Back to work today after a needed break. Took the week off. Oh, time. The sort of thing that you take when you need, and look forward to until you can take again. That sounds like I already miss the pool — and I do! — but I also miss not hearing an alarm in the morning. It’s the simple things, really, that are the most demanding work. Like waking up on time.
I’m already trying to plan my next off days. And presently there’s nothing on my calendar until November. That seems like an oversight. Seems like a long time.
It’ll take a few days to catch up at work, or an hour or two. It is all in the timing. So I rode my bicycle to work, and I made a new friend by the back door. This is a green darner (Anax junius) which is the most common dragonfly in North America. And I can tell you this guy, it is a male based on the coloring, has a different way of thinking about time than we do.
Wikipedia says you can find this in Mexico, Panama, the Caribbean, Tahiti, Japan and mainland China. (Spare a moment to think of the entomologists who have to collect and process this sort of information. Someone, perhaps several someones, have made this little guy their last work.) Apparently they are sometimes found in other places, too. It is believed strong winds can send them off their natural migratory courses. (Every once in a while that entomologist breaks out, and updates, the dragonfly map. What a Wednesday that must be.)
It is also the official insect of the state of Washington.
And those eyes will follow you everywhere. (That is actually the forehead.)
The more I studied it, the more I marveled at the bioengineering at play. And then I googled the darner’s lifespan. Seems like a great waste. That’s an awful lot of work for a creature that typically lives four to seven weeks.
But aren’t we all?
Somehow, after a week away, I thought that I would miss something at the old Poplars Building. The destruction has been going on — or not, as is sometimes the case — since the beginning of August. But, from our vantage point, it looks like they haven’t done anything since the beginning of September.
Not all work is visible, though, and that’s OK, too.
The good news is we didn’t miss out on whatever is in that central bit. I’m hoping it is cream-filled, or an easily torn-down elevator shaft. Or, perhaps, filled with dragonflies.
We didn’t run the site’s most popular feature last week, so we’re sorely overdue. Without dragging this out any further, let’s check on the kitties.
This very morning, Phoebe was sitting all casual-like by the bannister.
I’m always more interested in why they sit in the random places they do, than the random hijinks they get into. What made that quiet, semi-shaded spot the place to be this morning. On the other hand, I know why Poseidon got in this bag. It is in his nature.
Hilariously flailing away at getting out of the bag is also in his nature.
And here’s the rare shot of the two of them sitting together. Sorta.
They almost looked in the same direction at the same time. Almost. That takes a lot of time, too.
We had a short bike ride on Saturday morning, dodging raindrops until I couldn’t. I wanted to get in a quick 20 miles to reach the next round number for the year. (All of the records are falling this year!) And in the early going we went by this familiar corn field, which almost made it to Labor Day before turning.
And then, up the street and up a few hills, The Yankee was creating some big distance. See the little red dot on the side? I had to cover all of this ground to get her wheel again.
Eventually I did, and then we rode together for a while. She turned for the house and I added on a few more miles to get to that goal, and then found myself in the rain. It was foreshadowing.
We got in the car, pointed south and drove through every storm cloud that a third of this great nation can provide. My car hasn’t been this clean, nor my shoulders this tense in the car, in some time. This is just the beginning.
You know how, sometimes, you people stop under an overpass? When my wipers were going full blast and I was slowing down to about 35 on the freeway to let them keep up, it seemed like a good idea.
I always liked overpasses in the rain. That constant rattle on the roof interrupted, however briefly, by a bit of human engineering. It can be a sudden and stunning change, and then just as quickly, the rain returns, because the overpasses are only a few lanes wide. Sometimes you want more overpasses, I guess, if only to park under them.
We did not wait out the weather, but pushed on carefully through. And one of our rewards was this site.
You can almost see it there, but in the heartbeat before I took this photo, and those trees in the foreground crept in the way, you could actually see the place where the rainbow was hitting the ground. It wasn’t off in the distance, or beyond a hill. It was right there. I did not see the pots of gold, however. It is a busy interstate, maybe someone beat me to it.
We made it to my mom’s for a nice little vacation. We had dinner there Saturday night, and a quiet Sunday. Today my grandfather and a great-aunt and great-uncle came over for dinner. This was the first time I’ve seen my aunt and uncle since before the pandemic began. They were, and are, a hoot.
