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rediscovering Rick Springfield
Sunday, April 30 2017
After stopping at Home Depot for yet more (mostly electrical) supplies, I returned to the Brewster Street house to continue installing the washer and dryer. The bulk of this work was for installing the dryer's 240 volt outlet, though I also had to tap into an electrical box to produce a 120 volt outlet for the washing machine, as well as an overhead light (switched by a pullstring) so someone operating the equipment could see what they were doing. Just to get back to that dark corner of the basement required one additional light, which I provided in the form of a cheap motion-activated light plugged into the only duplex outlet in the basement (adjacent to the circuit breaker box, which happens to be near the bottom of the stairs). The whole time I worked, the dogs were languishing in the Subaru. The day was overcast and much cooler than it had been yesterday, making it ideal weather for a dog to be in a car. Still, I felt bad, at some point I let them run in the big (though incompletely-fenced) yard behind the house. Ramona immediately became fixated on a grey squirrel that was safely in the yard's tree of heaven (and then leaped to another tree, which I recall being some sort of maple).
By 4pm, I had the appliances installed and all the pipes, ducts, and wires hooked up. And Ramona had found half a bag of lime potato chips in the Subaru's way back and devoured them all. As I often say these days, she was very, "poorly-behaved." But in an endearing sort of way.
Back at the house, I took a bath, smoked pot, drank booze, and later watched Wet Hot American Summer, a movie Ca and Dan had been making cultural references to in my remote workplace. If they liked it, chances are that I would too. I wouldn't say it's a great movie, but it has some great moments (such as when there happens to be a Dungeons & Dragons geek present when a physicist determines that the thing necessary to save the world is a random number generator capable of generating random numbers between 1 and 20). It's a movie that tries to channel late-70s summer-camp nostalgia, something occasionally often best accomplished with musical choices. The most amusing thing about the movie was that the camp counselors always serve as the interesting wacko characters, while the children are unusually empathetic and warm-hearted. One thread in the movie features a counselor breaking down in front of her young charges, who then shown in the role as a multi-person therapist saying all the right things and doing what they can to put the counselor's psyche back together. But there are also a fair number of off-putting mood changes in Wet Hot American Summer, beginning with the time a bunch of campers ride into town and for some reason immediately turn into junkies.
In terms of music, Wet Hot American Summer is amazing. It reintroduced me to a bunch of music that was played incessantly on the radio of my youth but has not been played since (not even on radio stations dedicated to saccharine nostalgia). This means that various time capsules in my brain were opened by music I might not have heard at all since the early 1980s. Rick Springfield seems to be one of the most hastily-forgotten of early-80s musicians. I mostly hated his songs when I was a kid, but when I heard "Love is Alright Tonight" during Wet Hot American Summer's inexplicable junkie scene, I was like, "oh yeah, that song, was that some awesome late-70s one-hit wonder?" And then it turned out to be Rick Springfield. This sent me on a YouTube safari of other Rick Sprinfield songs, several of which I probably have not heard at all since 1983. These included "Affair of the Heart" (very forgettable and very early-80s), "Love Somebody," and "What Kind of Fool am I?" an incredibly cheeseball song whose only standout moment is a brief religious quandry, "But the gods or whatever make the world go 'round..."
Ramona on our morning walk on the Stick Trail with fern fiddleheads. (Click to enlarge.)
Neville on our morning walk on the Stick Trail with Houstonia serpyllifolia. (Click to enlarge.)
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