Hidalgo and Louis Perez

I cannot think of another Eighties rock group that started out with such an amazing string of recordings as Los Lobos. (They continue to produce amazing music, but those first albums touched my life.) I had heard about the EP, …And A Time To Dance, and even managed to hear some of it on the radio. As a side note, I can only say that radio stations were different in those days. Then, I bought How Will The Wolf Survive, their first full-length album and played it over and over again until, well, now. Don’t Worry Baby is one of the great opening tracks that gets your heart moving from the get-go while giving notice that the band knows where music has been and can help it move into the future. Multiple lead singers, ever-changing instrumentation, masterful arranging, and style-hopping to keep the ears engaged made them seem like the second-coming of the English invasion of the sixties, only updated to the times- sort of like what Prince was doing in his world. Of course, they presaged no such thing. Being Los Lobos then or now is not easy.

Back to the music- Will the Wolf Survive?, the final track on the album, was the perfect stunner to close out the proceedings. Before that, the ballads and dance tunes and rockers merely declared that these guys had a future.

By The Light Of The Moon was not as adored by the critics, as its predecessor had been named album of the year by many. Listening to it then and now, I have to wonder what they were missing. Set Me Free (Rosa Lee), Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes, and One Time One Night are great. All right, the first album was a mind blower, and this was simply grand.

Now might be the time to mention that Los Lobos also put on fantastic concerts. They are surely in the running for the greatest band ever to grace the planet. Outside or inside, they demand that you dance, polka and corrida, before they kick out the jams. If you’re lucky, they might even cover some Neil Young for you.

After the second album, Los Lobos appeared on the La Bamba soundtrack, which seems to be what most people recall. They followed that with La Pistola y El Corazon which covered more traditional songs with folk arrangements. The next album was The Neighborhood. While all the others before it remain on my playlist, The Neighborhood is simply indispensable to me- yes, this is one of my desert island discs. Deep Dark Hole has probably saved my life. Emily is arguably the greatest song for driving home. They brought in John Hiatt (never a mistake) for Down on the Riverbed. Not to shortchange the rest of the songs because the only thing that they do is remind why art and music allows me to be a human being.

So, here’s the other thing that I think about sometimes. I was this incredibly pale-skinned kid in southern Ohio that found so much wisdom and peace and beauty in the work of these older Chicano guys from Southern California. How else does that happen except through brilliant, open-hearted art and mass media?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 275 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Located in Cooperstown, New York

We all know architecture can be art, though we are just as likely to argue for practical use ahead of beauty. Art museums perhaps have the most asked of them in that we expect art when we are outside the edifice, but still expect a pleasing experience navigating the collection. You could argue that art museums have it a bit easier once you pass through their portal because the collection will inspire and seduce you. What though of a museum whose collection is not explicitly art?

Cooperstown is a lovely Finger Lakes town with a downtown dominated by baseball, as the museum draws a lot of visitors year round despite being fairly far from major population centers. The museum is attractive enough from the outside, but something unexpected happens inside.

I will leave a discussion of the art involved in the act of sport for another time, but I feel comfortable saying that Ty Cobb’s bat is an object of historical interest (specialized at that) and not particularly artistic in and of itself (let the collegial debating begin). So, the museum must work harder for an aesthetic experience.

Allow me to digress. I cannot deny that baseball is intrinsically American and that the museum does little to place the sport in any sort of global context (with the exception of nods to Canada, Japan, and Latin America). So, the emotional pull of the collection probably does not carry over to those without a predisposition to be moved by the sight of Roy Campanella’s glove. If you fall into this category, then the museum is not going to work its magic in quite the same way, but the Jackie Robinson display ought to move anyone, just as his life transcended the sport. Of course, you are welcome to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or Tennis or, even, the Ham Museum, if that floats your boat.

Whatever the subject of your museum, the curators always aim to tell a story. In large, multi-subject palaces, the story is broken down into distinct galleries and those don’t always carry over from one to another. Like that display of Edvard Munch drawings next to the Medieval Icons… all right I could see someone making sense of that…

The Baseball Hall of Fame takes you through the history of the game with diversions into cultural history that place the game in the world that it traverses. Sure, the Ken Burns documentary on baseball was lovely, but the actual holy relics of the sport somehow carry a power that cannot be denied. These institutions always save the plaques for last. After you walk by Babe Ruth’s locker (and consider how many youngsters would have given their back teeth to stand where you are), you enter the holy sanctuary where the names and accomplishments of the elect line the walls.

If the museum does it right, the experience is akin to walking the labyrinth in one of the great churches. Maybe it is better than that.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 276 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Book written by Tim Powers

Great work is done in genre writing all the time (mystery, horror, science fiction, fantasy, etc.), but we still act surprised and authors sometimes chafe against the definitions applied to their work. Depending on your point of view, bookstores and readers use genres simply to keep all those books in some sort of searchable order or they do it to marginalize the stuff that is not literature. Unfortunately for those who do not wish to widen their horizons, brilliant writing is happening everywhere. Tim Powers can be found in the science fiction and fantasy section more often than not though his books qualify as magic realism, too. (Let’s not travel down the path of urban fantasy, let alone arguing about whether or not magic realism is fantasy.)

If the name sounds familiar, his pirate novel, On Stranger Tides, was optioned by Disney for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film. The end result bore minimal resemblance to the book, to a degree that I cannot recall any other movie based on a book ever has. The story would have made a fantastic movie, though it would never have had the same success as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The powers that be in Hollywoodland bought the cover and gutted the pages. Powers has never publicly complained and always been gracious that they bothered to pay him in the first place. He may have a point. Read any of his novels and you may find yourself longing for a true cinematic adaptation until you realize that nothing could ever compare to the visuals that have been playing on that big screen in your head.

Powers’ stories, even the historical ones, take place in our world with just a thing or two gone odd. As the story progresses, the abstraction from our reality may grow, but the characters and the world that they live in never goes too far into unfamiliarity. Layered into all this are fantastic tales of espionage and action adventure, spiced with something special that makes the imagined world just a bit appealing, like the beer in Drawing of the Dark. There are horrors in these tales, but often no darker than our bones already know about.

Declare is my favorite, but it is hard not to love a story about a Djinn wrapped in a John le Carre story alluding to famous traitors of the sixties. While I try to entice you with these elements, I neglect the clarity of writing that allows the unbelievable to coexist with the concrete. Most of Powers books are heavy and the reader enters expecting a brain dump of world building and explication. Yet, Powers is a master of easing the reader into the fun-house mirror reflection of our world. His books are a lesson in the importance of character above all else. I remember the internal struggles of his protagonists as much as the arcane images conjured by his words. Perhaps that is the real miracle here- when characters are transformed by the plot, then the story really does take us on a journey that illustrates the way life transforms all of us.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 277 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.