Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Let It Out.

Author: March 24, 2018 6 Comments

Some places keep drawing me back, mostly because they’re convenient, but also because I know I’m likely to find interesting graffiti there. And it also fascinates me that some places seem to attract repeat offenders, if you consider them offenders. In my mind the jury’s still out, but that’s another story. That brings me back to the old Madison Mill industrial complex on Nashville’s Charlotte Avenue which I thought was slated for total demolition and urban renewal six months ago, and which had been scrubbed of all its graffiti.

Now it’s started to return. It appears to be different artists, but they’re presumably drawn to the place for the same reason others were: it’s a large and largely unguarded canvas. What really fascinates me, though, is the compulsion some people have to decorate. That’s what I think produces a lot of graffiti: there are people who have a desperate need to create and no other outlet. It’s like the moment in Spinal Tap when Viv Savage is asked what he’d do if there were no rock’n’roll, and he said, “I’d probably get a bit stupid and start to make a fool of myself in public, ’cause there wouldn’t be a stage to go on.” And, yes, I know Spinal Tap is not a real band and that Viv Savage was actually the musician Dave Kaffinetti, but stick with me here.

Forcing some people to stop creating would be like forcing them to stop breathing—and the effect would be the same. They need a space, and there should be spaces for artists. They shouldn’t have to find illicit places. This was already in my mind when I read a great review of the new film Wild Nights With Emily over at Assholes Watching Movies. The film is about the largely unknown life of Emily Dickinson; she was apparently not the demure recluse whose poems can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas we all learned about in English class.

What I’m really stuck on, though, is how Dickinson wrote compulsively, and her family allowed her the freedom to do so. She did publish a few poems in her lifetime but mostly she just wrote, filling up private books but certain there was a receptive audience out there. As she says in #162, titled “The Outlet”,

 

My river runs to thee:

Blue sea, wilt welcome me?

 

My river waits reply.

Oh sea, look graciously!

 

I’ll fetch thee brooks

From spotted nooks,—

 

Say, sea,

Take me!

And I also think about when I was taking pictures of that graffiti. It was a really nice day and there were a lot of people sitting out on the patio of a restaurant that’s right next to the Madison Mill. People probably noticed me and wondered what I was doing. No one asked, though. If they had I would have said, “I can’t help it.”

American Graffiti.

It’s A Spectacle.

Author: March 23, 2018 8 Comments

There are things you just don’t realize until you’re in a certain situation. For instance I never realized before that if you take the worst aspects of a doctor’s office and a J.C. Penney’s and put them together you get an eyewear store until I went shopping for glasses and the store was vaguely clinical with a lot of neutral colors and uncomfortable furniture but also mirrors that reflected back the dismal reality that I’m getting old and a lot of pictures of happy models wearing glasses, all of whom seemed to magnify the dismal reality that I’m getting old. And I wondered why none of them were modeling contacts until I realized that contacts don’t have a lot of stylistic variety and that basically this year’s contacts are going to look exactly like last year’s contacts, which actually makes contacts a better option if you care enough about fashion that you’re willing to start each day by sticking a small piece of plastic in your eye.

So anyway I was looking for glasses. And my wife was there with me because she has a much better fashion sense than I do and she’s going to spend more time than anyone else looking at my glasses whereas I’m just going to spend most of my time looking through them. She put the kibosh on one pair I picked up saying, “No, too John Lennon,” and she was right, I don’t imagine I could pull off that look. So we browsed some more and I accidentally wandered from the men’s eyewear section to the women’s section where all the frames looked the same but the models in the pictures were women. And all the lenses had a sticker that said, “Test lenses,” so I asked a few of them if they knew what the capital of Estonia is. Also I was slightly amazed by the prices of some of the frames. At least with really expensive clothing you know you’re paying for the label, but with glasses you’re just paying for some metal or plastic that holds a couple of magnifying glasses together and any label big enough to be worth the price is going to block your view. Or they’d be a monocle because nothing says wealth and class like being able to afford only one lens or a pince-nez because the acme of worldliness and style is glasses that keep falling off. And I remembered why I hate shopping for anything. In a late stage capitalist post-consumerist first-world double-dipped half-caff lightly sprinkled hot buttered and fluoridated society I should be able to find exactly what I’m looking for even when I don’t know what it is. When a very nice young woman came over and asked if she could help us find anything I said, “Have you got anything Elton John would describe as ‘a little too over-the-top’?” Because some of them were expensive enough that they not only should be able to help you see better but also hit that high note in Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but that’s another story.

