We had Chinese late last week, and late last night I ate the last of the fortune cookies. For one thing, they don’t keep very long. The plastic doesn’t seal in the freshness. You’d think, for people that purport to tell you the future, they’d be on to that little problem. For another thing, the cookies that I had last week, two of them, had no fortunes. They were just … cookies.
This happened to my great aunt one time and the family members she was dining with convinced her that this was an ominous way to end her meal. No fortune, no future, and all that. It was very upsetting and they all laughed.
Well, I wanted fortunes. And to get these cookies out of the rice drawer.
We have a rice drawer. We also have a tea cabinet, what about it?
Anyway, we had three cookies remaining, and these all had the important little paper bits inside. One of these is more important than the other.
The solution is my philtrum? Then what is the problem? The fortune says “a problem.” Not “the problem” or “all of your problems” or “your most recent problem,” just “a problem.” What is the problem!?
Maybe I was better off not having those fortunes the other day. I was certainly better off with the other cookies. Less than a week later and these were already going stale.
I wonder how that works. They all came from the same box. (I’ve seen the backstage magic at our local restaurant. You used to think there was someone back there hammering out these fortunes for each person, somehow they knew what you need. But, no. It’s just a guy reaching into a big box, knowing the fortune you need, and pulling it from the middle or, for special, hard luck cases, the back left corner. “This is definitely a back left corner sort,” is probably a thing that guy thinks once or twice a shift. I am forever jaded and ruined by the mysticism of the fortune cookie process.)
Let’s turn to the Poplars Building.
Yes, please turn to the Poplars Building, said the peanut gallery.
Not sure that was necessary …
Anyway, the failed dorm turned failed sorority house turned failed hotel turned longtime administrative building for the university is coming down. Eventually. The big crane hasn’t done much in a few days now, as you can tell.
I wonder how long that small piece can hang on so precariously. Of course, it’s probably eight feet tall, and securely held in place by the best adhesives the 1960s could muster … (Back when men were men and who knew what was really in the chemicals!)
Anyway, Elvis stayed there one night. He did two nights worth of concerts and skipped town on the hotel on his second night. It was not fit for a king.
And, today, yes, a carrion bird was circling overhead.
I watered the flowers this evening, just to show you some flowers. These are things my lovely bride has planted in the yard. These are in the front. I did not photograph the side yard, for they were in the shade of the evening by then. Photography is all about timing.
Look at those delicate little water drops on those delicate little flowers. I even kept the water on low, so the mists would fall delicately.
I suppose I was just so with them, because annuals already have a curious mix of the next few months. First, the trim of beauty! Then, the grim reality of their demise.
This wasn’t intentional, but just now I discovered in the final third of May Sarton’s “Plant Dreaming Deep” she is discussing mortality, and toiling in her gardens, and the two are at once alike, and dissimilar.
That is what the gardener often forgets. To the flowers, we never have to say good-bye forever. We grow older every year, but not the garden; it is reborn every spring.
That overstates the case for annuals, anyway. Some of the things in our little flower beds will grow back. Some will bring extra weeds from far away lands we know not how. But those little flowers, well, it’s hard to think about frost in August, but this is how I annoy myself and it’s been a mild August, besides.
Those little petals don’t know it, but they’ll flash their brilliance until the browning edges become all I can see and even the water droplets — when you remove all the books or training or years of experience or directions on the seed packet, it so often comes down to just good, simple water — won’t be able to distract my eye.
It is an odd thing to contemplate mid-August, I’ll grant you, but sometimes the moment is overlooked. This moment, being fleeting, winter always being on the horizon. Sure, the grass was cut just the other day, and I’m a little warm even as I type this, but it is in my mind, winter, even if it wasn’t in my fortune cookie.
Especially because it wasn’t in my fortune cookie. Those things are never accurate. They just grabbed by the handful from a box.
I got a decent shot of the fawn on the lawn as I rode through one of the campus neighborhoods. Three or four seem to sit there every evening. It’s a grassy, wooded lot that sits next to an odd rental, and just down from a Civil War-era home. They’re on a slight hill, in the shade, munching clover.
I just saw two of them on this pass. Last time I spied three. Next time, maybe zero. Who knows the schedules urban deer keep.
That’s a standard width sidewalk, and I was passing by close to it, on the two-lane road. The deer were not at all concerned with me, or the occasional passing car.
There are five houses on that block, and the one small stand of trees. One block down there’s a more densely wooded stand. I suppose that’s where they live.
Back to Sarton. I’ve worked my way through about two thirds of the book. She’s telling the story of her house. She bought it in her mid-40s after her parents died, and the memoir, written eight years later, is about the experience, the hidden New Hampshire village and, now, her neighbors.
I bought this book used, and I was pleased to see someone had underlined a few bits here and there. I probably haven’t always felt this way, but now I like idea of happening on someone else’s notes, but people seldom write in the margins anymore, it seems.
