What's G?

Today I reference an article featured with some prominence on the homepage of NYTimes.com, "Four Hours Without Gmail." Now, I do not claim to be particularly tech-savvy, nor do I claim to fully comprehend the relative importance of many of the interconnected online systems that the world has learned to rely on for our otherwise overlooked necessities, but Gmail? Come on. 

The Article shared the front page on cyberspace with headlines like, "Worry of a North Korea Missile Test," "Fed Chief Offers a Dire Economic Forecast," "Retail Earnings Reflect Slowdown in Consumer Spending," "Controller Tells Tale of Hudson Landing," and "NASA Satellite Fails to Reach Orbit," among others. Maybe I am naive and do not grasp the gravity of an event such as a temporary Gmail meltdown, but I am pretty sure that it is not to par with events that threaten human life and welfare. 

Maybe I am wrong. After all, I do spend about half of my workday on Gchat. Maybe it is not about being right or wrong. Maybe I am missing the point. Maybe the point is that Google has branded and marketed themselves in such a way that they earned a spot on the front page of NYTimes.com for doing nothing. They earned that headline through years of market domination, not as a result of some everyday mundanity--as was the case in this story. They are a corporate celebrity completely independent of a personality like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jerry Yang, Michael Bloomberg, or Rupert Murdoch. They are just Google. I guess that is pretty G.

Isn't it funny how affected a person can be by the current economic downturn? I mean, I have never really paid much attention to the financial markets. Although I recognized the power of it all, the financial community always seemed too enigmatic and arcane for a layperson such as myself to take more than a periphery interest in it. Now it seems that this otherwise foreign world  has engulfed my thinking and emotions in a strangely tolerable, yet invasive, way. I seem to gauge life subconsciously through the DOW, or the most current augmentation of the stimulus saga. If the DOW is up, my worldview is up. If the DOW is down, then...well, life seems a lot harder. If money is given to the Big Three in some misfangled bull-crap-ridden bail-out designed to do nothing than assuage idiotic shareholders who decided to invest their money in a product that hasn't produced for forty years, then I also get down a little bit. Today the DOW is down, and it looks like our friends in Detroit are getting theirs, but I am not too down. I think that I am getting used to this mess. How has the financial crisis affected your psyche?

50 Years Ago I Was -24

When people ask me what my musical influences were growing up, I unhesitatingly respond that I grew up on The Beatles and The Beach Boys. This is true.  Yet, there was another influence that came before the boys of summer or the fabfour. 

There is a fuzzy, sepia-tone memory of going to a Hills Department Store and buying a record with my dad that is at the beginning of this story. It was 1987. Not a particularly stand out year for anything, except Luis Valdez's classic film, "La Bamba." The record my dad bought was the soundtrack to the film, and the rest is history. Aside from the Disco Duck record that I had received for a birthday a couple of years earlier, my understanding of pop-music/rock'n'roll was pretty limited at the time. So, hearing "La Bamba", even if it was Lou Diamond Phillips lip-synching to Los Lobos, was revelatory. In fact, every time I listened to the record I had to perform. I used to get out my mom's old Chris Evert tennis racket and sing along into a microphone made out of constructs. It was pretty hip. I miss those days. Point being, that record and the artists it represented, namely Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper played a big part in the development of a part of my life that I really love. It is for that reason that I was a bit surprised and saddened when I neither heard nor saw anything on the 50th anniversary of their deaths, except a small blurb on a KQED morning show, that celebrated the contributions that those early pioneers made to rock'n'roll. Did Don McClain ruin it for everybody? Anyway, my hat is off to those three who had such a profound impact on the face of rock'n'roll as it has been played since 1959.