I could tell you stories, but it is a light week here, and you’d need to know them and hear them, anyway. But I will jot this down, just so I can remember it. Someone was telling a bit of a family story and my great-uncle didn’t hear who was the subject of the story. He said, “Who?” He heard the name. There’s a half beat where the name sinks in and you can see the gears readjusting to the new information. And then the man, who is in his 80s, giggled. It was him and them and perfect.
adventures / IU / Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off on ‘To give a little something even though he gets behind’ 29 Aug 22
They are making progress. Progress is being made, of the destructive sort. Just across the way is the building where Elvis slept. And, before that, a bunch of college students, and then some guests to the city, and then people worked in there. Now the building, long in the tooth in it’s seventh decade, as being pulled apart. A green space will be where the Poplars Building is. This only means that no one has decided on a better use for it yet.
I wonder if the person who had the room-converted-to-an-office knew they had Elvis’ room. Seems like you’d spend a little time trying to figure that out, no?
Anyway, we’re several weeks into this now, and they were scraping away ferociously on the east end of things today. No ETA on when the job will be completed, or when the adjacent parking deck will reopen, but I shall try to keep you up-to-date on this, the least useful, interesting or successful feature on the site.
Let’s balance that out with the most successful feature on the site, the weekly check on the kitties. They’re doing just great. Having a ball. Despite my playing zone defense these last two weeks, don’t let them fool you. They will try. But I have documentary evidence. Here’s a blissed out Phoebe enjoying an evening cuddle.
And here, Phoebe is surveying her queendom in a most grand style.
Poseidon, meanwhile, is playing the role of the jester of the royal territory. He often does.
And, last night, he got in a bit of reading with me. It was, again, a nice cuddle. Don’t let him tell tall tales. He will tell tale tells, fib, fabricate, dissemble and lie.
We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show tonight, making for a long but fine day. Earlier this summer we finally saw a 2020 concert in Indianapolis. It was postponed, twice, because of Covid, but when we finally got to see the show, it was great. Concert tickets purchased in 2019 age well, turns out. That adventure was a wonderful little return to normal — whatever that is these days.
The same bands were going to be playing Cincinnati last month, and The Yankee found a good deal on resell tickets and made a good impulse buy. But someone in the tour got Covid, so they had to postpone that show. We found out at the parking both of the concert. It’s a quick two hour drive, and the weather was nice that evening, so we walked around a bit of Cincinnati and made silly videos that never got used anywhere, I’m sure, and had some acceptable-north-of-the-Ohio-River pork barbecue.
Tonight was the rescheduled show. Or, to be more precise, tonight was the re-re-re-rescheduled show. The original was in 2020, and then they tried to run it in 2021. And then again, and now, finally … oh, and a thunderstorm was moving through lower Ohio.
But the lightning stayed away, and the 90s and turn-of-the-century pop music blared forth. Another great show, even if we knew the setlist.
As an added bonus, I can spread out music on the site for the next three days. So here’s Toad the Wet Sprocket, playing all the alt radio mainstays of the 1990s.
I don’t know if Crazy Life was my first protest song or the first for my slice of my generation, but I’m pretty sure it was the first one I really noticed. The first one I read about. And I read a lot about Peltier. I’ve never really settled on how I felt about it, not really, but this is Wounded Knee.
The Eighth Circuit thought a jury would have acquitted him had information improperly withheld from the defense been available, yet the court denied a new trial. And if you really dive into the story it’s easy to question how the system was used. But I don’t know, not really. None less than Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama have campaigned for him, though, and that means something.
The point is, this song made me look it up, and think, and ask questions of things in general and specifically. And I probably shouldn’t like a pop song this much, but anything that scrapes your brain for a quarter of a century is worth noting.
They did a Best Of album in 2011 — and it’ll come up much later in our regular music feature — in part to regain control of their masters. They reworked a few small things in some of their songs, including the ending of this one. This is still good, but I much prefer the original.
Toad opened the show, playing a short set, but most of their hits. In fact they removed two songs from the previous show in Indy, for whatever reason.
It must be weird to be a still-working band, on what is the growing and, hopefully, lucrative nostalgia tour circuit, knowing you can only get in so many of your songs. Of their eight songs tonight, seven singles, six of which charted, were released to great success in the early or mid-90s. The newest song they played was a ditty from 2013. I’d guess most of the audience wasn’t familiar with it. They released a new album last year, all new material, but not the first selection made the set list.
