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Funny thing happened saturday night. Roomie and I were hitting the grocery store for our weekly run for coke and smokes(yeah I need to quit, I know) and you know how they play musc as you shop to add to an environment to make you spend. Well they were playing "Year of the Cat" by Al Stewart and I was remembering some better Al Stewart as YotC was rather 70s and boring. I mentioned it to Roomie and we continued shopping. But when we got home I googled him and found out he is still writing and performing, and I downloaded the two songs I remembered as being much better. Turns out they are considered classics by some and yeah I'd have to agree. Stewart came out with an album in 1973 called "Past, Present and Future" that attempted a song for each decade of the 20th scentury at the time. Well there were two songs off that album that actually got a lot of radio play on local stations before the day of the infamous playlist and both still hold up today as creative and poetic. They were definitely not top 40 material at all. One of them is called "Road to Moscow" and was meant to cover the 40s and the other was the final song on the album called "Nostrodamus". I had never heard of Nostrodamus but I looked him up based on the song. God that was well over 30yrs ago and I was in junior high school at the time. What drew me into these songs were the lyrics, listening to them again last night the sheer musicality of them impressed me. He used balalaika music in "Road to Moscow" and it worked!

The words though are haunting. And yes I found the lyrics to both songs online. "Road to Moscow" tells of the German invasion of Russia threw the eyes of a soldier who faught all through the war only to be sent to the gulag at the end. It is based on a story in Soltzhenitsyn's novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I think it more impressive than "Nostrodamus" for the poetry and musicality of the work. The story as told in the novel is of a man in the gulag who faught in the Great Patriotic War who was captured for one day by the Germans, he got away and back to the Soviet lines. He went on to fight all the way into Berlin but when they returned the KGB(or whatever they were calling it at that time) while debriefing him found out about the capture and sent him to the gulag because Stalinist policy at the time was that all POWs were traitors to the state.The song ends with the soldier realising he won't be going home. Sad but very well done.

Roomie is going to Houston again this week. God it will be too quiet here again. He was happy about the super bowl, I only watch for the commercials and halftime show. Sir Paul McCartney brought some real class to it this yr. Oh he was good and so much better than the crap they've put on the past. It was a good show without the bread and circuses atmosphere of the last few shows. No wardrobe malfunctions. I could not believe last yr how fast everyone left Janet Jackson out to dry on that. Oh well guess everyone is pulling back and trying to get a bit more tasteful. Personally I had less problem seeing her boob than the commercials shilling viagra/cialis/.levitra last yr. I am beginning to think that medicine thinks a pill will solve everything. Can't get it up? Oh here's a pill! Right the most sexual organ in the body is your brain and if your brain is worried about paying bills or getting a job or something like that sex is not going to come easily if at all. The whole idea that all a woman needs to do is wave it in a man's face is insulting both him and her. I think medical science needs to back off and look at other things before writing the prescription for that crap. That's a personal opinion nothing more. After seeing a kerfluffle in another LJ concerning the female version of viagra I have no desire to see one here.