I posted this over at Integral Option Cafe this morning, but even adult men can enjoy a classic Charlie Brown cartoon.
What would Halloween be without the Linus and the Great Pumpkin, Snoopy's happy dance with a falling leaf, Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown, and on and on.
Somehow, even at 45 years of age, the holidays are empty without the classic Charlie Brown cartoons. I guess I'm nostalgic for the world the Charles Schulz imagined.
In 1985 I turned 18, graduated from high school, flunked out of college, and never told any of my friends that I liked R.E.M. or Joy Division or The Cure - after all, I was a guy and this was not manly music in redneck Southern Oregon. We listened to Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest (how ironic), Motley Crue, and Metallica, now that was manly music. [cough]
It's funny now, 25+ years later, to look back at how desperate I was (and probably most of my male friends were) to be seen as manly. What a load of crap, and yet so many young men still deal with those issues in one way or another - they have to be athletes, or weight lifters, or outdoors men, or whatever the stereotype is that region of America.
In honor of the scared kid I was, here is a full R.E.M. concert filmed in Germany, from 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction tour. In the two encores they play some excellent covers, including The Rolling Stone's "Paint It Black" and Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic" (those two songs could pass as manly tunes in my neck of the woods, just for the record).
Thanks to Open Culture for posting this first. Brought back good memories.
Set List:
Feeling Gravitys Pull
Harborcoat
Sitting Still
Maps And Legends
Fall On Me (original lyrics)
Green Grow The Rushes
Driver 8
Hyena
So. Central Rain
Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
Can't Get There From Here
King Of The Road
Seven Chinese Brothers
Auctioneer (Another Engine)
Old Man Kensey
Little America
Pretty Persuasion
Encore 1:
Theme From Two Steps Onward
Toys In The Attic
See No Evil
Second Guessing
Encore 2:
Ghost Riders In The Sky
(Don't Go Back to) Rockville
We Walk-Falling In Love Again-Behind Closed Doors
Paint It, Black
after rereading Cormac McCarthy and taking a 5 mile run through the River Ranch
Laughter is also a form of prayer —Kierkegaard
Okay then, right here, Lord, in Bandera, tether me to my shadow like a fat spavined mule stuck sideways in Texas tank mud bawling for eternity
At midnight's closing whine of the 11th Street Bar's steel guitar, when the stars slip their traces and race the moon like wild horses to their death in the darkness, let my hoarse song twine with the night wind
May the bray of today's good laughter fall like a brittle top branch wind nudged from a sprawling live oak straight down like early spring sleet to the hill country's bent and trembling bluebonnet covered knees
