Category: mitch
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Experience Vs. Idealism. 15 Rounds.
This blog has had a constant, self-imposed tension to it, at least to me. Idealistic, Small-L Liberal Mitch is a free speech absolutist for reasons not the least of which being when people who find not only disagreeable but hateful are speaking in the open, then they’re doing less skulking through back alleys and plotting…
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Big Changes
…coming Monday.
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Open Letter To An Entire Generation, Maybe Two
To: Millennials, And Maybe Some ZeepersFrom”. Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant, Millie Parent And Generational AgnosticRe: Stop Digging Dear Millennials – and many of you in Gen Z, It’s not like I don’t understand the anger. When I was in high school and college, the “Baby Boom” was barely entering its prime years. The oldest ones…
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So What Was With All That Stuff About Music And Relatives And Old Bosses, Merg?
I took a little vacation. That’s kind of a big deal. I don’t take vacations. It’s a running gag among my European co-workers that I”m the classic American. I’ve never taken a vacation of longer than five days that didn’t involve visiting family or some major household project. So I went to Norway from October…
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Where Credit Is Due: Epilogue
Those of you who’ve been watching this blog for years may have figured it out – when I have a loooong anthology series, I’m often doing something other than writing every morning. Two anthology series at the same time – “Soundtrack” and “Where Credit Is Due?” Unprecedented, right? It was. I actually took an honest-to-God…
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Soundtrack, Part 9
Of all the music I’ve talked about this past two weeks, this one may be the closest thing to an emotional time machine. My own baggage notwithstanding, if you built a time capsule and wanted to put “The perfect 1980s song” in it, this would be a candidate; the shufflying synth drums and faux orchestra…
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Where Credit Is Due: Don Vogel
The Twin Cities remembers Don Vogel as one of the most instinctively funny people ever to appear on the radio. “The Round Mound of Sound”, the blind guy who was going to drive you home. I remember a lot of different Dons. He was a guy who’d been blind since infancy, and who lived with…
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Soundtrack, Part 8
My first couple of weeks in the Twin Cities, I spent a lot of time in the car. And Twin Cities radio stations spent a lot of time playing this song. I’m not sure if it ever went to #1, but in a month of memorable music, it was perhaps the most chant-along-worthy thing on…
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Where Credit Is Due: Dr. James Blake
“Mitch, you’re not a Democrat. And I can prove it”. Dr. Blake looked across his desk at me. I was afraid he might be right. Jim Blake was the son of a New York cop, and still had the Queens accent to show for it. I didn’t know much more about his background, other than…
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Soundtrack, Part 7
Throughout this series, I’ve focused on memories triggered by music that is cemented into my brain as sublime. But it wasn’t all good. There was plenty of music that ranged from awkward to awful. And the more I write about it, the more of it comes back to me.. This was the second or third…
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Where Credit Is Due: Bob Richardson
It was the long, hot summer after tenth grade when I was looking for a way to make more money than the buck a lawn I was getting from mowing and raking (In retrospect, I think my parents and grandma had quite the racket going). But I had no idea what I actually wanted to…
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Soundtrack, Part 6: Notes From Underground
Long ago, I told the story of my first Sunday in the Twin Cities. It was a free day, without job hunting or much of anything to do. So I drove downtown. I visited First Avenue, had a burger, looked at Murray’s and vowed that someday, when I had a cool job and an awesome…
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Where Credit Is Due: Bill King And His Employees
Bill King wasn’t your typical Presbyterian minister. He spent, by his telling, a good chunk of his teenage years in one form of juvenile detention or another. He was a bit of a hoodlum until well into his teens. As he described it once, he didn’t get the right to vote until he was into…
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Soundtrack, Part 5
Nothing about my first week in the Twin Cities ever smacked me upside the head quite as hard as my first rush hour. I drove Cedar to 494 to try to get to 35W, to drive from Burnsville to Vadnais Heights for an interview. And 494 during the morning rush hour is still a cardio…
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Where Credit Is Due: Don And Pat Hall
In couples terms, Don and Pat Hall were the American Dream. Don was a kid from a fairly unsuccessful farm in Starkweather, North Dakota, who nonetheless had athletic talent to burn. He got a scholarship to come to Jamestown College, in Jamestown, where he lettered in Football, Basketball, Track and Baseball for all four years,…
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Soundtrack, Part 4
Yesterday’s (and Tuesday’s) entry was a bit of eighties apocrypha, meaningful maybe only to me. Today’s? Sublime, and a pretty universal pop culture reference. Do I even need to introduce it? The video isn’t just representative of the golden age of music video. The rotoscope noir-in-color is the golden age of music video. MTV would…
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Where Credit Is Due: Grandma Bea
My Grandma Bea was not an effusive woman. If there’s a stereotype of rural Scandinavians in America, it’s that they are pretty emotionally reserved, in a way that comes across as cold to some, passive-aggressive to others, and often just funny for those who get it. Example: when I was born, Dad called his mother…
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Soundtrack, Part 3
My first couple of days in the Cities, I was staying on a friend’s couch in Burnsville, working through my list of job leads (which was short) and going through the want ads to try to find some kind of income. Which left a little time for watching that new toy I’d found, MTV. And…
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Where Credit Is Due: Oscar Berg
Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg. Berg? I have no idea. I…
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Soundtrack, Part 2
The two weeks before I moved to Minneapolis, I wrapped up on my roofing and siding job. I had a boom box to help while away the lonely hours of hammering and sawing. To save battery power (four D batteries ain’t cheap), I usually tuned it to KFYR in Bismark – the only non-country music…
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Where Credit Is Due: Berndt Oleson Græsli
I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to be Berndt Oleson Græsli. He was born in 1863, named Berndt Oleson – “Berndt, son of Ole”, in a tiny farm hamlet named “Græsli”. a place small enough that being known as your father’s son was plenty specific enough. Græsli was in the hills of…
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Soundtrack, Part 1
John Hughes wrote movies for eveyrone – but they focused through the lens of angsty upper-middle-class kids from the north burbs of Chicago. Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. even Home Alone (angsty tween!). And their soundtracks reflected those kids; Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Simple Minds – just sing…
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Where Credit Is Due, Part I
I’m not a big “podcast” person. But since I got a car that reads my phone’s bluetooth without a lot of muss and fuss, I wind up listening to some of them anyway. It’s probably not a huge leap that I found my way to Mike Rowe’s The Way I Heard It podcast. It started…
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Soundtrack
Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25. It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music…