The Oppenheimer Report

Monday, July 29, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 7/29/19

A message flashed across my computer screen the other day, and it read something like: “July 2019 will go on record as the hottest month ever recorded in weather history.” I’m not sure whether this is a fact or not, but it does seem like a red flag. There have been more than a few stories on the news over the past month about the scorching heat wave presently inundating Europe. As well, over the past two or three summers, the devastating wildfires in Western North America have been a wake-up call that Mother Nature is pissed off. I don’t know if it is still in effect, but last week there was a complete fire ban in our region. Yesterday, I read a notice from one of the local campsites near us, stating that 7000 litres of water had been drawn from the campsite’s water source in less than a day. The notice went on to say that the well would require a day or so to recover. All these things are warnings, but are we heeding them? I don’t think so.

In the early 80s, I wrote a song entitled Waters Gone about a dream I’d had. When I wrote the song, I suggested that it was a metaphor for the Savings and Loan crisis which had just sucked $500 Million out of the American economy. In fact, it was nothing more than a song about the desert. I used to have a lot of dreams about the desert, maybe because, as a little boy, my family used to vacation in what was then the sleepy little town of Palm Springs, California. Even back in the 60s, we were reminded of the scarcity of water in that region. I distinctly remember riding horseback out in the desert, and in the middle of a bone-dry desert, we came upon a lush, 18-hole golf course. It seemed bizarre. “I have seen oases, I have seen jeweled caravans …”

Clearly the effects of climate change are now being felt across the earth. Soon large populations of people, especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa, will likely be forced to move or perish. I don’t deny that climate change is real, I think only a fool would, but I am skeptical about the notion that man can change its course appreciably. The best and most logical advice I glean from economists and scientists, is that we need to better adapt to the inevitable changes. I doubt we’ll come to a global consensus on greenhouse gas emissions. First World and emerging Third World nations are not going to suddenly comply with onerous (and economically devastating) emissions standards. I think that ship has sailed. As populations expand, the planet gets hotter, and fresh water becomes scarcer, we humans are running out of time. The Mother Nature has a brutal way of evening the playing field. I think the two biggest issues we face as a species are how to manage our exploding populations, and how to protect our fresh water supply. I also think that how we deal with these two issues will determine the survival of our species. The sky may not be falling, but the sands of time are.

“I was walking through the desert and a stranger came from nowhere out of the sun

He was tall and gaunt and dressed in black and he had eyes that were on the run.

And I asked him: “Stranger where did you come from?”

And the told me, “I am from no where and I am no one.

I am here to tell you your time has come;

We are all just prisoners of the sun, now that the water’s gone.”

Jamie Oppenheimer, Songwriter, Author, Blogger, Radio Producer, & Host has been writing THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT every MONDAY since 1992 and has published the articles on his blog since 2006. We are including Jamie's weekly reports, as a new feature of #HuntersBayRadio, The Bay 88.7FM.
#GotLocal? HuntersBayRadio.com #WeAreMuskoka #WeAreAlmaguin

Monday, July 22, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 7/22/19

About a year ago I got an unusual request from an old friend of mine, someone with whom I’d grown up in Buffalo. He wrote me to inform me that one of our old classmates, a friend named Willard Uncapher, was very ill and undergoing treatment for brain cancer. He asked me if I had any healing music that I might want to add to a list of songs he was compiling for Willard. I sent a few songs on and shortly thereafter wrote Willard as well. I’d lost touch with him over the years, but on occasion, we’d been in contact by email or Facebook. My last message from him was around November of last year, and it was one of those brief exchanges, a Thanksgiving greeting and the mutual wish for good health. However brief, those short messages were a comforting connection for me to someone whom I knew to be a good soul. The other day, I received word that Willard had passed on, and the news hit me hard. I wasn’t present in his life to follow his struggle. Knowing Willard, and reading the post his daughter and primary caregiver put up to announce his death, I don’t doubt that he had faced his journey with dignity, grace, and courage. Willard was quite different from my other classmates in school. I am so very thankful that we got to know each other better when we were young adults. It was then that I came to realize what a kind, gentle and loving soul he was. I can’t say I knew him very well, but I am a better person for having had him in my life.

