The Oppenheimer Report 6/25/18

Dad with my sister Jill

Last week, I made reference to my days as an unwilling equestrian, and this week, I’m going to delve into that subject a little further. As I said, my family was serious about horseback riding, and we rode both “English” and “Western” saddle. Out west, we rode horses out of the then famous Smoke Tree Ranch. Back in the 60s, when our family went out west for riding vacations, it was not uncommon to ride with movie stars visiting Palm Springs to escape their celebrity in L.A. Cary Grant and his wife Dyan Cannon once joined us on one of our desert rides. In Buffalo, we owned four horses. My mom and dad rode horseback every weekend, and were members of the Geneseo Valley Hunt Club. They regularly fox hunted during the fall season with their two horses, and my sister Jill was for many years on the amateur show circuit. She owned the other two horses and was a regional champion in several divisions. At her peak, she was invited to ride in an equestrian event at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Somehow or another, my parents assumed that their love of horses would rub off on me, and that it was my genetic predisposition to follow in their hoof steps. For me this enforced hobby was probably how most children felt about piano lessons.

I began riding at the Buffalo Saddle and Bridle Club when I was about 7 years of age, and I took riding lessons for the next five or six years. I never owned a horse, but rode the school horses at the club. Those ranged from old nags, to walking tubes of glue. There were two horses that stood out as my most unfavorites. One was a very old school horse named Wade, who was in fact a cross between a mule and a horse. Predictably, Wade was stubborn and slow, and extremely difficult to command. By far the worst horse in the stable though was “Snowball”, named because he was a white horse. Snowball wasn’t a bad looking horse, with one exception: he had a green ass. Snowball had a serious gas problem. Whenever Snowball trotted or cantered, he emitted wet noisy farts, sometimes combined with loose, slimy green manure. I don’t know what they were feeding those animals, but the green slime that spewed out of Snowball’s ass was otherworldly. Oftentimes, our lessons involved single file trots around the ring, and no one wanted to be behind Snowball. Anyone within 30 feet of this horse’s ass was in constant peril of being slimed. These are the dirty little secrets of horseback riding no one talks about. What child chooses to be sprayed with green horse diarrhea?

Snowball was one of a hundred reasons I never embraced horseback riding. As I said, I didn’t mind riding Western saddle out in the desert, and I also liked fox hunting, which I did for several seasons at the end of my riding career. Unlike the show circuit, fox hunting was the motocross of horseback riding, and involved a lot of high speed, open field, all terrain riding. I enjoyed the excitement of racing around on rugged terrain, jumping 3-4 foot chicken coops, and chasing after something we never ever caught. The Geneseo hunt was not snooty and aristocratic, like some of those English hunts, and many of the participants in the Geneseo Hunt were regular folk who simply loved to ride. That said, to keep a horse is an expensive, full time hobby. When the moment of truth came, wherein I was asked to commit to the sport, I opted out in favor of boating. While the rest of my family loved horses, and were happy to devote the time and effort to their care, I had little interest, and quickly gravitated to boats. As you probably know, boats rarely spew stinky green slime at their operators and, while they sometimes come with their share of mechanical problems, I have found them to be a much better investment in the fun-per-dollar department. Eventually, my family forgave me for my blasphemous rejection of the family sport, and everyone was happy.

     

 - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 6/18/18

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and though my dad’s been gone a long time now, Father’s Day is still a bittersweet day for me. It seems like only yesterday I was calling him up to bitch about the Buffalo Sabres. Until he was in his early 90’s I still relied on his judgment and advice, and I think about him and Mom every day. One thing is for sure, Dad’s personality is indelibly infused in me. There are things I do, both good and bad, which are so similar to my dad that it’s spooky. Shauna says I talk to our dog Jasper in the same baby talk voice that he used to talk to our dogs. It can be unsettling to realize I have little control over the traits I’ve inherited from my father. Some of us put our parents in the god-like category when they pass, and this belies the reality that most parents are not perfect. My dad had his faults but, almost a decade after he passed, I don’t think about them so much. Funny thing about the passage of time.

