Kenny Loggins

June 25, 2011 – This past week I found myself soggy from both gin-and-tonics and a rainstorm and sitting in a century-old concert hall listening to an orchestra play the themes from Jaws, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and E.T. Then I went backstage to meet Kenny Loggins. Sounds like one of those strange shifts that happen in dreams, right? But that's the deal I made when I jumped aboard this yellow submarine. You keep making life random, I'll keep living it.

Thanks to a friend of the family, my wife and I came into some last-minute free tickets to see the Boston Pops play a summer-themed concert at their small but elegant Symphony Hall at 301 Massachusetts Ave. Summer-themed basically meant a lot of baseball references, a lot of movie references, and one baseball movie reference. And it also gave the conductor license to toss golf balls into the crowd, apparently, while replica Greek and Roman statues looked down from their wall niches in either gentle approbation or disapprobation, I couldn’t tell which.

The centerpiece of the concert was a John Williams musical tribute (who conducted the Boston Pops for 15 years before the current conductor Keith Lockhart was handed the baton). That sounds like it should’ve been the prize in that cereal box, right? I mean, John Williams’ music has done more to influence the modern movie experience than Orville Redenbacher and whoever invented reclining seats combined, and to hear his music performed live is a rare treat since it takes like 40 people to play and they’re usually all off doing more serious music that wasn’t used to backdrop a guy in a fedora running from a giant rolling rock.

However, for the finale, a thin man in a black shirt and goatee walked on stage with a guitar and two back-up musicians (not counting the scores of people seated behind them with polished wooden and brass instruments held in various positions like weapons before a battle). Kenny Loggins. His level of relevance: He’s got a bit of expertise in the whole movie soundtrack business.

If you’re into adult contemporary or find yourself in dentist chairs a lot, you’re probably a fan of Loggins. The rest of us know him as the guy who made it possible to experience 80s movies from the cassette decks of our cars. He’s best known for I’m Alright from Caddyshack (1980), Footloose from the 1984 movie of the same name, and Highway to the Danger Zone from Top Gun (1986). He also wrote Meet Me Halfway from Over the Top (1987), but doesn’t get as much recognition for it. Not his fault. It’s a movie about arm wrestling.

For the concert, he performed about a half-hour set that included a couple of his more popular non-soundtrack songs, before finishing up with I’m Alright and Footloose. I tweeted drunkenly about it at the time, but it bears sober repeating: I saw Kenny Loggins perform the theme from Caddyshack live. Wasn’t really on my bucket list, but I went back and put it on there so that I could cross it off.

I’m not a particular fan of Loggins (well, technically I am a fan of anybody who was even peripherally involved with Caddyshack), so when those free tickets came with backstage passes, we had to decide whether or not to take the time to spend an awkward few moments with a guy who’s been imploring audiences to “kick off their Sunday shoes” so long that we don’t even know what Sunday shoes even are anymore.

Just kidding. No decision needed to be made. I collect awkward moment in jeweled boxes that I display on top of our toilet tanks.

So, after the concert, we wandered through the ornate hall, past the merchandise stand hawking CDs, T-shirts, and panties with "Danger Zone" written on them, to a guarded door with a short line of genuine fans of his that didn’t all have passes but were hoping to catch a glimpse or an autograph. We’re kind of jerks.

We only hung with him for a few minutes. We weren’t being rushed by his entourage or anything, but as soon as we walked through the door we became hyper-aware that we didn’t have anything to say to him. He, on the other hand, seemed just as unsure (or post-performance weary, more likely). After all, he’s probably used to dealing with both fans and nonfans, but nonfans pretending to be fans? That takes a whole different set of people skills.

We exchanged some pleasantries, complimented him on his set, and then he was nice enough to pose for a few pics with us, during which I realized I didn’t know quite how to do that since I think I put my arm around him like he was a girl.

I don’t get my picture taken with many famous people in my line of life. In fact, so far it’s pretty much been Dan Aykroyd and Kenny Loggins. Which means I’m only like 44 more people away from getting my picture taken with all the performers on We Are the World.