About a year ago, around the same time I heard that Willard was sick, I came across an old photograph of me as a little boy. Sometimes, when I find old photos that are not in an album, I paste them into one of my song notebooks, perhaps for inspiration. I can’t seem to throw out old photographs, though lately I’m beginning to wonder why I keep them. That photo is etched in my mind, because I was looking at it when I got the news Willard had passed. I was perhaps three years-old when the photo in question was taken at our beach house on Lake Erie. I was sitting in my very first boat, a tiny little red wooden boat that my grandfather gave to me. The boat was filled with water (a metaphor for my journey?). I look at the child in that picture and can’t believe that almost 61 years have passed since it was taken. Now, so many of my friends, have died before their time. A girlfriend with whom I was close died at sixteen, taken by Hodgkin’s Disease, a friend from boarding school was killed in a car crash shortly after we graduated, and an alarming number of other peers have fallen, especially in the past ten years. For some it was misadventure, for some it was genetics, but for some it was simply their time to die. As much as I search for meaning in all of this, I have found none. The only thing I can glean from all this loss is that it reinforces my resolve to assess the journey as I take it. I know Willard had a rich life, because I knew Willard, and that in turn gives me something for which to strive. His was a life well-lived, and I think I owe it to people like him to make the most of mine.

I wrote a song, perhaps 30 years ago entitled “Curse Of The Sea”, and it is about the unbridled anxiousness I felt at the time. It was a somewhat preachy, pseudo-intellectual examination of the existential questions many of us ask ourselves. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I dreamed I was somewhere else. I still have those feelings from time to time, and sometimes wonder what I am doing or could be doing to improve my life, or the lives of others. I can’t say I have figured this out yet, but the older I get, the less I worry about it. Meanwhile, I rush through time’s rapids, and no matter what course I take, there are rocks and snags everywhere. My contentment seems to come with the moments when I acknowledge my lack of control. People come and go in my life; I still have dozens of answering machine messages from ghosts. And then there are the photographs. There are good, positive lessons to be learned everywhere, from the people I meet, and from Mother Nature. I think I’m beginning to pay closer attention. Sometimes those prophets of love and understanding are alive, sometimes the voices are from the hereafter. Regardless, I will live out the second half of my life with the comforting notion that there is something good to be learned from all the souls that have touched me. Willard, I am grateful to have known you in life, and I am starting to believe we’ll catch up with each other again someday.

"I read a story about a maiden
Who lived by the sea
She used to stare out of a big bay window
Longing for what would never be.

Infatuation
No destination
No reservations
It's just the curse of the sea."

Monday, July 15, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 7/15/19

Of late, I haven’t been eating properly, and the older I get, the less forgiving my body has become when I neglect it. Over the years, I’ve learned a bit about nutrition, and I’m beginning to listen to my body. While I’m no expert, I know a lot more about t now than I did when I was younger. Lately I’ve been reading up on the gut and the digestive process. I now understand that the gut is command central for the body’s auto-immune system. Because Shauna has Crohn’s Disease, and a series of perplexing auto-immune illnesses that are likely related to the Crohn’s, I am trying to learn what foods are both nutritious and not hard on her digestion. Of course, there is no substitute for good, nutritious foods, preferably organic, which are low in harmful fats and preservatives. That said, it’s getting harder and harder to figure out what foods are good for us to eat. While we’re getting better at producing larger quantities of food, we are in some cases sacrificing quality. With a growing number of genetically modified foods, and the use of potentially harmful chemicals and fertilizers to grow those foods, it’s getting harder and harder to I know what is good for my body. Wheat is a good example and wheat products seem to be a bigger problem today than they used to be. I never heard about gluten allergies thirty years ago, but now I hear about them all the time. Again, there seems to be some correlation to the gut and to autoimmune health.

Like a lot of people, I don’t eat enough vegetables or fibre, and of late I have been adding inulin to my coffee (brand name Benefibre) and a green powder dietary supplement that I mix with fruit juice. That powder includes things like spirulina, wheat grass, and a bunch of ingredients that I can’t pronounce, but which allegedly provide some of the phytonutrients that I am lacking in my diet. It also turns whatever I mix it with into an unappetizing army green colour. I am constantly trying new fruit juices that I mix with the powder. I like lemonade, and on a whim bought a bottle of lemonade with watermelon mixed in. That is not a good combination, but just about any other fruit juices work well. It seems to be helping, and I have come to realize that preventative medicine is the best medicine. I don’t delude myself by thinking that dietary supplements will ensure my good health; there are plenty of environmental and genetic factors that are out of my control. That said, I’ve spent a lot of time attending to other friends and family in hospitals over the past twenty years, and I’ll do anything I can to avoid ending up in a hospital.