If you can play a half dozen top 10s decades hence, and people still pay to see you do it, you play the hits.
Speaking of which, more of that tomorrow in this same space.
My legs were tired on Saturday, so I took a bike ride on Saturday. They felt better on Sunday, so I let my legs rest. Today my legs feel only medium, who can figure any of this out? It’s a two-stairs-at-a-time day. Anyway, here’s a little bit of that Saturday ride. I like this portion of the route, because it is easy, and there are trees.
This morning I rode to campus and achieved a goal I’ve had for the last week or so. I wanted to make the trip without having to clip out of the pedals. There are a few tricky intersections to get through, and I benefited this morning from a school bus stopping behind me, and holding up traffic through the first one, a round-about. The second is a busy little intersection for a bicycle, and I timed it right, with a lull in the traffic. Later, I had a red light and a four-lane road to cross. Rather than try to track stand for the whole cycle (which I can’t do for that long) or I wheeled into an empty parking lot and did three donuts at the cell phone store until the light turned green. After that it was easy, a few hills, a left turn, a stop sign, and then … where did all of these people come from?
Oh yeah, classes. Today’s the first day of classes.
This did not sneak up on me. I am sure it snuck on some.
Oh, look, the itchy and scratchy crew are back for more work on the Poplars Building. They’re making good progress, too. You write one thing about them on Friday, and they’re pulling down more mid-20th century … whatever style of building that is all day Monday.
That 1960s dust and debris is probably what the big curtain is for, though today I’ve come to think that the crew is shielding the Poplars Garage from having to see what’s happening to the Poplars Building.
The parking deck will stay. It is currently closed, but — and here I will once again try flexing the power of this blog — we need it to re-open sooner than later.
Hear that, everybody?
It is time once again for the biggest hit of the site, the weekly visit with the kitties. They’re doing great. They just want all the pets. At least they take turns demanding attention, I’m not sure how they schedule that, but it is fairly considerate of them, alternating their neediness.
Phoebe will not share her toys.
Poseidon, meanwhile wants to come outside. Or wants me to come inside. Probably the former, but he’ll begrudgingly accept the latter.
It’s a funny thing, watching that loudmouth meow without being able to hear him because of the glass between. He will be heard, but I will not hear him.
I read Cartman Gareth’s We Rode All Day this weekend. It was a quick read, two short sittings got the job done. It’s about the 1919 Tour de France, the first Tour after the Great War. I don’t know anything of substance about the racing of the era, and then along came this most unconventional book.
It’s told in the first person. Gareth is writing for the voices of four racers and two organizers.
It isn’t my style of book, generally, but I found it growing on me because he kept it moving. Mostly, I want to learn more about those old races — this one was the second longest Tour ever, if I’m not mistaken. It was a different type of racing than the modern version, and in this book Gareth twice makes a point of saying the 1919 race was also altogether different than the rougher in the 19-oughts. An Englishmen writing, in English, for French cyclists using modern English colloquialisms. This must drive the French and Francophiles crazy.
It is interesting, and maybe worth reading, but I’m not sure if it was entirely satisfying.
Last night I started Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. After Rome fell came the Middle Ages. And in this pop history book we’re going to study some of the crossover between those times. Should be fun because, as Cahill points out, historians are experts in a period, but not in the transitions.
The idea is that some people on an island off Ireland saved literacy, the church, western culture and so on. Monks with silly haircuts living in stone huts, not too long after they’d figured out the written word themselves, really. It’s a part of the Irish mythos, but not talked about in the wider world, so here’s Cahill.
To understand what happened in the fifth century, and why Rome fell, he asks why the Romans didn’t notice the problems. What were they doing? To answer that series of questions, Cahill goes back a further century, introducing us to the poet and teacher Decimius Magnus Ausonious for reasons that aren’t yet clear to me. He says his verse is no more fresh than the modern day sympathy card. I’m not sure why it is important to pick apart a man that’s been dead for 16 centuries, but he’s having fun doing it.
So it’s a personal anecdote as microcosm. They did because they could. Resources and needs and distractions and all of that. Cultivation of crops allows for a social evolution, rather than foraging and hunting for your every meal. Cultures can emerge and can flourish and, apparently, write bad poetry.