There was a photo taken of my dad a long time ago, out west in Palm Springs. When I was young, my family, all horse lovers except me, vacationed in Palm Spring during our spring break. There we spent a lot of time riding “western saddle” in the desert and in the nearby mountains. Being the youngest child, I had no say in the matter, and I did a lot of involuntary horseback riding, but that’s another report. It wasn’t so bad, and we rode all over what was back in the 1960s barren desert. There was a unique freedom I experienced riding horseback in the open desert. I’ve written a lot of songs about the desert, so it clearly made a strong impression on me. When my dad died in 2009 or thereabouts, and shortly before his funeral ceremony, I found an old black and white 8x10 photo of him on a horse, up in the mountains overlooking the then tiny town of Palm Springs. In my eulogy for him I said that this picture embodied what my dad was to me: bigger than life, strong, smart, in control, competent; the guy you wanted around in a crisis. He made me feel safe. To this day I draw on his strength.

I told a story on Facebook the other day about my dad taking me to a roadside carnival when I was a little boy. He thought it would be a big thrill for me to ride the miniature choo choo train, but when I got off the ride, I told him I could have walked faster. I was about four, and for the rest if his life, he loved to tell people that story about how his wise ass little boy was a chip off the old block. My dad was a funny guy, with a perfectly balanced combination of irreverence, humility, and dry wit that ingratiated him to all who knew him. He was a very popular guy, but he always held his cards close to his chest. His family knew him well, and loved him for the good man he was, but I don’t think many people knew him the way I did. Years ago, I wrote a very personal song entitled Bassett’s Farm, about the first time I discovered my father was a mere mortal. He had an accident, almost losing his thumb in a piece of farm machinery, and I, who was probably ten at the time, was the one who came to the rescue. My perfect dad made mistakes.

Somewhere between the Stetson-wearing John Wayne dad, up on a mountaintop riding his horse, overlooking a huge valley below him, and the dad who needed his son’s help when he got his thumb stuck in a manure spreader, lies the complicated, fallible, wonderful human being who was my father. Overall, he was a great dad, and I always knew I could count on him. All the parts that made him complicated have made me complicated. For better or for worse, we carry the genetic imprint of our parents, and the more effectively we embrace that fact, the better we will understand and be able to improve ourselves. A belated Happy Father’s Day to one and all.

      - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 6/11/18

Another Monday morning, and as I listened to Willie Nelson singing “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me” on the radio, I turned on CNN to see security guards scrambling in Singapore in anticipation of the big meeting between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il. How appropriate is that song was to narrate what I was seeing on the screen?! Shortly after the G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, which the Orange Emperor deigned to attend, he’s back on the attack. Rump the anti-diplomat, the great disguster, the loud-mouthed, tactless shit-disturber and world class Twitterer is now spewing his venomous rhetoric at and against Canada. Nixon reportedly once called Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre “an asshole”, but I think Trump has trumped that insult. I’m no lover of Trudeau, but I’m embarrassed by how poorly Rump is representing my homeland. Maybe, as some suggest, his public nonsense is just a negotiating ploy to make a better trade deal, but in the eyes of the world he is the reckless, foul-mouthed, Cadillac-with-steer-horns-on-the-hood- driving, fast food-hoovering, uber-ugly American, and he is the man everyone loves to hate; well, everyone but half of of America. If he manages to convince N. Korea to de-nuclearize he may win a Nobel Peace Prize. Put that in your vape pen and smoke it.

  

Last week, Ontario voters chose PC (conservative) candidate Doug Ford to be Premier of Ontario. Perhaps this was more of a show of disenchantment with the outgoing Liberal party, which has done such a poor job of governing Ontario for the past 15 years. Many have likened Ford and his pompous behavior to Rump, and much was made of the fact that his brother Rob was the controversial Mayor of Toronto, caught on camera smoking crack. I could not make this stuff up if I tried!

I don’t know if others in my vicinity have noticed, but it seems the mosquitoes have been particularly fierce this season. I think they’re on steroids; they’re bigger, meaner, and faster than ever. We have electronic rackets in every room of our house, and I have begun to use a liquid concoction comprised of equal parts Epsom salt, stale beer, and mouthwash as a mosquito repellant spray. It may be helping. Nothing else is working. While black flies have not been as prominent (yet), the mosquitoes are out of control, and I’m not sure why. We are keeping the standing water to a minimum, and there hasn’t been that much rain, but they’re bad this year. I took our dog Jasper out yesterday for her morning pee and she was swarmed. It was like bees on honey. When the bugs are that fierce, I wear the bug jacket, but it’s almost impossible to keep them out of the house.