Eventually we did find a pair that my wife liked the look of and that I liked looking through, and I find that when I put them on the world looks a little sharper, the way I remember it used to look, which also reminds me that I’m getting older. Still there are advantages. A friend told me, “Those give you a very intellectual look. Do they also make you feel smarter?” and I said, “Uhhhhh,” and she had fortunately wandered away when I suddenly and for no reason yelled out “Tallinn!” because I only paid enough for the ones that make me look smarter. The ones that would actually make me smarter were twice as much.

The Weekly Essay

Interestingly…

Author: March 19, 2018 6 Comments

Supposedly there’s a Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” I say “supposedly” because I once asked a Chinese scholar about that and she said, “I’ve never heard any such thing in my life.” It’s probably an expression some guy cooked up and to make it sound more interesting he decided to claim it was a Chinese curse. Uninteresting times can be a curse too. Recently I took a trip by Greyhound bus to Cincinnati. I made the same trip last year and then it was interesting because it had been about a quarter of a century since I’d taken a Greyhound bus anywhere and things had changed significantly. This time all the things that were different before were still the same. Well, almost all the same. The men’s restroom had just been repainted and I went in there and literally watched paint dry. Then, because I have a smartphone and the station had free wifi, I went out and looked up “watching paint dry” in Wikipedia. Smartphones mean we never have to be bored ever again, and I had mine loaded up with podcasts and music, and even if the battery went dead I had my bag with my journal and copy of Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi. I didn’t expect my battery to go dead, of course, because I knew from my last trip that the bus seats have plugs you can use to recharge your device.

I got on and grabbed a seat and a young man in a purple hoodie sat down next to me and we both had our phones out and that’s when I noticed there were no plugs at the seat I picked. My phone died about half an hour out of Nashville so I followed Twain’s progress to New Orleans while I went northward.

When we stopped in Louisville I went into the restaurant/gift shop to get coffee. Then, still holding my coffee, I wandered out then tried to go back in. “Sir!” yelled the man behind the counter. “This is for customers only! Once you go out you can’t come back!” This was more baffling than it was interesting.

Back on the bus I found a seat with wall plugs and my phone was full and so was my bladder by the time I arrived at the Cincinnati Greyhound station where the men’s room had not been freshly repainted because such a coincidence would have been too interesting for this trip.

I went to Cincinnati, by the way, to see some old friends and a talk by Neil Gaiman which was extremely interesting. There’s an old saying that’s also been attributed to the Chinese that the journey is more important than the destination, but sometimes it really is the destination that matters, especially when it’s the destination that’s interesting.

Adventures In Busing.

Free For All.

Author: March 17, 2018 4 Comments

“I really thought if I ever learned to draw properly I would try to change the world for the better.”

–Ralph Steadman

I first saw this mural in Cincinnati from a moving car, which is funny because I don’t know where to start with it. In fact I was so excited when I saw it I almost jumped out of the car, and that was before I realized it was by Ralph Steadman. Steadman is best known for his work with Hunter S. Thompson, a long collaboration that began with Steadman providing illustrations for The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved. Steadman’s slapdash style looks decadent and depraved, at least from a distance, but up close is exquisitely detailed. He combines accidents and precision, an interesting contradiction given that Steadman himself seems very contradictory. His art is often brutal and angry, raging at state of the world, and yet he also does commercial work. You may not be able to buy an original painting by him–he’s really very reluctant to sell his work and has said, “If anyone owns an original Steadman it’s stolen”–but copies are cheap and easy to find.

Among other things he’s done the labels for Flying Dog beer, and it’s not surprising that when my friend James, who was driving the car I’d later almost jump out of, and I were perusing the beer aisle of a store I pointed some out to him. He’s lucky he can find Flying Dog beers since they’re no longer available in Tennessee, and I once drove a really long way to find some. Then I sent them an e-mail describing my ordeal and got a really nice reply and they sent me a t-shirt, but that’s another story. He’s also a prolific author of numerous books.

As for the mural, it is an original Steadman.