I think about a version of her support and freedom of a routine once in a while. I think it’s really about efficiencies. A routine gets done and redone, and you get better and better at it. So you become faster and so on.
Isn’t that the point of rote work? It’d be different, of course, if you were talking about true craftsmanship, which she does a fair amount. From time to time she tries to compare the craft work of others to her own craft.
And here she is at her craft, jamming an incredible amount of work into two pages. It is masterful, really. This is not the full story of her neighbor, Albert Quigley. (Even more about what is an interesting measureIt is not she includes about the man, but consider how much information is contained in these two short, clear pages.
The Quigley home is now Nelson’s library.
I’m still waiting on all of the context clues to flesh out where Sarton’s house is. I have a guess, and I could definitively figure this out online, Googlefu being a craft of a sort, but that seems to be against the spirit of the book.
Slow going across the way. The big crane didn’t move today. Perhaps it has developed an affinity for the Poplars Building, which would be the only one. Crews were doing some work among the rubble below.
We have learned that the adjacent parking garage, just seen to the left in our view and separated by a narrow alley, will remain closed until the razing is completed. They need to move faster, then. Parking is a consideration, which explains why they waited until the end of summer — and the beginning of a return to a “normal semester” — to undertake the project. I’m sure there were reasons.
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.
Friday / photo — Comments Off on Writing around pictures just takes up space 12 Aug 22
I pass this on my bike commute. It’s an important bit of work, and it could ruin a bike ride. I only ever notice it going the one direction, though, which only seems problematic in retrospect.
Also, this is quality workmanship. Quality workmanship that is apparently never going to be completed on the “multi use trail.”
You can imagine the supervisor, thinking about all the rest of the jobs on his clipboard for the week, taking a quick glance and thinking “They can just move over, if they notice at all.”
The new guy said, “But, boss, what about the satisfaction of a job well do — ”
The rock shoveler cuts him off. “Not on sidewalks, dude. Or roads, right fellas?”
The guy holding the sign chuckles.
“But — ” says the new guy.
“It’s lunch,” say the three guys standing there watching, in unison.
“And the guy writing this is just writing around his pictures, anyway,” the supervisor said.
And so we have a gravel pit.
I do not think, not for one second, that I could go into that little five foot gravel strip and keep my bicycle upright.
Speaking of work crews. The guys pulling the Poplars Building didn’t do that today.
Construction guys must have some nice Work From Home arrangement. Good deal, if you can get it.
I’m beginning to think that my phone is getting up there in age. The photos are getting a bit blurry. For example, I knew these deer would be in this yard. So I coasted by this evening, ready for the shot, found three of them reclining in the grass, ready for the weekend.
My phone, though, is having a bit of a Monday.
But then, later, at the house, I got a decent, natural, depth of field effect without any editing.
So who knows. Of course, my phone is now going on six years old.
My goal with my bike commute is to make the entire trip without having to put my foot on the ground. I had to unclip four times this morning, but only twice this evening. Had I been just a tad more daring I could have gotten that down to one, but that doesn’t really seem the point. Otherwise, the highlight was this little strip of road here.
They paved this in August/September of 2018 — I have photos — and again this week. The scrapped up the 2018 work on Monday, and it was a nice new ribbon today. How long does asphalt last around here?
Or, put another way, this little stretch of road fronts a Civil War era house. At this rate, it must have seen … carry the two … 36 coats of asphalt over the years.
I’m sure they had asphalt around here then. And I’m sure they treated it about the same way in those old winters as they do now: poorly.
I will not, I will not fall down the rabbit hole on this and read the entire history of asphalt, but just know I skimmed it to see how outlandish that joke was. Asphalt has been around since the Babylonians, and it was first used in the U.S. for roads in the 1870s, so not impossible, but not hardly likely for the tucked away place this was in the 19th century.
An interstate finally passed through here in 2015 or so.
But enough about construction, let’s see some destruction! I have for you, if you peer closely, an action shot of the grout removal going on at the Poplars Building. And by grout removal I mean the Poplars Building.
That’s some 60 years of stone and dust and carpet and dust and dreams falling out of that building just now. You’ll note they’ve got that screen held in place by the second crane. It comes and it goes, that screen. Seems to be protecting the parking deck. Protect the parking deck at all costs!
Sometimes they spray water on the rubble as it falls down. Some sort of safety measure, no doubt. I wonder what determines when they do and when they don’t spray.
I figure by Monday they’ll get to that protruding shaft — possibly the elevator system, I don’t know, I’ve never been in that building and it doesn’t seem safe to go exploring at this late date. If that’s what it is, I bet it comes down quickly.
The weather has been in the delightfully enjoyable 80s the last few days, which means the evenings have been a nice time to sit outside. We even had dinner outside this evening, because why not?
We were rewarded with a nice view.
We ordered Chinese. There were no fortunes in the fortune cookies.
They were just … cookies.
Let’s get back to the music! Last week I decided to start working my way through all of my old CDs when I’m in the car. Good way to mix it up. I did this a few years ago and enjoyed it, but figured, this time, that I could write about some of it. These aren’t reviews, except when they are. Mostly they’re just memories and good times.
The collection crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, as I said the other day, whimsy.
Recently I finished Memory Dean’s second album, which was self-titled, but people called it the “In My Father’s House” record because of the cover art. If that sentence is a mystery, don’t worry. They’re a regional band from Georgia. A good live act. A good college band back in the day. Probably quite popular in bars. I only saw them at festivals.
A college buddy of mine basically grew up not far from them, and had followed them for some time. He gave me this record, which is a curious mix of studio and live tracks. And, if you’ll notice on the Discogs site, they refer to it as the track side and the live side. Because this was a cassette first.
In the live portion they even talk about how they’ll have tapes on sell in the back after the show! This was released in 1993 and let’s say it was produced that same year.
Rather, Memory Dean’s music is an intriguing collision of spring-break choruses, beer-fueled rhythm, and a lightly twisted lyrical sense–all of which bring to mind Flannery O’Connor and Brian Wilson harmonizing on a cypress-cloaked veranda over their morning grits.
Within that Deep South context, it’s hard to pigeonhole Memory Dean’s sound. More than just snappy choruses–there are millions of those floating around, seeking to light in listeners’ brains–the band’s songs are, on first listen, anchored in the instinctively unique vocal harmonies of co-founding guitarist-singer-songwriters Jay Memory and Bubba Dean. With naturally occurring parts that recall the low harmonies and counter-melodies of the Indigo Girls or, perhaps, Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon after a night of tequila, the fluent vocal blend lures you in just long enough for the words to hit you over the head.
[…]
Originally rivals in street-corner minstrelsy, they hooked up and began writing the sort of songs borne of two things: 1) the innate tradition of a town that gave birth to REM, the B-52s, and several other seminal ’80s “modern rock” bands, and 2) the sure knowledge that through music came liquor and sorority girls.
Koster, who wrote that in 1998 and is still working, these days at The Day, in Connecticut, overdid it — by a lot — with the Flannery O’Connor reference. And I think you sense that in the second album, even more so than Koster found it in the third album. And I think people try to sound like they overthink Flannery O’Connor because they think it makes them sound smart.
It doesn’t.
Otherwise, that piece feels spot on. Re-listening to their eponymous record, trying to figure out what it means all these decades later, I had two thoughts. First, there’s an obvious mix of bawdy lyrics that feel too clever to the authors, mixed with some surprisingly deeper material. And when Koster quotes them, they’re pointing out “Yeah, we started writing in college. We’re 30 now.”
At any rate, these days Jay Memory and Bubba Dean are a lot older than 30, and they’re still doing it a bit. There don’t seem to be an album cuts from this record online (you can’t even buy this on Amazon!) but there are a few live performances from recent years with some of these tracks.
Which brings to mind the second thing I thought. Memory Dean is the musical college companion of the entitled annoying guy with the annoying boat on Lake Lanier. Not the one that loved college, but the one that still loves it too much. He’s a little too loud. A little too tipsy. A little too much. He rents that boat. And I’d bet this crowd, with its dedicated fanbase, had examples of that guy, and his “WOOOOOOOOO” wife.
This is misnamed on YouTube. The actual song title is “Beowulf, Captain Hook & The Albatross.” See? College kids wrote that.
And while the lyrics are a little muddled in that recording, the chorus pops pretty well, and this is important. The band is at their best when they’re doing harmony. My friend said that around Georgia people called them the Indigo Boys, which naturally intrigued me.
This is “Peach State of Mind” which is a song about Georgia. This is recorded in Athens, Georgia. There will be barking from the crowd.
For some reason they sped up the tempo of the song there, compared to the record. It probably fits the bar scene better, or maybe they’re just sick of it, but that one change takes away the lament and soul of the song, which is important when you’re talking about being homesick.
I know of which I’m talking here.
This is the funniest song on the record, the crowd participation song, and one of my least favorite. I’ve sometimes wondered, when this came to mind, if they would freshen up the lyrics if they had the chance. Now I know. Yes they do. And they always pick the best low hanging fruit. They say “Rap Music Sucks,” but you don’t get here without an appreciation of the genre. And they reference “Rapper’s Delight” in an important way. It doesn’t get twisted. They don’t point out, as they do when they send up Sir Mix-A-Lot, that this is actually a good song. They just do a variation on “Rapper’s Delight.” As if, even in 1993 they were already saying that the pop version of rap is not all that it could be.
Which, for some white guys from Georgia in 1993, probably seemed prescient.
In our next installment of musical nonsense, we’re going to hear from post-peak Def Leppard. It’ll be a treat.
