personality insight

A cold is a cold, and calling it "low-grade" didn't make recovery any quicker. Recovery from that cold wiped out three ride days last week. Not a bad thing really; that day I went out and abandoned almost immediately was actually unpleasantly chilly from wind and radiant cold despite air temperatures in the 70s. All three days were like that. Three days of 20-mile rides would've added up to 60 miles, giving me a total of 180 miles for the month, leaving only one more ride to hit 200 miles for the month; a loose goal, totally unnecessary, that had looked easily attainable. Without those three days, not so much.

Come this week, I gave Monday one last day of recovery for good measure and the last three days of the month were forecast to be in the high 70s and sunny. Days I would regret if I didn't take my bike out. It occurred to me if I did 25 mile rides, I could break the (totally unnecessary) 200 mile mark. And so it was, no longer sick but still coughing. 25 miles the first day, 26 the second and I only needed 20 miles the third day. What a difference between 20 and 25 miles. It's just 15-20 minutes more, but at my age feels like it's starting to take something out of me. Mind you, 30 miles used to be the minimum of what I considered "a ride". 20 miles will do as a standard outing now, a daily constitutional. It's a quick jaunt and on with my day. Don't even need to shower if it's cool enough.

The "duckhead" is the upper left portion of the ride. If I didn't cross that bridge, it's a perfect outline of a duck head:

26-mile duckhead-Waishuangxi-Maishuai:

I caught a low grade cold on Saturday. Then it got cold, moist and gloomy outside for a few days and I used all that as an excuse to stay home for most part and feel sorry for myself (not really, I love staying home all day, the only problem is going out is my excuse to not drink through the afternoon and dry out, which I do like). The cold peaked Monday (the low grade one, not the weather) and today was recovery with a lingering cough, the kind that feels juicy and satisfying but is still a cough, and some wheezing and fatigue. Tomorrow and the rest of the week is supposed to be mid-60s and up and no rain. Sun, actually. I'm wondering if it's stupid to be planning on doing 20 miles tomorrow. Obviously I'll keep expectations low, I won't "time trial" it like I usually feel like I'm doing, and I'll abandon and come home the moment I feel I can't finish it. Thursday and Friday are definite ride days.

I wonder about how I caught the cold. Maybe I touched some surface with some germs on it and delivered them to a facial orifice? I went to a tonkatsu restaurant on Saturday with plenty of surface areas shared with other people. Leaving and entering my building I touch doors where germs can have been left by neighbors. Should I consider this to be my first social interaction of the year? 'Tis the season to carry a handkerchief to open doors.

<in the end>:
- Wisdom prevailed Wednesday and no ride. If I were still young and stupid, I may have pushed to go in a fit of braggadocio, as the pros call it, but I gauged my fitness and thought of consequences to my throat, to my lungs, to my metabolism and decided better not.
- I got out on my bike Thursday, but with the help of unprecedented construction completely blocking the bike path, forcing a 180 not even 2 miles out, I took that as a sign and abandoned. It would've been a disaster if I tried to do 20 miles. As soon as I started I was figuring out shorter routes using which bridges, 13 miles, 10 miles, 8 miles, . . . 3 miles! The construction said go home now, thou shall not pass! Seriously, when I first came to Taiwan, random construction was practically expected. In the past however many years, though, Taipei had advanced to the point that if there was construction blocking a bikeway, detours would be created or alternate routes posted.
- Friday I took the Thursday hint and I'm staying off bike until full recovery. See? We can still learn even at our ripe old age.

Phil:
Last month I finished re-reading Pete Townshend's autobiography "Who I Am", and I was out near Eslite bookstore with time to spare, so I bought Phil Collins' autobiography "Not Dead Yet". I'm a bit surprised I didn't buy it the first time I saw it more than a little while ago, seeing as Genesis is my fave band of all time and Phil is at the top of the list of my fave drummers. But unfortunately he was more than a great drummer who fronted post-Gabriel Genesis to the heights of success. Solo, he also became an international pop superstar and fronted Genesis to their arguable artistic low of the wildly successful Invisible Touch, which for people like me tainted his legacy. As a fan, it's hard to begrudge him success, but . . . "Sussussudio"? I couldn't listen to any of his solo work after that, aside to see if I might like it. I never did.