Pompeii and Vesuvius, Part I: The Destroyed

June 18, 2011 – If an inescapable fiery cataclysm ever engulfs my town, some of my last thoughts will be about my loved ones. But not my very last thought. That’ll be, “One day me and my living room might be a tourist attraction.” And that’s Pompeii’s fault.

One of the most infamous disasters in the world, the destruction of Pompeii shows us how temporary our mighty cities can be...and then also shows us how permanent they can be. Story morals are confusing.

According to more Internet sources than I’m used to accessing, it happened this way. In 79 A.D., just one day after Vulcanalia, a Roman festival dedicated to its god of fire, the volcano Vesuvius threw its own little party after hundreds of years of being just an interesting landmark. It destroyed a few cities, but Pompeii became its most famous victim due to its size, extravagant culture, and the fact that it was the easiest to excavate (and monetize).

According to the latest scientific understanding of how much of a jerk a volcano can be, it's believed that the victims in Pompeii were killed quickly when a wave of 250-degree heat surged from Vesuvius, after which the volcano politely finished the job (or guiltily hid the evidence), burying its victims under scores of feet of ash and dirt and rock that rained for days.

The end. It was Atlantis time for Pompeii.

Except that the land is a less greedy invader than the sea. In the late 1500s artifacts started being discovered in the area, but it wasn’t until the 1700s and the discovery of nearby Herculaneum, another city buried by the event, that its rediscovery really motivated archeological work to start in earnest. Er, Pompeii.

Today, this exhumed city is a train stop populated by roving bands of school children and tourists who cavort in its private residences and take breaks in its modern, air-conditioned pizza cafeteria. This is the part where people usually quote Bob Dylan.

We did Pompeii as part of a long day trip from Rome that also included a trek up Vesuvius that I’ll save for the second part of this article. We made early-morning reservations on a train departing from Roma Termini and then enjoyed an easy three-hour trek to Naples, where we changed to the Circumvesuviana, the local commuter train, for a half-hour leg, getting off at the Pompeii Suvi stop, a few steps from the entrance to the ruins of the ancient city.

If you don’t sign up for a tour or come with a tour group, you basically have free (or rather entrance fee-paid) run of the city. You can see the colonnaded ruins of its temples, walks its stone-paved streets, jump into any random private residence to see the many remarkable and remarkably preserved murals, and generally just experience how fascinating, and a lot of fun, the remnants of tragedy can be.

It’s big enough that you’d need to spend all day there to see everything, but also repetitious enough (ruined house after ruined house after ruined house) that a few hours is all you need to really get Pompeii. Still, how often will you get the chance to walk the streets of a 2,500-year-old city that’s been almost completely preserved. I mean, in Rome you’re only walking on the top, modernized strata of many millenniums’ worth of history. In Pompeii, you’re walking through the original strata almost as-was.

And you do so in the ever-present and ominous shadow of its killer and preserver. While we tripped over its large cobblestones and documented the place with our cameras better than an army of trained archeologists using field notes, Vesuvius hid itself within an apologetic aura of clouds. So we lost a bit of the drama of being able to see the dragon from the perspective of the dragoned. It did make for some pretty cool pictures once we were up in those clouds, though. Again, Part 2. I guess “Part II” would be more appropriate.

We were there for about half a day and we basically toured it using our Spidey senses, so we didn’t see everything. But we saw some cool[ed] stuff. Highlights were certainly the surviving murals that were both interesting in themselves and for breaking up the monotony of crumbling stone wall after crumbling stone wall. Also, the fully excavated amphitheater, which you can enter and stand in the center like a Roman gladiator…or Pink Floyd (Thanks for that tip, @sevenmileswest).

My personal favorite was the brothel, with its stone beds and erotic art. Not because I’m a pervert. That’s irrelevant. But because how many times do you get the chance to walk into one with your wife and friends in the name of history and take pictures of each other in the name of tourism. If you’re answer is any number above 0, than you’re the reason there’s a comment section at the end of this piece. Also, I know an instrument-of-God volcano that would like a word with you.

Of course, you can see ruined Roman cities all over Italy. Pompeii has more than that. It has artifacts. And by artifacts I mean bodies. And by bodies I mean hollow human shapes. As compelling as it is to see the remains of the city, far more compelling are the remains of the people (and animals) who lived there.

