Some trails, such as the Coast Trail from Palomarin, are more popular than others. Some trailheads, such as Bear Valley, have larger parking areas, while some, such as the Palomarin Trailhead, are very limited. Some trails allow for social distancing and some do not. If you get to a trail and the Palomarin Trailhead and the parking lot is full, please choose another trail to hike. Let's all do our part to reduce resource impacts and prevent the spread of COVID-19. There are lots of places to visit in the park and many other hikes from which to choose.
Amerie, All I Have full album zip
It is 2045 and the protagonist of Bruce Sterling's 1998 novelDistraction, a young pol named Oscar Valparaiso who happens tobe a clone, repairs to a half-wrecked Louisiana town where the beachhouses were long ago moved up into an abandoned cow pasture. As hesups on a genetically altered crayfish the size of a lobster, a stringquartet strikes up a minuet: "Typical Anglo ethnic music. It wasamazing how many Anglos had gone into the booming classical musicscene. Anglos seemed to have some talent for rigid, linear music thatless troubled ethnic groups couldn't match." But never fear. Thoughthe Chinese have destroyed the U.S. economy by putting all oursoftware online, life remains "doable" in this "big, hot, Greenhouseswamp"; as one Cajun operative puts it, "The women are good-lookin',and the music really swings!" And though many harbor a bias againstAnglos--"the most violent ethnic group in America," with "white-collarcrime rates right off the charts"--the best pop music in the worldcomes from the Netherlands, where holding off the sea is a way oflife. Distraction was on my mind in re the 32nd or 33rd Pazz& Jop Critics' Poll because it glances off two key but apparentlyunrelated 2005 music stories. One of these is obvious. ThoughNonesuch's 129th-place Our New Orleans 2005 will go down inhistory as the finest charity comp since Red Hot & Blue,Katrina didn't make our album list, poking through only on twosingles: the Legendary K.O.'s 15th-place "George Bush Doesn't CareAbout Black People," which turned our big winner's greatest soundbiteinto an online protest rap that easily outpolled the Bright Eyesdownload "When the President Talks to God," and Amerie's No. 2 "1Thing," which came marching in behind an indestructible ZiggyModeliste beat.
There's more to be said about Anglo ethnic music, and New Orleanstoo. Both dwarf Kanye West. But they're whole traditions. He's asingle artist--which doesn't mean a singles artist, though this yearhe won in that category as well. Not to hang too much off a two-albumoeuvre, but having cruised to first place with The CollegeDropout last year, West did well just to release a follow-up in2005. That Late Registration should prove his secondconsecutive full-length to come on strong and then keep getting bettermakes him look like one of those rare "actual genius"singer-songwriters that singles consumer advocate Joshua Cloverconsiders an inadequate excuse for our hero-hyping electoralritual. With The College Dropout it was jokes that remainedfunny while they got serious; with Late Registration it's musicso rich you never tire of unlayering its meanings. Brion contributesmostly synthesizer parts exploited for organic color--the violentviolins that rev "Crack Music" three minutes in are an atypicallyexplicit case. The famed arranger ceded the actual arranging to West,who absorbs Brion's European bent into a basically black flow. Andyou'd best believe this Panther's son with the line of credit at Jacoband Co. is basically black.
I've had it with the caviling. In a year when the fashion inhip-hop realness was a grotesque crack nostalgia--powered, in the caseof Young Jeezy (No. 39 album) and Three 6 Mafia (No. 10 single), byAnglo-ethnic victory-fanfare and scary-strings beats whose wholly'hood authenticity was indistinguishable from their Hollywoodschlockitude--moralistic sellouts have got it going on. Knowing you'rethe best isn't arrogance, and knowing what's right doesn't require avow of poverty. The guy rhymes about conflict diamonds andself-appointed Africanists interrogate his annotation; he blurts--orplans out, more power to him if so--an ugly truth about our hideouspresident and is taken to task for not constructing a platform aroundit. Then there are the wheezes about his workaday rapping skills, andhey, he's not the handsomest fellow you ever saw. So let's bringit.
On the evidence, Kanye West is nothing less than the youngcentury's most gifted popular musician. Everything indicates a decentman who's canny about putting his decency into artistic practice--thewidespread misapprehension that the poll-topping "Gold Digger" is"sexist" is one of many proofs that he's smarter than his critics. Hisrhymes have enormous emotional range--the one about his dying grandmachokes me up every time--and when he falls in love he will writeinteresting songs about it. Not only that, West produced two otherfinishers in his spare time: Common's well-spoken 15th-place Beand John Legend's super-ordinary 27th-place Get Lifted. He'sturned himself into such a cultural presence that his cameos on thesealbums are musical highlights--he's more the voice of common sensethan the former Common Sense is.
