Learning some keytar songs for my local music collective

Hopefully nobody in my regular "Songs from a Hat" music collective sees this because we're supposed to arrive each time with a musical surprise, playing a song or a few songs from a category that we have previously selected. Tonight's category is "keytar," meaning songs that were played with a guitar-looking keyboard around someone in the band's neck. It's looking like "Don't You Want Me" from The Human League will be my spotlight number. I remember loving the boy-girl vocals and super-80s electro vibe all the way back to when it spent three weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1982.

I think I'll also play: 

• "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger. It's unbearably long at 4 minutes so maybe I'll find a way to do a three-minute version. 
• "Sunglasses at Night" by Corey Hart. The toughest thing to learn about this song is getting Corey Hart's Night at the Roxbury head-pumping right. Watch the video for this one; it's hilarious. The song surprisingly climbed all the way to #7 in 1984. It's at the same time oddly surprising it didn't go to #1.
• A mellow version of "Jump" by Van Halen would be a good choice if it were more original, but what I've worked up sounds a lot like the Aztec Camera cover version. We'll see how the night goes. If it gets late and we've been drinking too much, this could be a good sing-along candidate.

Other songs I worked on a little but will probably save for another day:

• "Tempted" by Squeeze
• "Angie" by The Rolling Stones
• "Just What I Needed" by The Cars
• "Home Sweet Home" by Motley Crue

The Highballers light up Greenbelt on a stormy night

I haven’t seen my friend Kendall’s band The Highballers much lately (though not for lack of opportunities; they play a lot of shows around D.C.), but I went with my wife and my friends Kevin and Megan tonight to Greenbelt, a little town in Maryland envisioned by FDR as the first intentional community. Once there, and secure from the raging heat storm outside, we stepped in the see the band in a great little concert room behind the New Deal Cafe. 

As Kendall said, the place always gives him "a real good vibe," and indeed there was a good mix of newbies like us and regulars. The place felt like if there were a bar and restaurant (tasty BBQ) at the cohousing community where we used to live in Silver Spring, Eastern Village Cohousing. Funky, fun, intelligent people all around just enjoying their time on Earth.

The Highballers have consistently gotten tighter and better. The whole band really seems committed and they played a lengthy and pleasurable set of covers and mostly originals. While Kendall and Belen traded off amazing harmonizing vocals throughout the country set (the good kind of country, it should go without noting), with such highlights as “I Didn't Mean to Get Drunk Last Night But I Did,” my favorite might have been “Older Guys,” a Gram Parsons tune covered later by Teenage Fanclub and made to sound like an Uncle Tupelo country-punk rager by The Highballers.

Kendall reminded us that it had been 10 years since we celebrated the band's album release at the time at the old Iota in Arlington, Va. Here was what I wrote about that album at the time, in my Best New Albums of January 2013 column:

The Highballers - Soft Music and Hard Liquor

My son was in the process of getting married to The Highballers' showman-leader Kendall's daughter in their preschool class. That would have made this review a conflict of interest, but luckily it was clean-up time and the kids were unable to comlete the ceremony. Regardless, I saw this band live at Arlington's Artisphere and they were a force. It's easy to compare them to an offshoot of Johnny Cash and June Carter (what with the boy-girl vocals and all), but The Highballers are much funnier, have smoking and tasteful musicianship all around, have lots of songs about drinking (which is, let's admit, the point of honky tonk), and gloriously adds a modern twist ala Uncle Tupelo and The Bottle Rockets.

So they be improving (or just consumate musicianship-ers), but they are also clearly just naturals. Oh, and our kids may not be married yet, but they are still friends. 

Stop signs can help us make the world a better place

Originally published at MobilityLab.org.

Americans can take action to slow the decline of civil society simply by focusing on the ubiquitous stop sign.

If you’ve ever ridden a bicycle on city streets, you recognize that there are a ton of people driving while texting. It’s easy to see because a person on a bike can easily see down into people’s cars.

If you’re walking, you know how often people driving won’t stop for you in clearly-marked crosswalks. They either don’t notice you or don’t care, feeling smugly protected in their cages.

Meanwhile, everyone in cars sees people on bikes and foot doing things we deem as reckless (zipping in and out of traffic or not watching what’s in front of them on the sidewalk).

This all fits into a fascinating little brief commentary in the Glendale (Calif.) News-Press that horrifyingly documents the war zone that exists in the vicinity of stop signs.

Do you stop at stop signs? So few drivers do that Glendale posted temporary electronic signs informing drivers to “stop at stop signs.” What’s next: “breathe in and out”?

The other day I pulled up to [a four-way] intersection. Cars were at each of the four stop signs.

To my left was a car making a left turn. The next driver to go was supposed to be me. Just as I released my brake ready to enter the intersection, the car immediately behind the one that made the turn quickly followed right behind so closely that it appeared one car was towing the other.

It was one of those eye-popping “did that just happen” moments. There were at least five other drivers who witnessed that illegal and highly dangerous maneuver.

What was going through the mind of that man behind the wheel? Obviously, he did not give a whit about the rules of the road and was determined to shave off a few seconds from his commute — to hell with everybody else.

In what little research that exists on the matter, there is no correlation between getting moving violations and changing one’s driving habits.

The author goes on to make the suggestion that parents and school systems need to do a better of teaching the increasingly lost art of social responsibilities. Schools are definitely cutting funding for driver’s ed.

That’s one problem. It’s also a sure sign that, if there’s not as much education about how to drive as part of the rules of the road, there is almost certainly not much teaching going on about how young people should operate in an increasingly multimodal society.

Since police forces no longer put much time into ticketing people who run stop signs, one transportation demand management offshoot strategy is to petition local governments for street-calming measures such as speed humps, traffic circles, bike lanes (or, better yet, protected bike lanes), wider sidewalks (or, in many cases, any sidewalks), and many others.

On a hyper-local level, I’m leading a neighborhood charge in my city of Takoma Park, Md. Even though my street already has a nice sidewalk and stop signs that aren’t too far apart, we have noticed more and more of exactly what the journalist in Glendale details. Despite the high prevalence of kids playing and people walking, drivers constantly blow through the stop signs in front of our house. They seemingly don’t care or have lost the muscle memory be able to stop in the name of either the law or human decency.

All my crusade will take is 2/3 of the households on my block and the two adjacent blocks to agree to get the city to install a speed hump in front of my house. That equates to 12 households, which seems like a pretty easy task in the name of perhaps saving the lives of the kids on our street.

Even if my petition fails to get the required signatures, at the very least, I’ve informed my neighbors about the research that shows speed humps are a valuable addition to our transportation spaces.

As always, so much of TDM’s success hinges on getting infrastructure to adapt to new trends. Steps like my petition for speed humps is a perfect example of the importance of TDM, also known as transportation education.

Photo by Dylan Passmore/Flickr.

Guys Night Takes Us to Library for Famous Author Reading

Jackson and I enjoyed our "guys night," with Rachel and Zoey already in New Jersey for our upcoming Bat Mitzvah weekend for cousin Hannah, by going to the Takoma Park Library for a reading by Llama Llama Red Pajama author Anna Dewdney.

She entertained the kids by drawing her signature character and reading her most famous book, along with a new one. And I'm excited because Jackson and I checked out the first Harry Potter book to read for the first time.

We also played National Parks Monopoly in the basement and baseball (t-ball starts in a few weeks) in the front yard.

Guys nights are good.

John Lennon's "Woman" Kicks Off New Takoma Park Music Meetup

Here's my take on one of my favorite John Lennon solo songs, "Woman" from 1980's tragically concluding Double Fantasy.

I learned it to play for a new meetup group that has formed here in Takoma Park. We bring our instruments and go around the room playing a song with a certain theme.

The first session last Friday was supposed to be a song from 1984-1986, but I didn't get the memo. But I also didn't get kicked out for playing "Woman," which only missed the mark by a few years.

It was a blast, as we drank chocolate wine and sang along to each other's covers, which also included "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," "(Don't You) Forget Abut Me," "If Ever I'm In Your Arms Again," "Karma Cameleon," "Cherish," and "Legs."

I totally think we should do "We Are the World" and each be a different superstar from USA for Africa!

The Pre-School Take on Why Bikes Are Good Things

Today I was honored to present a session at my son's pre-school on "Why Bikes are Good Things."

Jackson and I drew the above poster last night. We brainstormed all the benefits of riding bikes. They are really broken into the categories of healthy, fun, transportation, economic, and environmental.

So it was fun to see his classmates today say what things they thought in regards to why bikes are good.

I was surprised nobody mentioned "fun" and few mentioned things related to health. Many said they were fast for getting around town and most said something related to the environment. I guess "you don't run over animals" would fall under the "environmental" category, along with "not getting stuck in traffic jams," "no pollution" and "no noise."

I tried to tell them that mommies and daddies spend a huge chunk of their paychecks on housing and transportation. They seemed to get it that using a bike more could save money to buy more toys.

The kids enthusiastically said they would go home and tell their parents that they want to ride bikes this weekend, so it seems my job was completed.

Our New Home in Takoma Park, Maryland

The movers brought all our stuff to our new house on Thursday and, after eight years in nearby Silver Spring, our address is now in the lovely, tree-filled Forest Park neighborhood of Takoma Park.

We have a nice fenced-in front yard and an amazing screened-in back porch and tasteful wooden playground in the back yard. There is a finished basement and a sun room that can serve as Jackson's additional play areas. There are really no negatives, except for leaving all our friends at Eastern Village Cohousing. But we have a good number of friends in our new neighborhood already and the neighbors have been uniformly nice in our brief meetings with them so far.

We're off to the Sunday Farmers Market (pictured above), a hallmark of life in the Republic of Takoma Park, which Wikipedia calls "the Berkeley of the East." Like our former home, Takoma Park borders on DC, and it is novel and kind of nice that the city has a "no nukes" policy, has very stringent tree-preservation guidelines, and is about as progressive as possible in every way.

More on all this later, as well as photos when we get a little more unpacked.

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