Faces-Fading

Nobody knows exactly what to say …

"Faces in Cabs," Mark Heard
"Faces to the Window," Daniel Amos
"Facsimile," Vigilantes of Love
"Factory," Bruce Springsteen
"Factory," Melissa McClelland
"The Factory," Warren Zevon
"The Facts of Life," Talking Heads
"Fade Into You," Mazzy Star
"Fade Into You," Pedro the Lion
"Faded from the Winter," Iron & Wine
"The Fading Glory," Kangaroo

I fell for the band Kangaroo at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. We had standing-room-only tickets for the Folger's production of "Twelfth NIght" — a  performance so buoyant and giddily delightful that standing for three hours was entirely worth it. A few Kangaroo songs were scattered throughout the evening and the curtain call used their near-perfect pop song, "Thing For You." That's probably the only pop record I've ever bought due to seeing a Shakespeare play.

Long before I ever heard Kangaroo's song "The Fading Glory," I wrote a post lamenting the offshoring of the production of Levis jeans — an iconic American product now made somewhere else. In that post I recommended American-made, union-stitched Diamond Cut Jeans — commendable not just for those reasons, but also because of the "diamond cut," a diamond-shaped patch of fabric that prevents all the seams from joining together in a knob directly under one's hooh-hah. Anyway, that post also remarked on (unfavorably) Wal-Mart's signature "Faded Glory" jeans and it somehow got picked up on a bunch of message boards with my e-mail address somehow being communicated as the complaint line for those jeans. Years later, I still occasionally get an angry e-mail from someone complaining about them. The Internets are a strange place.