When I still lived in Buffalo, I was the long-time board member and volunteer for Meals On Wheels of Buffalo And Erie County. The organization fed over 1400 home-bound clients per day. In the ten or more years that I was actively involved with that organization I learned a thing or two about geriatric nutrition. A lot of the seniors I served were on low sodium diets, and that’s a deal breaker for me. One day, after I and my server had finished our route, we had one low sodium meal left over. I’d been delivering these meals for years, and had never sampled one myself, so rather than let it go to waste, I ate it. It was awful. It is remarkable how tasteless some foods are without salt. That said, I’ve begun to read product labels in the supermarket, a habit I got into when I was buying food for Shauna’s elderly parents. There is too much salt in just about everything, even in some desserts! One can of a soup I used to buy contains the maximum recommended amount of salt a person should ingest in a day. As we all know, too much salt and sugar can be killers.

As Joni Mitchell so wisely pointed out in her song Big Yellow Taxi, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” Like so many others in my ever-expanding demographic, as I approach my golden years I am increasingly mindful harmful effects of bad food and a sedentary lifestyle. I know what to do. The trick is to practice what I preach.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 7/8/19

Last Friday, I made an unexpected trip into Huntsville. I’d left my laptop at the radio station after my Thursday night show, and I didn’t want to leave it there all weekend. During the summer months, I try to avoid Huntsville on the weekends, because it turns into Toronto north. In the hour or so that I was in town, I had three people tailgate me, one nearly t-boned me at an intersection (when I clearly had the right of way), and at least one person rudely pushed in front of me in the supermarket. I’m not used to these weekend warriors; for them it’s business as usual to drive aggressively and rush to go everywhere. I spent much of my life in cities, impatient and anxious, and probably acted the same way. When we moved up to the bucolic Almaguin Highlands, my tolerance for crowds and traffic gradually eroded. What the locals jokingly refer to as “citiots”, racing around to “have fun” with their limited free time, reminds me of who I was twenty years ago.

As some of you may know from Shauna’s Facebook posts, we recently had a memorial service for our dog Jasper. We buried her out front where she will forever overlook the lake she spent most of her life surveying from our front window. I don’t think I have ever missed a dog as much as I miss Jasper. Someday, hopefully soon, we hope to have another Miniature Schnauzer in our home that brings us as much joy and laughter as that little gremlin did. Throughout Jasper’s life, we kept in touch with her breeder, Carla Borrelli, who is well known in breeding circles for her award-winning show dogs. While Jasper was not by any stretch of the imagination a show dog, she was a healthy, wonderful member of our family for her entire life, and we credit Carla for counseling us on how to keep her that way. Like so many purebred dogs these days, Miniature Schnauzers can be a problematic breed. Our dog prior to Jasper was a very sick girl for much of her life. In part, I blame the irresponsible breeder from whom we bought her. Shauna discovered Carla after much research and after we had learned that she had selectively bred out many of the diseases that plague Miniature Schnauzers. Recently, we were in touch with her, and hope we are lucky enough to acquire another one of her dogs. Carla may retire soon, and this next one might be the last litter she offers. Regardless, we value her friendship and guidance. She truly loves all animals and her humanity is palpable.

In a recent phone conversation with Carla, we discussed her various accomplishments, and Shauna and I learned that, not only had she been a successful dog breeder for much of her life, but she had led another, incredible life as well. We told her she should write a book, only to find that she was part way into writing her autobiography. The other day, she forwarded to us some of what she’d written so far. Shauna, her mom, and I have read it and were all astounded by this woman’s journey.

I sometimes speak in my songwriting show about the art of listening. These days, because I am bombarded with so much information, my attention span is shrinking. As a songwriter, the most important asset I have is my ability to observe, and to listen. In this fast-paced world, it can be a hard skill to master. It seems as if the boorish and the well-promoted command our attention, while so many more worthy stories go unrecognized. Reading Carla’s unfinished autobiography reminds me that there are so many wonderful, untold stories, stories that connect us all. Every so often I get a glimpse of my impatience, and I try to keep it in check. Perhaps even one of those stress puppies tailgating me in Huntsville has a good story to tell. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the erosion of compassion and empathy in our world today, and I struggle with this daily. I try to remain open and listen to the quiet heroes and role models that drift through my life. They give me hope.

Thursday, July 04, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 7/4/19

The Miss Buffalo In The Buffalo Harbour

A belated Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends, and Happy 4^th of July to all my friends stateside. I didn’t want to go an entire week without writing this report, but I am a little late. As I am still a yank, I suppose the 4^th is an appropriate day to post. I could make the excuse that it was because of all the festivities surrounding Canada Day, but in truth the week just got away from me. I was in Huntsville on Canada Day to attend the first ever Hunters Bay Radio Canada Day music festival (“Canadafest”), featuring bands from Huntsville to London, England. The weather was beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed the day. Huntsville’s River Mill Park venue is a great place to hear music, and although there were likely other Canada Day events taking place in Huntsville, nothing beats a free music festival by the waterfront. Attendance was respectable, and I expect that next year’s festival will be an even bigger success.

