The Oppenheimer Report 9/25/17

Shauna and I have animated conversations at the dinner table about music. Last week, she asked me why the rock group Nickelback had such a lousy reputation. It’s a running gag that this apparently popular Canadian rock band is much-despised by music lovers throughout the world. Apparently, Nickelback is to rock n roll what Kenny G is to jazz. I laughed the other day when I heard on the news that someone was summarily escorted out of a Trump rally for carrying a sign that read “Trump Likes Nickelback!” I did not have an answer to Shauna’s question, although I suspected that it had something to do with the band’s inauthentic, derivative, soul-sucking lack of originality. Shauna did a Google search, and as she typed “Why Don’t”, Google immediately finished her sentence with several options. The third thing that popped up was “People Like Nickelback”. Clearly other people have been asking the same question. There were, by the way, a number of reasons why Nickelback is so despised by many, and some of my suspicions were confirmed.

As I’ve mentioned more than once, I broadcast a show on Thursday nights on Hunters Bay Radio in Huntsville, which focuses on songwriting. I play songs that I think are well written and then talk about some the people who wrote them. Lots of radio shows have themes, or present styles of music, but my show is all over the musical map. You might hear Zydeco, Polka, Blues, Country Rock, Jazz, Broadway Musical hits, Punk, Folk, Alternative Rock, etc. and the only criteria I use is that the song must move or entertain me on some level. To improve my own songwriting, I have begun to deconstruct songs. Does the song move me because the lyrics are strong, or is it the arrangement that hooks me, or does the artist do a particularly good job of interpreting a cover? The more I research the music I like, the more good songs I uncover. I haven’t listened to all that many Nickelback songs, but to date I have yet to be impressed by any of them. There will always be Nickelbacks in the world that make it big. Most of my favorite artists are struggling to make a decent living. One thing I’ve learned about good art is that it often goes unrecognized.

Shauna wants me to release another CD of songs, and I’ve probably recorded enough songs to fill two more CDs. I’m not sure I will, because in a field where so many talented artists are trying to be heard, I don't want to (or can't) compete. It has been my great pleasure to have recorded some of my songs with some very talented local musicians and singers, and it seemed logical to employ their skills to better represent my work. I am proud to be recognized locally as one of the local artists, and some of my songs even get local airplay. But I can’t compete in a world of Trumps and Nickelbacks. Creating music, improving my skills as a songwriter, mentoring other songwriters, and collaborating with good musicians, have become my unexpected rewards. I never thought the day would come when that was enough, but I think it finally is. As Nickelback plays to arena audiences and Donald Trump is busy trying to fire the NFL, I’ll be alone in my music room with a pen and paper trying to make sense of it all. My twelve loyal readers demand it!

  - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 9/18/17

What an explosion of color we are beginning to see outside our front window! The leaves are turning, and the maples trees out front are just starting to show the bright yellows, reds, and oranges which should be more prominent later this week. After a summer of fall-like weather, we finally got a beautiful week of sunny weather up here in Katrine, and I’ve been doing a lot of carpe diem-ing. I did some long delayed tree pruning, then ended the day drifting on Little Doe Lake, bathed in the peach pink sunset on the glass calm water, with E.T.’s Martini Music show playing softly in the background.

Indeed, the past year has flown by, and I cannot believe we’re already in the fourth quarter of 2017. They say life is what happens to us when we are making other plans. In my constant state of cluelessness, I walked into a dollar store in Huntsville the other day and was overwhelmed by sea of orange and black Halloween paraphernalia. I’m so out of touch that I keep track of my seasons by what holiday debris they’re selling at the dollar store. My sorry decoration, which adorns our front porch, is a scarecrow-like thing I fashioned out of some of my old clothing, stuffed with dead leaves, and featuring an orange plastic jack-o-lantern as the head (you guessed it, from the dollar store). Go ahead, hang up your variegated corn on the front door, or your fine mesh, hand-sewn ghosts and goblins, or your ghouls, witches, and skeletons. You can go to whatever creative lengths you choose to advertise your Halloween enthusiasm, but for me, nothing is as creepy and disturbing as a grotesquely deformed scarecrow, topped with an orange, plastic, dollar store jack-o-lantern. 