Ausonious winds up tutoring the heirs to power, and that increasing his status a bit, as well. In times past, being named to one of the two consulships positions was a huge and important honor. By his time, though, it was all coming undone. It was civics, not suddenness.
At least so far. I’ll learn more tonight. Cahill has made this great point about Rome’s notable historians — Augustine, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Gibbon specifically — tending to view things through the lens of their time. (All different, all correct insofar as they go, proving once again that there aren’t often simple answers to complex longitudinal questions.) With that in mind it should be no surprise that something written at the end of the 20th century would see the fall of Rome as taking place with not a little ennui.
Which is precisely when you need some Irish people to show up. And I’m sure they will arrive in this book this evening.
It was a quiet and uneventful weekend. I think I spent almost the entire time on the front porch, enjoying the breeze and the shade, and the neighbor’s 1980s tunes. How long does it take to clean a grill? Pretty much the entirety of the early 1980s pop catalog.
So no big events, but a host of usual things to make your visit worthwhile. First, the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check on the kitties. They’re doing great.
Phoebe is ready for her closeup.
Poseidon, meanwhile, is laying a trap.
He’s just waiting on someone to spring it.
And here’s the daily check on the chipping away of the Poplar’s Building. It was a 1960s dorm, but that was a bust. And it was a sorority house, another bust. And it lived for a time as a hotel, the first premium hotel here, apparently. And then it was a “research and conference center” before finally becoming administrative offices for the university. It was time for it to go.
But no rush. The big machines didn’t pull any of the building down Friday. No one was even on site, as far as I can tell. They did move that big orange monster today, once.
Most of the day’s effort, though, was on the ground and just out of our view. Maybe they needed to rearrange the rubble, or move some of it off, before the peeling away of the past continues.
I finally finished this book yesterday. It had been my late night reading, slowly peeling the past away of some of the history of American journalism. I’m glad this one is now in the “read” stack. I was ready to move to something else, so, yesterday, it become afternoon reading. Wrapping it up.
You don’t have different books for different times of day? I have books for all manner of different kinds of events and occasions, and it used to be much worse. It used to be as out-of-control as my bookshelves. But I digress.
This book started off on the wrong foot.
How many errors should I accept in a (good) book? Now I want to verify every anecdote and trivial bit.
1. Technically four, but I get it. 2. Missed the date. 3. You never study the messy 1876 election. Close, but no. 4. After two years in NYC. (He spent about a year in Philly.) pic.twitter.com/YqGO9j4Lay
But it grew on me over time. I stopped looking for errors and became impressed by some of the people that are in the book.
This part is about Jose Martí, a pioneer of social justice journalism. I have to agree with the authors, Gonzalez and Torres, that Martí’s “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among America’s nineteenth-century newsmen.”
Almost everything he wrote seemed evocative.
There are a lot of stories in this book you’ve never heard of. For example …
“Only months after the US entered World War I, a frightening wave of racial violence rocked the country. The troubles began in East St. Louis in the spring and summer of 1917. The second of those disturbances culminated in one of the worst massacres of blacks in US history.”
Conversely, I grew up learning about the Scottsboro Nine, a 1930s Alabama case. I’d love to know who Ted Poston was talking about here, and who those people wrote for.
I might know some of their bylines by reputation.
Here’s another story I never got in a history class or any other book I’ve read.
The book is filled with a lot of tales of individuals, and some institutional and organizational anecdotes. It tells another, important side of the history of our media ecosystem. It tells of, as they make the point, the sides of American journalism history that were seldom noticed contemporaneously, and haven’t been deeply studied in retropsect. It’s a good book, if you’re interested in this sort of book. And it’s an important book, to be sure. But, and this is just the reader’s perception, I felt like I was reading it for forever.
So I finished that, yesterday, and I started this.
I bought that, and three other of May Sarton’s books, on the strength of this one quote. (Used bookstores offering free shipping are dangerous for my mail carrier and the local delivery folks.)
May Sarton – a poet, novelist and memoirist – sounds like a cyclist, @truebs.
I googled her, found someone suggested these four memoirs and made it about a third of the way through this one last night. She’s in her mid-40s, her parents just died, and so she’s buying her first home. This is a book about that house, in a small town in New Hampshire because she had to have somewhere to put the sentimental family furniture. Sarton is a poet, but this isn’t sappy or purple. It’s just good writing. She’s visited four houses and then, the fifth house, a rundown 18th century farm, it worked out. She’s writing this memoir eight years on.