Beck and Sleater-Kinney rank with Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Wilco (2005live album 91st), Lucinda Williams (2005 live album three mentions),Bj (2005 soundtrack one mention), and Yo La Tengo (2005 comp onemention) as '90s-based perennials in the Morrison-XTC manner. Theyfinish higher because they still command consensus, an ever rarerthing. Nevertheless, they constitute a rather modest cohort, fromwhich the Roots, 148th-place Stephen Malkmus, 61st-place Madonna(though "Hung Up" scored), and now 95th-place Missy Elliott haveapparently departed. This endurance shortage reflects the megabizcrackdown on long-term catalog investments. But it also bespeaks ayounger electorate tied to the Web as both writers and consumers. It'slike when three music weeklies competed for the Britfan's fad-impairedattention span by putting new next big things on their smudgy coversevery other issue, only sped up. In principle, file sharing and musicblogs mean we can all listen to everything for nothing, andlet's-start-a-webzine content provision exploits what NewYorker business columnist James Surowiecki calls "the wisdom ofcrowds." Unfortunately for audiotopia, listening happens in real time,something even the nuttiest netcrits don't have enough of, in partbecause there's too much music out there and in part because they'repaid peanuts-to-zip for writing about it. And unfortunately forgroupthink, coordinating collective knowledge is impossiblytricky. Pazz & Jop's methods are imperfect. But so are Amazon's,ILM's, and Metacritic's. So why doncha just listen to your UnclePoobah?
What-have-you-done-for-me-lately is evil later. The way music hasworked for me as an adult is that something that sounds good one yearretains its zip. Timely pizzazz evolves into aesthetic impact; momentshave legs. Longing to rewrite history, young crits love them their newoldsters. When an intelligent journeywoman like Bettye LaVette outdoesherself on two straight releases (though her Dennis Walker cheatingalbum had stronger songs and rawer soul than 2005's better-distributedJoe Henry job), she's hailed as the new Shuggie Otis, I mean LorettaLynn. But netsters have made such a life project of hopping on bandsthat they think nothing of filing Four Tet away with that Limp Bizkitembarrassment they fell for when they were 17. Franz Ferdinand's 26thplace was just a hype correction, and now they'll fade from view orfigure out what they have to say. But learning to hear Kieran Hebdentook effort for an old guy like me, and I wish his constituency wouldshow him some love. In years to come he'll evoke his time more deeplyif less acutely than Franz Ferdinand--unless he has to be rediscoveredlike Bettye LaVette.
If my appetite for the literal isn't au courant, sue me. These daysI'm such an old fart I even use albums to help me understandsingles. James Murphy seems like a nice guy in interviews, but as anartist he's a scenester, and the poker-faced ennui of LCD Soundsystemtaught me once and for all that it wasn't just arthritic knees andparenting hours that kept me away from techno--it was the disco way ofescapism. Occasionally the right dancefloor hit--say "Hate It or LoveIt" or "Get Low," true electronica being so fungible it rarely makesour charts--can enlarge the soul, but most of them are too generalizedto waste fun on. That extends even to the Gorillaz' fun-enough "FeelGood Inc." I like their DOR Demon Days better than the DOR LCD Soundsystem because it's at once more utopian and morepessimistic, meaning full of hope indulged or dashed. But I preferboth artists' wholes to their singles-charting parts; hell, I preferJames McMurtry's longform to his magnificent "We Can't Make It Here."My long-held belief is that pop music is a way of knowledge as well asa way of pleasure. We need its knowledge desperately right now--thatelusive sense of humans-after-all not just struggling for fun, asSimon Frith once put it, but determined to keep living fully whiletheir supposed betters rob or disdain them. As chunks rather thanscraps of history, albums--like literalism, come to that--tell us thisintuition that comes over us isn't just a trick of perception,evanescent and disposable.
Who knows what will become of New Orleans music? With WyntonMarsalis sticking his status in, you can bet it will include classicaltraining, which long before Jelly Roll Morton fed into the raciallystriated city's black music, always informing the street cultureKatrina swamped. But bet as well that it will include swingin'--sofar, Anglo ethnic music is just a flavor in what remains afundamentally African American conception. As a particular skill,however, swing in 2005--whatever the case in 2045, when 2005'scultural interventions will have vanished into the apparentlynatural--was also a conservatory matter. Just ask any jazz guy howmany Berklee grads he knows. And note that by Marsalis's standards ourmost classical finisher is also our most swinging--the Monk-Coltranefind, a major and probably unrepeatable addition to both geniuses'oeuvres just like everybody claims, and easily the most traditionaljazz album ever to convince our voters it was pazz. Yet when I A-B'dit up against Kanye, I found Late Registration not only deeperbut just as much fun. The Rough Guide to the Music of theSahara, which to me sounds as ancient as sand even though it'smodern to Tuareg, Songhai, and Berber ears, is just deeper. You wantfun, ask Amadou & Mariam. 2ff7e9595c
Comments