Very early last Thursday morning, as I drove and Shauna slept, we headed home from her most recent MRI in Toronto, and I turned on 640 AM to listen to some talk radio. I was rewarded with an episode of George Noory’s Coast to Coast show. Coast To Coast  used to be hosted by the inimitable Art Bell (and I understand still is, on occasion). Bell has a great radio voice, and he used to broadcast this very popular radio show out of his home in Pahrump, Nevada (not far from Area 57). Shauna and I used to listen to hours of Art Bell in the car, on our way out to or back from Banff, and we found his shows entertaining. There’s nothing like a good radio show to make a long drive go by faster. Much of the subject matter on Coast To Coast involves conspiracy theories, UFO sitings, or so-called authorities on the paranormal, so you know there are going to be a few crackpots involved. Last Thursday morning, Noory had on a guy named Paul Guercio, who is a self-proclaimed forecaster of the future. Guercio has developed a computer software called “Merlin” which in some way facilitates predictions of future events. A lot of these guys are End of Days prophets of doom, and Guercio was certainly vociferous about the political changes taking place in the world. As I drove through the moonless darkness of Orillia at 2AM,  I wondered if every generation has had its Chicken Little prophets. Admittedly, things  look bad right now. Trump and Kim Jung make-me-ill are vying for the “infantile bully of the sandbox” award, and we live in the age of too-much-information, constantly reminded that we will all be S.O.L. when the planet heats up a few more degrees. Still, has not every generation since the dawn of man had its tribulations? I’ll wager things looked even more dismal to the victims suffering under Hitler’s insanity.  

My friend and fellow songwriter Doug McLean had a CD release concert last weekend in Huntsville, joined by many other local musicians, and I was able to persuade Shauna to attend. It was a struggle for Shauna, but she was happy to have been out in public for the first time in a long time. We still have no answers about her ill health, but life goes on. As I said: Carpe Diem.     

 - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 9/11/17

Somehow, this date always seems to sneak up on me. With all the hurricane reporting that dominated the news today, it did not even cross my mind today marks an ominous anniversary. I remember that Shauna and I were in our apartment in Toronto when the first jet crashed into the World Trade Center, and I remember our shock as we gradually realized that this was a planned attack. Then, I remember the eerie emptiness in the usually crowded Toronto skies as all planes were grounded, and the strange feeling of vulnerability as we watched the news unfold from our high-rise apartment. Sixteen years has passed, and while I always thought that it would be man that eliminates mankind, it looks like Mother Nature is a much larger threat.

It’s Sunday, and as I start this report, Hurricane Irma is creeping up the west coast of Florida, having already hammered the keys and Naples. Over twice the size of Hurricane Andrew, about which I spoke last week, Irma is wide enough to impact both coasts, and CNN reporters are all over the state covering the storm live. It looks right now as if Florida will be spared the high winds that tore through the Caribbean, but it’s still too early to assess the damage from storm surges. We anxiously followed the journey of one of our friends, James Solecki, as he struggled to get out of Turks and Caicos shortly before Irma walloped that island. It was fascinating to read about his harrowing experience unfolding in real time. I spoke to my buddy Gil Walker last Wednesday, a former high school class mate and one of my twelve loyal readers. Gil lives in Vero Beach, and when we spoke, Irma was predicted to hit the east coast of Florida with Cat Four or Cat Five force winds. Gil was going to ride it out at home as he and many other Floridians have done so many times before, but how is one to know if the next one is The One? Two “Cat Four” hurricanes have now made landfall in the U.S. in less than two weeks, and I believe this is a record.

I’m a bit of a storm junkie, so of course I had CNN on all weekend. There were interviews with people holed up in their upper floor condos in Key West, which took a direct hit when Irma was close to or at Cat 5 force. There was remarkable storm footage from Miami and the southern west coast, showing the results of storm surges. As always, there are stories of people who showed bad judgment, and the one story that stood out as the ultimate stupid move involved the people who decided to ride the storm out by motoring out to sea in their relatively small sloop. They of course had to be rescued, or they would have surely perished. I doubt they even considered that they’d be endangering the first responders who saved their lives. What were they thinking, sailing into a Cat 4 hurricane, when cruise ships were changing course to avoid it?!

I wonder about our disaster preparedness here in Katrine. I think we have addressed the increased volume of water, and our new sump pump seems to be keeping the basement dry, but what about a winter storm? Our plow guy is in his mid to late seventies and I’m not sure how much longer he’s going to be working. I’ve half considered buying some heavy duty snow removal equipment. My 27” snow blower is not going to cut it for a 500 meter driveway on a regular basis. Wildfires in the west, hurricanes to the south, the weather was definitely strange up here in the near north this summer, and to top it off Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. I think it’s the end of days. To all the lost souls in last week’s hurricanes and to the victims of 9-11, my thoughts are with you today.

