Born in a bad time.

Lately I've been reading books that leave me incredibly pissed off that I wasn't born at a different time. Case in several points:

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Caplan. I'm not sure what I find so appealing about living through the early stages of the Cold War. Maybe it's just the numerous references to the RAND corporation that make me envious. Fun fact: I learned about this book from a paparazzi photo of Renee Zellweger in which she was using it to shade her face from the camera's glare.

The Road To Woodstock, by Michael Lang. I could probably talk about this book all damned day, because as many of you know, I am a big fucking hippie and moving to Kingston has only made me embrace this aspect of my personality moreso than ever before. This book is full of amazing anecdotes about the festival and the days and months leading up to it and also includes full set lists and a timeline of performances. Every little side story seems like the best one yet, and I'd like to synopsize them all for you, but I'll leave it with this: I really, really wish I could have seen Pete Townshend smack Abbie Hoffman in the face with a guitar when he tried to commandeer The Who's set.

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, by Dervla Murphy. Dervla Murphy started cycling the world on her own in the 1960s, and she is TOUGH. Within the first twenty pages she gets attacked by wolves and totally fends them off with a pistol she's carrying in her saddlebag. She goes on to get in a fight on a bus in Afghanistan and basically tear things up across the globe, and she writes about these crazy things that happen to her on the trail with typical formal UK prose, and it is awesome fun to read. The copy I borrowed from the library is clearly an early edition, and has the publication values of an original Bobbsey Twins book, all cute line drawings of a lady on her bike passing camels and following a dotted line across a pre-USSR map of the mid-eastern world. I'm so glad no one threw this one out of the collection before I got to it.

Unrelated: I was listening to Cross Country Checkup on my drive back to Kingston today. It was all about the purported end of the economic crisis, and every caller had a sometimes absurd, always poignant anecdote that called bullshit on the notion that we're all on the mend. All that talk of mills shutting down left me with this song stuck in my head.



I have such a schoolgirl crush on early 70s Rick Danko.