Reading about Genesis was a delight, and I read extra slowly during the Gabriel years to savor it. He could've written a book twice as long just covering every detail of his Gabriel-era experience and I still would've read it. I would've bought it right away, too. He gives his view of his role in the 80s as the "it" guy who was everywhere and you couldn't get away from him unless you turned off the radio and never watched MTV. In previous interviews he's said that he basically took every call that came his way because you don't know when the calls would stop coming. I suspect constantly working was also his way of running away from his personal problems, which became a part of his personal problems.

Unlike the vast majority of egomaniacal superstars, Collins was aware of his bad press and that there were quarters that reviled him. Despite his success, he remained characteristically self-deprecating, almost to a fault (like when he dismisses claims that he's a "world great" drummer), which likely kept him grounded and realistic. The stunner is how willing he is to make himself look bad in the name of getting his own truths out. And his failed relationships make him look really bad. He just had some seriously wack relationship mojo, aside from engaging in the typical male rock star behaviors. I've read a bunch of rock star autobiographies and messed up and failed relationships practically come with the territory. But this is the only rock autobiography that was followed by a lawsuit by his first ex-wife for defamation. That's wack mojo! For crying out loud, just let a little old man tell his life story.

I went back looking for articles about that lawsuit, filed in 2016, and from what was reported I hope it was or will be summarily dismissed. Collins doesn't ever say anything defamatory towards his first wife, he just gets facts wrong that were construed to be defamatory. He outright states that the book is just how he remembers it and differs from other people, so personal interpretation of even wrong facts I don't think is actionable. How his first ex-wife feels defamed by a wrong fact doesn't make the wrong fact defamatory. How Phil feels about not being a "world great" drummer doesn't make him not a "world great" drummer by any objective standard.

No doubt there are mistakes of fact in the book. In fact, there is one mistake of fact that can be verified by hundreds of thousands of fans who saw Genesis live in the 80s. He was writing about being a showman in the 80s and making the audience do dumb things (pretty close to his words) in the name of entertainment. Specifically the introduction, he writes, to the song "Domino" when the lights come down. Every Genesis fan knows that "lights coming down" doesn't mean they were dimmed, but that the entire lighting rig is lowered so that the stage, seen from the front, looks to be in letter-box format and the lights are hanging just a few feet above the drum overhead mics, extra vivid because they're less diffuse. It was just a gimmick, I reckon, they did just because the technicians figured out that they could do it. It didn't serve any part of the show; it wasn't a requirement that had to be brainstormed on how to do it. To justify the gimmick, Phil had the audience do dumb things. Only, as the video verifies, the song wasn't "Domino" but "Home By the Sea". I wanted to sue-sue-sue-dio Phil Collins for getting the song wrong.

To geek out a bit, "Second Home By the Sea", which is segued into, has my second favorite note Phil Collins sings. The song is mostly instrumental, but at the end reprises lyrics from "Home By the Sea" including the line "things that go to make up a life". The way he sings "life" the last time in the reprise is totally different from all the times before (with appropriate echo) and to me has always been the song's emotional closure before the actual closing line of the song, "as we relive our lives in what we tell you". (My favorite Phil Collins note is the backing vocal on the chorus of "The Light Dies Down on Broadway". He's just doing "ah"s, but on the third note where I expected the note to go down, back to the first note actually, he goes up to a harmony note and I love it every time I hear it.)

