Ba Ba Ba-Bamp!

On the way to the botanical gardens, I was listening to 87.7 FM, this new and (to me) mysterious Cleveland radio station that has cropped up recently to please the Gen-X listener. It is like an oldies station for my people, which is disturbing if you give yourself any time to think about it. [If you know anything about this station, please tell me about it. I find it so odd.]

"I Wanna Be Sedated" came on and I sang along with the radio turned up while the kids played with the Kindle in the backseat, and I was struck by the open joy of Joey Ramone's voice on that track, and I thought for the millionth time about how Joey Ramone is a beautiful chip of the divine, all dressed up in ripped jeans and black leather.

Yesterday Stiv Bator. Today Joey, and some very young Beasties.

I first saw the Ramones at Mem Aud in Athens in 1985, when I was 14. I was in the pit or perched on the back of the front row of seats. I had black hair. Here is what somebody said in an article about Mem Aud:

"As one of the auditorium's cadre of student ushers, David Snow, BS '85, was driven batty by the crowd during a 1985 concert by the Ramones, a punk-rock band.
'Everybody ran down toward the stage and started dancing, and it was so loud you couldn't hear yourself think," he says. "We were sent down to get people to go back to their seats. I grabbed one guy and shouted at him, but he just looked at me like I had something growing out of my head. I gave up.'"

Saw them again 10 years later at Nautica in Cleveland, and felt very, terribly old. In the intervening decade, I had lived in NYC for 7 years, where I never saw the Ramones, but I did listen to Vin Scelsa's Sunday night Idiot's Delight as much as I could. He would often interview Joey, who would call in from wherever he was in the world. They were quite a pair. And once in a while, there be a live performance. Like this rare piece of acoustic ephemera:

Thanks, universe, for letting us have Joey Ramone. Very shiny, indeed.

Reading: 

Women and Ghosts and a little bit of Bird by Bird, oh and a shiny copy of O magazine in the lunchroom, promising me all perfection in the new year.

Writing: 

Revising the real guts, wishing for more time.

Dinner: 

Tofu and mushroom teriyaki (using the fabulous housemade teriyaki sauce from Flying Cranes, also their hand-toasted black sesame seeds) with a cucumber ribbons salad in sweet vinegar-soy-sesame.

Soundtrack: 

Duh.

Random thing:

I love, love, love that ZandO do not take themselves too seriously to ride the little garden holiday "train" at the botanical gardens right now. Last night they rode it twice, once with me and once with David when he showed up.