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Independence Day

We let freedom ring on the bikes this morning. Snuck in a quick 30 miles (legs felt great) and made it home precisely at noon, which was conveniently when the sun remembered it was being sponsored by the month of July. Had watermelon for lunch.

We drove to Montgomery for ribs at Dreamland, as is our tradition. Our waiter was an immigrant who talked fast and moved a little slower. We sat outside in the shade, shooed away flies and enjoyed barbecue and banana pudding. We heard country songs next to blues next to Texas blues next to Edgar Winter. I’m no longer sure how to categorize Winter, so let’s make him his own genre. The Founders would have wanted it that way.

We made it back home in time to make it to the high school football stadium for the local fireworks show. Found a spot on the shoulder of the road that fit the car perfectly. We pulled the lawn chairs out of the trunk, where they’ve rested since the fireworks last night and craned our necks into the night, enjoying a peaceful half an hour before the first sparks were flung into the sky.

Here’s tonight’s finale:

The conclusion seemed a bit sudden, in a way, but then a firetruck which had been parked near the launch site suddenly bolted for some emergency somewhere. And it has been very, very dry here, despite a bit of rain yesterday, so we found ourselves hoping there wasn’t a problem with the pyro. I don’t think you could pay enough to cover the antacids for the fireworks engineers. Always a crowd, always in a drought, no thanks.

But the show was great. Kids were playing. Little boys and girls oohed and aahed. The weather was divinely perfect. Everything was.

Hope yours was great as well.

Happy Independence Day!

adventures / history / iPhone / memories / Tuesday / video — 1 Comment
3
Jul 12

Early fireworks

Fireworks are the most temporal of our celebrations. After the fact you’re happy their gone. You can think mean things of the neighbors still lighting them after the calendar suggests they should be stowed for New Year’s Eve.

Never mind that the Declaration of Independence was first published in a newspaper on July 6th. We forget it was shipped to the Brits and read publicly on the 8th. Few recall that Gen. George Washington had it read to his soldiers on the 9th and that it was August before the signings began. The vote was the 4th and that’s when the fireworks retailers really need help getting their revenue in order, so that’s when we buy and light the things.

Fireworks on the 6th of July are just right out. There’s just no ring to that whatsoever.

You can light fireworks early, that’s festive. Unless your neighbors are the type that call the cops. Police officers hate the “shots fired” call which is really Old Lady Eveready mistaking your firecrackers for a revolver. Some cities burn through their pyrotechnic budget before the grand day. Opelika is one of those towns. Their “Celebration of Freedom” was tonight.

They have food and music and inflatables and face painting. The local parachute group leaps into the sky to bring the American flag to the city elders. Kids have scattered out decorated paper plates beforehand, hoping the guy with the flag lands on theirs so they win a prize.

People are sprawled everywhere in the beds of pickups and in lawn chairs. Two teenagers are making out and some old people nearby really wish they’d just stop. People see each other outside of work or school or church, maybe for the first time in a long time. Kids are playing tag over here and blowing bubbles over there. The entire scene is almost perfect and lovely. The only thing missing is John Mellencamp.

Promptly at 9 p.m. organizers throw thousands of dollars into the night sky and hope that, while it doesn’t reach escape velocity, it somehow catches fire and burns in many colors and shapes and sounds. More often than not that is precisely what happens. Here’s tonight’s finale:

For the video I shot last year I wrote “why not make it a several day celebration? A birth of a nation should merit that.”

Why not, indeed.

God bless America on this Third of July.

memories / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
3
Jul 12

Memories of Andy Griffith, who died today at 86

To grow up in a certain time — which was, really a stretch of about 30 or 40 years thanks to syndication — meant a friendly and devoted relationship with Andy Griffith. My generation met him as the kindly sheriff and father from Mayberry.

A little bit later we were all introduced to this other side of Griffith, the brilliant work of the comedian:

And then later we learned of his outstanding early movie work. Suddenly the kind old Mayberry father-figure (He debuted as Andy Taylor a year younger than I am now. So I take it back; he wasn’t old, it was a trick of the black-and-white film.) was young. He was 32 when the hysterical No Time for Sergeants play debuted as a movie:

Did you catch Corporal Klinger in there? Jamie Farr played the un-credited co-pilot in the movie.

Years later we’d see A Face in the Crowd, and it would turn everything upside down. Andy Griffith as a bitter, cynical, hard Lonesome Rhodes? It changed everything. It was hard to process this man playing a role like that when you had the ability to see Andy Taylor (and Matlock, and some of us just assumed we could make Matlock an extension of the Taylor character, sort of an apology for RFD in a new setting) on your television almost every day for your entire life.

He’d say later he’d had exactly one acting class before that film which, by the way, holds up remarkably well, 55 years later.