And as long as I'm geeking out, my favorite lyric from "Home By the Sea" is:

Coming out the woodwork, through the open door

Pushing from above and below

Shadows with no substance in the shape of men

Round and down and sideways they go

Adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair

Then as one they sigh and they moan

Needless to say, it was worth the read. My opinion about him is the same. He's still a drum legend and always a thrill to watch, but I'm not going to be getting into his solo catalog beyond what I already have, his first two albums. He does fill in a lot of information that I didn't know, even about Genesis, and his physical struggles that forced him to stop drumming are tragic. He suffered for a career and ambitious drive that was always pushing his own limits as a drummer, vocalist and entertainer, it's no wonder his own body would smack him down like a fly on a windshield.

Pete:
I will re-read Phil's book, possibly right away, but last month was finishing off Pete Townshend's book for the second time. When I look back and think of my favorite rock bands, The Who is faded far off in the background microwave radiation, but it's undeniable they loomed large in my formative years. It was no less than a legacy they left on impressionable young rock and roll minds without our necessarily even knowing it.

Memory is replete with the evidence. Keith Moon's epic drumming is the stuff of legend, figuring out John Entwistle's "My Generation" bass solo, listening to the synthesizer solo on "We Won't Get Fooled Again" loud in the dark, wearing a Who t-shirt in an extant teen birthday photo, writing out Who lyrics on the cover of school-owned textbooks (we had to cover them with brown paper shopping bags and could write all over them as we pleased), even traumatizing my baby cousin later (she told me even later) by telling her 11 people were crushed and killed at a Who concert on her birthday, December 3rd.

It has to sink in now what a towering talent Townshend was. Reading his narrative of what went on, the words "brilliant" and "genius" don't necessarily jump off the page, but coupled with watching past concert and documentary clips on YouTube and having enough files in my iTunes collection for them to come up reliably often on shuffle, there is a sense of who is this god among us? 

It's hard to conceive of why he couldn't get the "Lifehouse" project off the ground after the success of Tommy. It's actually better explained in documentaries by other people who really had no idea how to make Townshend's vision happen. Out of the rubble of "Lifehouse" we got the classic Who's Next album, but it's confounding wondering what he was getting at and what the album could have been above and beyond the multi-platinum, classic, must-hear-before-you-die Who's Next.

I did download the Lifehouse Chronicles, the "Lifehouse" project demos that Townshend ended up releasing in 2000 and it's fascinating, amazing stuff. Not least because versions of almost everything that ended up on Who's Next is included, plus songs that would end up on Who By Numbers and Who Are You, but these are fully formed, high quality demos that he made himself. He is not only among rock's most underrated guitarists (and by no means is he rated low), but an accomplished engineer, and no slouch on bass and drums. I always wondered how Quadrophenia was recorded because there's so much synthesizer on it, played by Townshend, with lots of space between band-playing sections. It wasn't an album where The Who could gather in a studio and play through the songs. How did they do it? It's likely the band worked off Townshend's demos to record their parts.

Both Phil and Pete mention Phil's offer to fill in for Keith Moon after his death, but they tell different stories. It was fun and interesting reading the differences, because of course they have different memories of the fact. That it was an important enough anecdote for both to mention tickled me pink and erased any suspicion that Pete's rejection might have been a diss, and personally I think Phil's version is actually closer to the truth. He was the one putting himself on the line, so it would make sense that he remembered it better, despite not being able to remember the Genesis song where the fucking lights are lowered.

Phil also mentions Eric Clapton enough that I think I'll try reading his book again in the library. I'm not a Clapton fan. I find him overrated and boring for most part and my favorite work of his (the original "Layla" excepted) is as a sideman playing lead guitar on Roger Waters' The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. I tried reading his book before but it was boring going and I swore to myself that if he mentioned going fishing, I was closing the book and putting it back on the shelf. It was totally random, just imagining what is the most boring thing to read about. And then he mentioned going fishing. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf.

The best I can accept of Eric Clapton's purported greatness is Jimmy Page describing him as the greatest ambassador of American blues. That's totally fair. He's a great guitarist, but basically a copycat and interpreter for white people. As for who Jimmy thinks is the greatest of the Yardbird guitarists, he points to Jeff Beck. There's an assumption that Jeff Beck would cite Jimmy Page. Neither would say Eric Clapton.