A few days ago, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain committed suicide while on location shooting in France, and, like many others, I was shocked. Bourdain was a guy who seemed like he had it all together, despite faults which he was all too willing to admit. Bourdain hosted one of my favorite TV shows, CNN’s “Parts Unknown, and his candor and honesty were refreshing. I learned so much about other parts of the world from watching his show, and he seemed to humanize the world. Indeed, he was the opposite to the omnipresent and divisive political journalism I cannot escape on television today. Now, when I’m watching reruns his shows, I’m looking for any signs of his depression. Short of his self-deprecating humility, which belies his celebrity status, there is little to indicate he was in crisis. Sometimes the signs are very faint. Mental illness is a huge problem in the world today, and it seems like I only really take notice when a high profile celebrity like Robin Williams or Bourdain commits suicide. For every sufferer who kills him or herself, there are probably one hundred who are thinking about it. There is a local musician who recently made a video about his struggle, and I was surprised to hear his story. He came very close to leaving his family behind, because he thought it would be better for everyone. Bourdain’s death is a wake-up call to all of us who may be ignoring danger signs of the ones we love, but don’t understand. Maybe it’s time to get our noses out of our phones and strike up a dialogue, face to face.

   

    - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 6/4/18

The other day, I watched a CNN special called 1968, recounting the tumultuous year that ushered in Richard Nixon as President of the United States. LBJ’s escalation of the Viet Nam War made a bad, unwinnable war even worse. Nam veterans, unlucky enough or poor enough to be drafted against their will, came home from the war broken and suffering from PTS, to an unappreciative civilian population conflicted about the war. Iron-fisted Chicago Mayor Daley put the hammer down on the protest marchers during the Democratic National Convention. It was the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was also the year of loudmouth yippies like Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the SDS and other militant anarchists blowing up buildings. There were race riots in LA and elsewhere, and war protests across the nation.  I was 13 at the time, and I vaguely remember those troubled times, and I remember fearing that my country was coming apart at the seams. I think it is simplistic to make parallels between that troubled time in America and the situation we find ourselves in today, but clearly, 2018 is not the first time America has faced a crisis in leadership. For me, one difference between then and now is that I still believed what I heard and saw on the news. I trusted guys like Walter Cronkite. These days, everyone so clearly has an agenda, and I don’t trust or believe most of what I hear or read.

Last week, comedienne Rosanne Barr imploded on Twitter, going on record with her overtly racist comments. She denies that her words were racist, and blamed her hurtful remarks on Ambien, a sleep medication she was taking. I chuckled when Sanofi, the pharmaceutical company which makes Ambien, immediately put out a damage control press release, assuring that Ambien does not cause users to become racists. Perhaps they should put it on the label. ABC immediately pulled the plug on Barr’s new show, and I think that was the right move. The bigger problem for me is the lack of remorse, and in some cases indignation on the part of the offenders. I didn’t mean what I said. I wasn’t responsible; I had no idea sleep medication would make me say what I believe. Celebrity’s a bitch, and sadly, the general public does pay attention to what the stars say. 

Increasingly, we live in a world where we don’t take responsibility for our actions. We blame our leaders for the atrocious mess we are in, and we judge everything, oftentimes without the facts. Why aren’t we accountable? I make mistakes every day, but I’m trying harder to own up to them. I’ve said a lot of mean, insensitive things in the past (just read some of the early Opp Reports), and I've been called out for some of those irresponsible words. I don't think I've been hateful, but these days I temper my disrespect. I find social media very useful, especially for the promotion of music, but it is also an indelible record of every stupid thing I say or do. That drunk video you posted of you dry humping a statue of Smokey the Bear might have seemed funny at the time, but maybe it won’t seem so funny in five years. We  seem to be lowering the bar for tolerable behavior and, while we all screw up, there seems to be less and less inclination to show genuine remorse for bad behavior. Ironically, we live in a world where those mistakes are permanently recorded for the public to see and judge.

I don’t know if Rosanne Barr is a racist. She may just be another unbalanced comedian who crossed the line for a laugh. I do think that the number of us who are racists is growing not shrinking, and this saddens me. I don’t know how you teach people to love, but I suspect it is by example.    

   

    - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED