Elvis Costello’s ‘The Last Year of My Youth’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Elvis Costello is 62 today. It might be obvious to anyone who visits these pages that I am something of an amateurish fan of his work. He is touring America (near me) this fall with a concert based on his 1982 album, Imperial Bedroom. This column first appeared in May:

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The phrase must have been much on Elvis Costello’s mind the summer of 2014: he was going to perform a set of solo shows at Carnegie Hall in June and he had even titled the shows “The Last Year of My Youth.” But he did not have a song with that title.

He did have a song that addressed aging, the folly and wonder of being middle-aged, a song called “45” that he debuted on The Tonight Show in the 1990s and then performed on his 2002 album, When I Was Cruel. He was around that age at that time and found for himself a wealth of metaphors to being 45, from the end of World War II in 1945 (“bells are chiming in victory”), to 45 RPM records and what rock singles meant when he was young: “Bass and treble heal every hurt.” One reviewer, also in his mid 40s, wrote that “45” hit him so hard at the time, “I was shaking at the end” of the song. When I hit 45, I understood this thought about the song and I also understood the song; I also found that I understood the song better than I had the day before, when I was still 44.

The summer of 2014, Costello was turning 60, because math happens, and that phrase—”the last year of my youth”—must have been much on his mind.
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Today in History: #NPS100

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The National Park Service Organic Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on this date 100 years ago.

It created the National Park Service and established its jurisdiction in the Department of the Interior. The NPS was mandated “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” In the 1930s, historic sites such as the battlefield at Gettysburg and presidential homes were added to its mandate.
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Today in History: August 24

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The International Astronomical Union published an article, “Definition of a Planet in the Solar System: Resolutions 5 and 6,” ten years ago today. (The link is to a PDF file.)

In popular culture, what the IAU did ten years ago today was demote Pluto (seen above) from one of the classic nine planets of the solar system, the nine whose names we all grew up memorizing and reciting, to one of several or many or thousands of “dwarf planets,” leaving us with eight planets. Schoolchildren everywhere possibly find it odd that this elicited as much controversy as it did.

The article employed in an official way a term that had been around since the early 1990s: dwarf planet. A dwarf planet is an object that is massive enough to be a ball (in scientific terms, it is a spheroid that is in hydrostatic equilibrium) and orbits the Sun, but it is not massive enough to have cleared its lane through space.
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