As an American, I am tempted to devote this entire report (but won’t) to the latest atrocity foisted upon us by Donald The Imbecile. Nothing says Happy 4^th of July like placing Army tanks in front of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C.. Let’s completely ruin the celebration of my country’s independence by showing off our military might with a garish display of weaponry, smack dab in the middle of our nation’s capital. This tasteless sabre rattling is just one more in a series of undiplomatic blunders which more resemble the dictators Rump is embracing than the actions of a responsible leader of the Free World. I’m surprised “His Orangeness” didn’t order a fireworks display to emblazon the sky with his likeness. The antithesis of diplomacy, Rump wants to turn a 4^th of July celebration into a self-aggrandizing political rally, and it turns my stomach. There, I did it in a paragraph.

I love fireworks, and I particularly loved explosives in my ill-spent youth. I’m not talking about lady fingers, or even cherry bombs; I’m talking about construction-grade explosives. A friend used to buy a gross of M-80’s shortly before this holiday, off the back of a pickup truck from a nice little old lady, who would mysteriously appear in downtown Buffalo shortly before the 4^th, then return to the bowels of hell wherefrom she came. There’s nothing like a well-placed M-80 to wake the dead. We also used to drive our boats into the Buffalo Harbour for the annual fireworks display on the waterfront, and that was usually an adventure. Lots of people who own boats are not particularly well versed in the common sense rules of boating, and when one adds alcohol into the equation, that is a recipe for disaster.

Of all the fireworks displays I have viewed from the Buffalo waterfront, one stands out. At the time I owned a classic 1957 Chris Craft Sea Skiff utility, I, along with a group of my friends, motored to the Buffalo Harbour for the fireworks display. For some reason, the boating crowd was particularly unruly that night, and there seemed to be a lot of heavy drinking going on. The police boats were very busy, as some of the more inexperienced boaters moored in the inner harbor, directly in the path of a well-marked channel, meant to be kept clear for the passage of The Miss Buffalo tour boat. One boat, a large cruiser, was not only in the path of the Miss Buffalo, but its drunken passengers were shooting off hand-held Roman candles at the other boats. Before the police could get to these bozos, fate intervened, and the Miss Buffalo came motoring through. As she sounded her unmistakable horn, none of the offending boaters in her path were prepared to pull up their anchors fast enough to avoid the inevitable. As impressive as the fireworks display was, nothing was as entertaining as watching that 100+ foot tour boat barrel through the Buffalo Harbour, dragging five or ten unlucky boats by their tangled mooring lines off her stern. As these drunken idiots banged into each other, scrambling to cut their mooring lines, hundreds of the more responsible boaters cheered and honked their horns. Karma is indeed a bitch. Again, Happy Canada Day week to all my Canadian readers, and Happy 4^th of July, to my American readers. I am thankful to live in a free country; and my greatest hope is that it will always remain so.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 6/24/19

Flock Of Seagulls

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that escapism seems to be overtaking the film industry? A while back, perhaps during the last Oscars, I remarked that I was tired of all the emphasis Hollywood was placing upon superhero movies, and fantasy movies in general. Yes, I have an imagination, and I enjoy a good fantasy film, but there are so many interesting, real, and new stories to tell. I also suggested that the reason those big budget Marvel movies and Game-Of-Thrones-style fantasies are so popular, especially now, is because there is heightened trepidation about the state of the real world. Donald The Imbecile, as I have newly crowned him, routinely flirts with international disaster, and American politics has begun to resemble the World Wrestling Federation. Vision, creativity, and leadership are sorely lacking, and this is reflected in the music to which we listen.

Billy Macpherson, a musician friend with whom I recently sang a duet in the Hunters Bay Radio fundraiser event at Huntsville’s Algonquin Theatre, gave me an interesting article to read the other day. It was written by singer-song writer/ playwright Ian Tamblyn, and in it, he traces the gradual decline of popular music as a valued art form. The gist of the article is that the digitalization of music has facilitated that decline. Once an expensive venture, largely controlled by big record companies, the recording and promotion of music had become much easier and cheaper with the emergence of digital recording. Gradually, a new generation of listeners, raised in the digital age, came to believe that they shouldn’t have to pay for recorded music. Why buy the cow when the milk is free? No longer are fans buying (or listening) to entire albums of music. Now they buy, or download for free, only the songs they choose. While the field of talented artists continues to grow exponentially, the rewards for being creative and talented are getting harder to reap. I realize this sounds like Jamie the fuddy-duddy, ranting about the “music these days”. I confess I am a little grumpy today. Still, I think that there are more young people these days listening to the music my generation likes than there were young people from my generation, listening to the music our parents liked. By the way, I’m not saying I don’t like Hip Hop or Rap – there is a sub-culture of those two genres about which I am learning and have come to respect and appreciate – I’m talking about what is being played as pop music on commercial radio today.