After a while he could only work those heavy roles, but it was the character from Mayberry that endured, persisted and informed us as an audience. For all of his range, as an actor and generationally, what happened in that fictional little North Carolina town is what everyone thought of this morning when they heard the news.

Several years ago AV Club did a list of wonderfully irrelevant Andy Griffith show conversations. This scene description was fitting for the series:

It rarely makes the list of the greatest Andy Griffith Show episodes, but the first seven minutes of “Class Reunion” should be issued to anyone who wants to learn how to write Southern characters, and how to act them. Beginning with Knotts and Griffith moving a heavy trunk and worrying that one of their pants might’ve ripped, the conversation evolves into a discussion of those “make money in your spare time” ads, and then a conversation about what’s in Knotts’ trunk, starting with a rock that Knotts used to strike a match on to light his father’s pipe.

Here’s that scene, and it is pitch perfect still:

And of course the smartest thing Griffith ever did on that show was to play it straight. Don Knotts was destined to be the comedic relief, but that wasn’t the original plan. Andy Taylor held the town together, but Barney Fife brought the show down through the generations:

Here’s Griffith just after Knotts died in 2006:

Here they are together in 1996, both near 70 years old and 36 years after the show took the air. Griffith says Mayberry, shot from 1960 through 1968, was really about the 1930s. They’re talking about the characters, which is just about the most charming conversation you could imagine two old men having:

Did you know the great theme had lyrics?

Well, now, take down your fishin’ pole and meet me at the fishin’ hole,
We may not get a bite all day, but don’t you rush away.

Makes you want to run right out for an Andy Griffith marathon.

Monday / music / video — Comments Off
2
Jul 12

I’m reading and thinking, so …

I am glad there are people like this in the world. The world needs people who find art in essentially simple engineering. There’s a place for people who find conversations in circles. I’m just glad I’m not that person.

Wheels get me there. Safely. Comfortably. Just get me there.

It makes you wonder how the brain perceives art. Why do you see it farther down this chain of events and activities than the next person? There’s a talent and an art to growing things. There’s a great spirit involved in planting a seed and nurturing what comes next. A different person takes that freshly grown potato and thinks: french fries. Now there’s a culinary art I can salt and get behind.

You can think of any analogy you like and make it apply here. I’ll stick with a simplified explanation. Anything you do with joy can be art — I made pizzas in high school, and that wasn’t art, but there was a guy there who did it with flair. When it becomes rote, then you’ve done it too long. I like to watch the guys at Mellow Mushroom spin out the pretzels. To them this is a crank of wrist and a bend of the elbow, a few hundred times a night. Don’t spill it and don’t back up the kitchen. Just get it there safely and comfortably.

I’m not a very good cyclist — have you heard? — but I do try and make sure there’s a smile on my face. Otherwise, what is the point? You get in the upper 20s and there’s so much wind it always sounds like there’s a car behind you, you better look the part because, eventually, that will be a car and not wind noise. A truck turned right in front of me the other day, almost hitting me, and then behaved rather stupidly in front of me for some time. It is unnerving, but you must remember to smile. That guy could be having a really bad day. There could be a terrifying spider in his lap as far as I know. Also his truck weighs more than my bike, and he cares not for the philosophical or ontological designs behind the wheels’ origin.

Someone will write to say that the absence of appreciation is a lack of depth of thought. True. Usually I’m more concerned with breathing and lactic acid in my legs. And I’ve seen wheels my entire life. Perhaps if I’d been around at the beginning for those first stone wheels I would have made drawings on my wall about them.

We’d talk about it later, but I’d act casually about the wonders of what I’d seen and preserved in plant dye.

“Grog! Look! I have portrayed Grimmel’s wheel. See how it slides down the hill? He should try it on the skinny side. But his flipping regimen is doing wonders for his core.”

At what point, really, do you think people began to look at the wheel as more than a simple tool that made chores remarkably easier? The Renaissance? The Bronze Age? The first kid that had a wheeled toy? Wikipedia says that was perhaps around 1500 BC and — I’m guess from the citation here — in Mexico. Imagine that, a kid who looks at what someone carved him and comes to the realization that he has, as a toy, what someone in the village doesn’t have as a tool.

But he didn’t write sonnets about it.

And now, 100 guitar riffs we should beam to outer space on a universal disc of greetings along with our periodic chart and anatomical cliff notes. Here is something of a history of rock ‘n’ roll, without the obligatory guitar faces:

That really needs Joe Satriani and Alex Lifeson, but you can’t have everything. Artists.

video / weekend — Comments Off
30
Jun 12

Wanda “Bang Bang” Lamb and Mary “Boom Boom” Williams

I am about to make your weekend … and perhaps every other day between now and Independence Day.

These ladies have apparently been famous for years:

They’ve been showing up on viral sites about this time of year since 2008. Sadly I’ve just now learned of them.

The rest of their commercials are only posted on their site. Run right over there. Boom Boom.