“In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates …. What I came back to was that moment of silence, and the oriole. Everything here has been a matter of believing in intangibles, of watching for the signs, of trying to be aware of unseen presences. In the end the oriole tipped the scales.”
May Sarton is a writer that one grows into. One can read her when young, but if one re-reads her later in one’s own maturity, her words take on extra depth and meaning. When I was in my twenties, I discovered her journals and poems, particularly Journal of a Solitude, most likely still her best known book. While I liked it, I moved on. When I re-read Sarton in my early forties, suddenly every word was alive and deeply compelling. I had grown up enough to have caught up with her.
I’m basically Sarton’s contemporary today, but not in the age-is-just-a-number sense. I’m sure I’ll have much more to think about this as I work through the book in the next day or two.
But, first, we have something else to dive into.
We need to keep up with the Re-Listening Project. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car, repeating a project I did a few years ago. Only I didn’t write about it then. Shame on me! So I’m writing about it now. Shame on me! These aren’t reviews, usually. Mostly they’re just memories, or marking the time between good times.
This is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be. And this is purely a pop and rock update.
I bought “Slang” right as it came out, in May of 1996. If you had MTV in the 80s, or a rock station nearby in that same period, you couldn’t escape Def Leppard. They are as much the soundtrack of my early adolescence as anyone could be. We’ll catch back up with some of their earlier work later, when I started replacing old cassettes with replacement discs. (Format changes, am I right?) But this was new, and it was somewhat different. Their sixth album, first in four years, first with Vivian Campbell after Steve Clark died in 1991. Half the band was going through a post-successful rock period in their lives. They were trying to steer away from the first five records, and around grunge. There was a lot going on, and you hear it right away, there’s a sarangi, and other exotic (for them) instrumentation all over the place. It charted at #14 on the Billboard 200 and #5 on their native UK Albums Chart and was certified gold in both countries.
Since I’m doing two of these in this post, just a few selections. The first thing you hear when you load this thing up is “Truth?” Campbell’s sensibilities are an immediate addition here.
Everything on the record is solid to good or better, but it’s not especially cohesive. This is a good record to skip around, which simply does not fit my listening style. I’m a bit of a completist, and will only move over songs that just annoy or embarrass. What is unique about this record, to me, is that each track has a place, you just need the right mood for the moment.
So it was a good car record. I can’t imagine a lot of group listening to this, but I do suspect it got a lot of spins on longer drives. Probably a lot of interstates. The mind was already wandering anyway, right, what’s a little aimless singalong?
This is the ninth track, “Blood Runs Cold” it’s the closest thing I would say that is a bridge from their traditional sound and the themes of this record — and it’s a bit more emo than their glam origins and massive stadium anthems.
Mutt Lange did not produce this record, and that is how this song made it on the finished project. Not that it’s bad, but Pearl of Euphoria is just … different.
Just before Def Leppard put that on shelves, Hootie & the Blowfish released their second album, “Fairweather Johnson.” And if you couldn’t avoid Lep in the 80s, everyone within earshot of a pop, alt, rock, MOR or adult AC station was getting stalked by Hootie in the mid-1990s.
I still really, really enjoy Hootie & the Blowfish. Their sophomore effort debuted at the top of the charts, but has only sold 3 million records, but wasn’t the 21-times platinum that their debut was. So, somehow, this is a failure?
The music business is weird.
Just for fun, then, because this is a good record, here are a few of the songs that weren’t singles.
I sang this around the house all weekend. (Sorry, dear.)
When I decided to do the re-listening project again I was confronted by a problem right away. And the solution was, I’m just not ready to play a lot of Nanci Griffith after she passed away (a year ago last Friday). This is, perhaps, the only exception.
I’m pretty sure Darius Rucker growls through part of this song. He’s laying the groundwork for his solo projects, and staying true to his Carolina yell.
There’s a hammond organ throughout this record, and Jim Sonefeld’s wet drum work, and there’s a moment in this track at the end of the record when it seems that all of that, and the jeans and the weather-worn hats and that whole fratastic 1994-1996 counter-to-the-counterculture aesthetic maybe should last forever.
And it would last, for a little while longer, anyway. Music is a weird business.
But the next time we come to this feature, we’ll have some blue-eyed funk, which is still a little weird, a quarter-century on.