This week, I decided to broadcast another all request theme show, and I put up a post on Facebook asking for weird, bizarre, goofy, bubble-gummy, and otherwise unusual pop songs that my listeners remember from their past. In my opinion, even the terrible novelty songs from the distant past seem pretty good to me, when compared to the soul-sucking auto-tuned, synthesized sameness of much of today’s pop music. It all goes back to what I suggested at the beginning of this report. In my opinion, imagination is on injured reserve. In the five hours after asking for quirky pop songs, I had 43 responses. Typically, I will receive somewhere between 60 and 100 song suggestions in the month leading up to one of these theme-based all-request shows with a theme, but there may be more for this one. Next month on Lyrical Workers, I will place emphasis on Canadian pop music. I fully expect to get some imaginative selections suggested by my listeners. They have not let me down so far. I know that I will have a lot of fun putting that show together. Yes, of course Yummy, Yummy, Yummy by Ohio Express will be on the playlist. It’s one of my favorites! What is YOUR goofy pop tune choice??

Monday, June 17, 2019

The Oppenheimer Report 6/17/19

Another Father’s Day has come and gone, and I am always reminded of my dad when the day rolls around. If you have a good dad, I hope you appreciate or appreciated him, not just on Father’s Day, but every day he is alive. Anyone who has been reading this report for a while knows that I have great love and respect for my departed parents. Sometimes, when I’m out and about, and I see a boomer caring for his or her elderly parent, I am reminded of some of the challenges my family faced when my parents got old. Both my mom and dad lived well into their 90s, and I might have been one of the first of my circle of friends to face those challenges. There were some difficult times. Someone once suggested to me that that the most horrible thing for an elder to experience is the loss of their ability to think and reason. I’m not sure I agree. My mom was in a state of advanced Lewy Body dementia for almost five years before she passed. While caring for her was complicated and challenging, I think her deterioration was harder on her loved ones and her caregivers than it was on her. She and my then nonagenarian dad spent their last years at home, accompanied by round the clock caregivers. I think all of it was harder on my father, because was relatively clear-headed until he passed at 98. A fiercely independent man, he had difficulty coping with the loss of his dignity, and the gradual erosion of his quality of life. As our elderly population grows, and more of my peers are facing the challenges of caring for their elderly parents, it’s easy for both the children and the parent to lose perspective. The Golden Years are not always so golden.

I remember sitting with my dad at his bedside one night, shortly before he passed on, and he told me he felt as if he had no purpose. He wanted to die. I am sure other children have had this experience with their elder parents, but I did not know what to do with that information. Dad had lost his perspective on what he had achieved in his life, and how much his life had positively impacted others. The next morning, I wrote him a long letter, and in it I pointed out some of the things he’d forgotten about his numerous achievements in life. It didn’t matter if he could no longer balance a check book, or to change the furnace filters by himself. He had done a lot of wonderful, unselfish things, and he’d been a great dad. I just wanted him to know that his son respected him and loved him for the good man he had so consistently been. Old age can be an emotional mine field, and it might be the hardest mental challenge I have ever encountered. If it was hard on me, I cannot imagine what it was like for my dad. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying, if you have (had) good parents be thankful. My parents weren’t perfect, no parents are, but they taught me the meaning of love, and no matter what happens to me now, I am armed with the best defense I could ever hope to have.

Last Thursday night was notable for several reasons. First, we held a very successful, well-attended HBR fundraiser concert at the Algonquin Theatre in Huntsville, wherein over thirty local musicians, organized by our talented fearless leader Sean Cotton, re-created the legendary Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen concert. After a high energy show, we all headed over to the Huntsville Brewhouse to watch the Raptors beat the Golden State Warriors for their first ever NBA championship in Raptors history. What a thrill it was to watch this historic event with an enthusiastic crowd in a bar! As I write this, Shauna and I are watching the Raptors victory parade presently creeping towards Toronto’s City Hall. There are reportedly over 2 Million people celebrating in and around Nathan Phillips Square, and this may be one of Canada’s proudest moments in a long time. I’m happy for Toronto fans, and delighted to see the country celebrating so happily.