What happened was, in excavating the city, workers would find human-shaped pockets of air where the body had rotted away and the surrounding solidified deposit had kept the form. Archeologists would inject a hardening foam into the hole and pull out the cast of the body in its exact final death throe. Unfortunately, the process all but destroys any remaining biological material, but you get to see how many of the Pompeians met their end. Crouching in terror, crawling in terror, writhing in terror, foxtrotting in terror.

You can see a few of these foam forms near the entrance to the city, right by the aforementioned cafeteria. They’re located in a long stone building, the front wall of which has been striped with iron bars, so that you look into its contents from the outside. The building contains shelves and shelves of pottery and statuary, but only a few bodies pushed into open spaces and spread apart for maximum crowd gawkage. There’s even a dog. Many more Pompeii artifacts and body casts (and erotic art) can be seen at the National Archeological Museum in nearby Naples, at other museums, and at the various traveling exhibits that constantly traverse the world. There are apparently plenty of bodies to go around.

We left Pompeii a bit dusty and a bit beat. It’s a lot of walking. A lot of saying “Look at this.” A lot of wandering and wondering if we’d been down this road before. A lot of ducking down alleyways and into buildings to avoid duck-and-duckling tour groups. We just wanted to collapse into a train seat, shove our faces into exotically flavored gelatos, and then sleep the sleep of the not-doomed. But we still had a volcano to climb.

Part II: Next, we meet the destroyer, Vesuvius itself, and look deep into its heaven-pointed maw. Oh, and here are more pics of Pompeii...the vertical ones that are difficult to wrap text around.

Before...

...After

Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee

June 6, 2011 – I don’t think I’ve ever seen an artifact in a museum that seemed more reluctantly displayed than the Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee. When I visited, which was a couple of years ago, it was in a small stand-alone case beside a large vent and up against an unobtrusive blank wall that you passed on entering the museum’s Native American exhibit. If you didn’t look behind you as you entered, you didn’t see it, and for some reason it seemed like the museum was okay with that.

But that could just be me projecting, based on the rather unstoried history of this smooth chunk of hieroglyphed stone.

Made of either quartzite or mylonite, the Mystery Stone looks for all the world like a Cadbury Creme Egg in both color and shape, although it’s about twice the size (so more like the UK version of the Easter treat). On its surface are carvings, the most prominent of which being a face, but it is also inscribed with a teepee, an ear of corn, a spiral, a circle, and other, more abstract symbols. Through its major axis has been drilled a hole that, like the rock itself, is small at the top and larger at the bottom. Overall, it doesn't look that remarkable.

However, when it was found in the ground during a fence installation project in 1872 near Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire, it apparently seemed remarkable, especially to Seneca Ladd, the businessman who organized the dig. He held onto the stone until his death 20 years later. All the usual guesses were made about its origin, but when it came down to it, nobody had a clue what it was or who made it, and that made it seem cool.

Ignorance makes a lot of things seem cool.

Today, we still don’t what it is or who made it. It's still a mystery...stone. However, experts are pretty sure the hole was bored with a machine. That’s enough to hurt its mystery right there, since the explanation seems to be “Some dude just made this for kicks, and relatively recently.”

After Ladd’s death, it found its way into the possession of the New Hampshire Historical Society, where they eventually gave it the aforementioned semi-embarrassed display in their Museum of New Hampshire History in the state capital of Concord, separated from the main displays of Native American and 1800s-era cultural artifacts, as well as items of modern-day interest, like a Segway prototype (invented in NH…we’ll make up for that at some point, I promise).

Actually, I guess the New Hampshire Historical Society is not completely embarrassed by it. I mean, it’s not too hard to find information about it on their website, they sell T-shirts featuring it, and they admit it’s the piece that receives the most inquiries. Still, judging by the exhibit display, you could tell that the museum curators didn’t know exactly what to do with it, and are at least wary of making too big a deal of it.

And, sure, one day we might learn that it’s the top of a lever from a time machine or the necklace bead (or kidney stone) of an ancient god, but its purpose, if it ever really had one, is probably a bit more prosaic. And deep down, everybody with a connection to or an interest in the stone, kind of knows it.