      

     - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 9/4/17

If you're a boomer like me, you have probably had one or two problems with advanced technology. It's one of my pet peeves, and my feeling is "don't fix it if it ain't broke." For 25 years I have been ranting about the thousands of ways advancements in technology have complicated my life. I remember the Stone Ages., when VCRs were  big clunky machines and programming them to record was a complicated series of steps involving tiny  buttons that were hard to find. When I bought my 2016 Honda Pilot, it did not come with an owner’s manual booklet; it came with a CD. I popped it into my computer, I was astonished to find it was 500 pages long. There is a whole section devoted to the many ways one can program the doors to unlock. The feature which continues to give me the most aggravation is the radio. I am baffled by the mentality behind a touch screen radio. First of all, it must be “refreshed” every time the car is turned on. This is a two-step process, which cannot be done with the controls on the steering wheel. One must physically go through two screens to get to the default settings. Anything involving a touch screen is difficult to operate while driving a car. In the good old days, my car radio turned on when the car turned on. Changing stations was the simple push of a preset button or the twist of a knob. Touch screens are a horrible distraction in a moving car. Why is it illegal to operate a cell phone in one’s car, but there is no specific law against staring at my touch screen radio for 10 seconds, trying to figure out why it is not responding to my touch?

Where does the time go? One minute I'm snow blowing the driveway, dreaming of warmer weather, and in the blink of an eye, summer's almost over. Certainly, this summer will go down in the record books as a bit of a wash. As I sit down to write this report on Monday morning the remnants of Hurricane Harvey, which deluged Houston Texas last week and left hundreds of thousands homeless, is soaking our neck of the woods. While our summer weather here in the Northeast was unusually rainy and cold, we did not experience the devastating wildfires that raged in the west. I communicated with my cousin in Corvallis, Oregon yesterday and he told me that his state is on fire, “from the south coast to the Cascades”, and the air quality where he resides is horrible. All summer we heard about the hundreds of out-of-control wildfires in BC, Alberta, and now Manitoba. With the latest devastation in Houston, Texas and the surrounding area, the news is all about climate change. Once again, I humbly suggest you can’t fight Mother Nature. No doubt about it, the planet is heating up. Unlike our saber-rattling Commander-Of-Tweets, I don’t deny the existence of climate change, or even that mankind has likely accelerated the cycle. I simply think that this is not something we will or can control.

Weather patterns are cyclical, and if one traced the history of weather on earth over the past 100,000 years (weather records go back maybe 100-150 years), one will likely find cyclical patterns that are not appreciably controllable by human beings. What I find remarkable is that with all the talk about greenhouse gases, and cleaner alternative forms of energy, are we taking proper steps to adapt to these inevitable changes? Are we doing anything to curtail unsustainable population growth? Have we effectively addressed the control of shoreline development and development in general? Are we constructing roofs and pavement made out of reflective white materials to deflect the sunlight? Do we have effective flood and disaster plans in place to protect us against the kind of hurricane that just flooded Houston? The list goes on, and the answer is a resounding no, we simply react. I’ve always wondered why we don’t divert rain water from rain-soaked areas to arid regions. We don’t seem to have problems building trans-continental pipelines to transport oil (other than ignoring the protests of the indigenous peoples whose lands are affected). 

Hey, what do I know, I’m just some ranting schmuck who has the carbon footprint of Sasquatch. I know I’m a part of the problem.  This week’s entry was inspired by one of my earliest “reports”, written August 31, 1992. Cat 5 Hurricane Andrew had just wiped southern Florida clean off the map, and I’d never seen another storm of that magnitude in my life. That was 25 years ago. We didn't look before we leaped and and now the horse is barking up the wrong tree with both oars out of the water. Whether or not we figure out this adjusting-to-nature thing, she’ll just continue to steam roll over us until we adjust or perish. Mother Nature doesn’t give a flying Walenda if we drive a Prius or a Hummer. Neither of them floats, by the way. Happy Labour Day to my twelve loyal readers. Gotta go now. The leaves are turning and I think I'll go fire up the snowblower ... you know, just to make sure it works.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED