41 Favorites: #7-9

For my 40th birthday, I jotted down a list of some of my favorite things to prompt a series of occasional posts. My aim was to periodically knock out brief entries that cover a variety of subjects, as I’d been retreating from new content due to frustration with the constant gremlins.

That was two years ago. I had to switch the title from 40 Favorites to 41 Favorites in 2011 and I’ve only added three installments since then — including this one. Sunday,
I’ll need to renumber the series again.

Anyhoo; I’d prefer to talk about...

7. coffee

Oh, I loves me the coffee.

To many folks it’s merely a delivery system for a vital dose of caffeine, and I’m not above using it that way myself. While caffeine is a vasoconstrictor that’s often helpful in alleviating migraines, however, I’m among the minority for whom it’s a soporific rather than a stimulant; I could very well get a brief jolt from it neurologically, were you to look at a brain scan, but I’ll begin to get sleepy from a cup of strong coffee in short order. (I’ve gone off of caffeine entirely in the name of eliminating potential rebound or caffeine-withdrawal headaches from the picture, twice, and the tradeoff was not worth it. Migraines still abound. It’s way better to have caffeine in the arsenal even though going too long without caffeine after regular caffeine intake will probably trigger a headache.)

What’s essentially great about coffee, to me, is the combination of the aroma, flavor, and warmth — and/or chill; I enjoy iced coffee equally, given the right setting, as I’ve written about previously. As I also wrote in that post, coffee is nicely combined with other flavors, hazelnut being tops on my list. I’m definitely a cream-&-sugar guy — which strikes some coffee purists as just wrong, I know — both for the taste and
because I like my coffee to have a bit of body to it. Lattes are heaven.

I’ve been told that I brew a good pot of coffee, and I’ll take the compliment, but I’m a disaster with the French press so I stick to filters.

8. cover songs

Despite my affinity for them, I’m surprised to see that the “cover songs” label on this blog had already been applied to over a dozen posts. It surely helped that I became obsessed with The Sing-Off.

Some of the best-loved, most fondly remembered pop tunes from my childhood were/are cover songs purely by happenstance, but while I’m not sure when my fondness for such reinterpretation as a creative enterprise unto itself began I definitely have a particular, one could say peculiar, admiration for turning a song on its ear and making it as good if not better. There are plenty of ways to do this — by stripping the arrangement down or building it up, changing the tempo, going from electric to acoustic, etc.

The other day I heard a fascinating reggae version of Michael Jackson’s 1979 disco-
funk hit “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” and — here’s what’s so compelling about covers to me — it would probably have sounded cool on its own yet it was so much
more interesting because of what I brought to it from having known the original, my expectations getting pleasantly reinforced at certain points and just as pleasantly confounded at others.

I groove to the Billie Holliday ballad and the Marcels doo-wop versions of “Blue
Moon”. I’m head over heels for Lick the Tins’ pennywhistlicious “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” as popularized on the 1987 Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack, which is simply outright fantastic, but also delighted with David Bowie’s mightily over-wrought reworking of the 1966 Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” on his 1984 album Tonight. I know that it doesn’t touch Bill Withers’ 1972 original, but I still be jammin’ to Club Nouveau’s 1987 cover of “Lean on Me”. I find Weird Al Yankovic’s Stars on 45 parody medley “Polka on 45” and its sequels absolute genius.

There is a drop-dead gorgeous cover of Roy Orbison’s legendary 1961 song “Crying” performed a cappella, in Spanish, as “Llorando” by Rebekah Del Rio in the 2001 David Lynch film Mulholland Drive.

Artists occasionally cover their own songs, to varying levels of success. The first time
I was aware of this was probably when Neil Sedaka, himself an upcoming entry in this series, rerecorded his 1962 chart-topper “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” as a ballad for his 1975 album The Hungry Years, with a brief snippet of the original leading into it as if playing on the radio then quickly fading out as Sedaka’s piano began. Sting’s revamped “Shadows in the Rain” on his 1986 album Dream of the Blue Turtles actually outclasses The Police’s 1980 original, in my opinion. Although Eric Clapton’s 1992 unplugged rendition of “Layla” doesn’t possess the fierce urgency of his 1971 original with Derek and the Dominos — nor its gorgeous piano coda — I’m happy to have both.

That only scratches the surface, and I’m sorry to forego links. I didn’t want to get bogged down looking for legal recordings online. I do want to hear your own favorite cover songs in the comments, for sure.

9. crossword puzzles

You know, I thought I’d written about crossword puzzles before, and I’ve discovered where; it was in my post accepting the Honest Scrap badge, wherein I revealed that I like to fill in the boxes neatly and often in specific lettering styles.

That doesn’t happen as frequently as it once did, but neither does me exercising my brain over crosswords, period. It’s hard to summon the kind of focus required for the length of time required thanks to fibromyalgia clouding my brain, yet for that very reason I still try. Reading and writing being a much greater effort than they used to be, overall, also means less time for all such pursuits — everything is harder and takes more time; it used to be that I could do some reading, get through a puzzle, and watch some television after a nice day’s work. Finally having a functioning computer again, too, and belatedly having reliable high-speed Internet to go with it, similarly cuts into the puzzle time due to all the stuff that’s out there to watch and read.

Maybe the silver lining there is that when I remember to pick up the book of puzzles from my night table and do have the focus to work on one it feels like a treat. Among
my earliest memories are my dad getting me a book of crossword puzzles that we worked on together, which in retrospect I realize had enormously big white boxes and very few of them. (Its cover was mostly yellow with what I think was a pink kangaroo.) Getting myself a book of crossword puzzles carries a bit of the same thrill of nostalgia, combined with disbelief at being a grown-up now, that buying certain other things or visiting certain places without my parents or grandparents does.

I’ve never quite been on the New York Times bandwagon, at least partly because the reliance on words that only appear in crossword puzzles bugged me in principle. The hometown Philadelphia Inquirer was more my speed, especially at the end of the week when the degree of difficulty offered the right kind of challenge — like chess and Scrabble, crosswords are a game that you have to play against an opponent, in this case the puzzles’ creator, whose skill level is almost exactly evenly matched with yours for it to be enjoyable. I know people who hate them, but I’ve found that big Sunday puzzles with themes are straight up my alley. Merl Reagle — whose Inquirer puzzles moved to the Arts & Entertaiment section from the Sunday magazine when that was phased out, leaving me bereft since I can no longer work that small on newsprint — occasionally gets a bit too precious with special characters and such, but I generally find that approach fun, and for some time now my mainstay has been the spiral-bound collections edited by John M. Samson for Simon & Schuster.

Next up? I might break away from the alphabetical order.


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