Father's Day is coming

This is important for two reasons:

First, traditionally, the Peter McManus Stickball Tournament is held one week after Father's Day. Although these days, with the explosion of Chelsea, the crowd is oppressively big. Like Easter (in so many ways), people come to McManus for the Stickball scene, not as a regular thing. These individuals are to be sneered at.

Second, I've requested from my children--good people but, I am here to tell you, dear reader, horribly undependable in matters such as these (I'm still waiting for the flexible spatulas I asked for for Christmas)--the deluxe version of the reissued version of "Exile on Mainstreet."

I was reading a fascinating article about it in The Mothership and said to myself something along the lines of "Is it possible I don't have Exile on Mainstreet on my iTunes library?" Because I have a lot of Rolling Stones on there, I can assure you.

And the answer was no. I didn't. And rather than just click the button (in which case, I could be listening to it now), I thought something along the lines of "This would be a great thing to tell my children I want for Father's Day." As I may have mentioned, my children are good people but horribly undependable in matters such as these.

So I wait. Like Buddha. Serene in my expectation of good things; emotionally compartmentalized enough to withstand the bad. Which is as we should all be.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs from the Times piece, written by Ben Ratliff:

A LESSER-KNOWN version of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup,” found on the bonus disc of the new reissue of the band’s 1972 album, “Exile on Main St.,” seems to me the best thing the Stones ever did.

It’s country gospel gone lurid, and it seems to rise up out of a nap. Nicky Hopkins’s piano chords circle around a G at slow tempo in an echoey room. Charlie Watts starts pumping a bass drum at the third beat of the second bar; he’s either late or early, but finding his way. Piano and drums roll up to the D chord at the beginning of the first verse, and Mick Taylor bends two guitar strings under Mick Jagger’s opening line: “I’m the man on the mountain — yes, come on up.” Onward, Mr. Watts weaves around the beat, smashing down on his high-hat, forming weird and clattering snare-drum fills. He both shapes and follows the group’s euphoria and the music’s subtle acceleration. The Stones gather around the song like pickpockets, jostling and interfering with it. Keith Richards, playing rhythm guitar and singing backup, quits harmonizing and starts to shout.

This performance represents to me the sound of “Exile” in idealized form: a dark, dense, loosely played, semiconscious tour through American blues, gospel and country music, recorded in a basement in France. “Exile” was made around the Stones’ creative peak and in unusual circumstances: they were tax exiles, forced to live away from home.

I can't wait.

That said, I'd like to call attention to one aspect of the NYT that annoys me. That being their apparently completely random decisions regarding to what particular terms they should offer the reader a hyperlink. I'm ok with the main Stones link, but if Mick gets a link I can't understand why Keith doesn't. And Mick Taylor offers probably the most interesting stuff (on some level) and he gets nothing either.

It should additionally be noted that the hyperlinks The Times offers are to related articles within The Times' archives, not to the web itself. As an experiment, I typed Keith Richards into the archives' search box. And of course there is a ton of stuff. Of course there is--he's Keith Richards.

Then I typed in Mick Taylor. About whom, actually, there was very little.

Anyway, Father's Day is coming.