Who owns it, though, or if it’s really owned by anyone, is another question. Public murals are contradictory in themselves: they’re commissioned and approved and an artist gets paid but once done they belong to everyone who happens to pass by. You don’t have to go into a gallery or museum; most of the time if you see a public mural it’s an accident, but hopefully an accident that makes your world a little better.

This reminds me of that great quote from Winston Churchill, “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

American Graffiti.

What Time Is It, Anyway?

Author: March 16, 2018 8 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

“Florida Legislature OKs year-round daylight saving time…”

-Herald-Tribune, March 6, 2018

It seemed like a good idea at the time. We moved the clocks up an hour and then just left them there. Most people forgot about it until November and there was a decision that since it worked so well we should fall forward and no one lost any sleep over it. Well, technically we all lost an hour of sleep, but nobody was counting at that point. Then the next spring came around and we all looked at each other and said, okay, let’s do this again, and there was another hour. And we did it again in the fall. Then someone suggested we “overwinter” and everybody was okay with this since it meant we could get through the holidays faster. Spring came earlier than usual that year and then someone said that as long as we were “overwintering” maybe we should also “undersummer” and figuring out what that meant took care of a few more hours.

We can’t say exactly when the idea to go to metric time got started, but it wasn’t an easy transition. No one could figure out why the Egyptians and Chinese decided days should be divided into twenty-four hours, but some argued that we’d been doing it for so long it didn’t make sense to change. Others said that it was confusing and that we should have scrapped it long ago. Finally each side was given one week, or ten days, to prepare and an hour, or one hundred minutes, to make their case. Even now some people believe the metric side won because they made their case I only seventy-five centiminutes so we could all leave early.

All this would have created a lot of work for clockmakers if we hadn’t already digitized everything.

Everybody liked that the addition of three extra days to every week meant a longer weekend, but adjusting the calendars was still controversial. Corporate sponsors suggested  additional names for days of the week, but instead there was some compromise and nod to tradition. In English we added Fimmday between Thursday and Friday, Shaniday between Saturday and Sunday, and Hermsday between Tuesday and Wednesday.

Proposals to get rid of Monday entirely were rejected.

Once this was done it was easy to knock out two months. Since August is usually the hottest month some people suggested getting rid of it could slow down global warming. Ultimately though everybody agreed there was no need for March and September, for reasons no one can remember.

Well, that about wraps up this brief history of lost time. Since it’s now midnight let’s go get some lunch.

 

Not Non-Fiction, The Weekly Essay

Looking Outward.

Author: March 15, 2018 2 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

In 2010 Stephen Hawking said that humans should stop sending signals out into space because we run the risk of letting aliens know we’re here. According to Hawking it could be very bad if aliens find us, and he compared it to Europeans discovering Native Americans. The Europeans did bring syphilis and smallpox, but they also brought horses, so aliens could potentially do something similar.

I really do respect Stephen Hawking and I don’t think he offered up his opinion lightly. He has a history of carefully thinking things through. When he was at Oxford-–this is absolutely true-–he was a lazy and unmotivated student but told his professors that if they gave him a first he’d leave to go study at Cambridge and if they gave him a second he’d stay at Oxford. So naturally they gave him a first.

I once did something similar: I managed to pass sixth grade math by telling the teacher that if she flunked me I’d just come back the next year, but that’s another story. Sometimes I imagine his old Oxford professors getting sloppy drunk. One of them says, “Dude, we let Stephen Hawking go.” And the other one says, “He was such a slacker then. How could we know he was gonna write bestselling books and play poker with Data and Einstein on the Enterprise holodeck? And stop calling me ‘dude’. We’re both in our nineties.”

If I could ask Stephen Hawking one question, though, it would be, “What led you to the conclusion that aliens are a threat? And show your work.” I have to include “show your work” because, even though I’m pretty sure he didn’t just leap to this conclusion I would like to know how he arrived at it. I think Hawking may be completely wrong about aliens, but it’s an interesting question to debate, and I credit Hawking with making me think about my own position.

The problem I have with the assumption that aliens are going to come and put an interstellar smackdown on us if we let them know we’re here is that, as far as I know, we really don’t know what aliens are like or what their interests are. I think Hawking was right when he said the universe is likely teeming with life, and given how diverse life is just on this planet whatever forms that life takes are likely very strange, even unrecognizable. If he’s smart enough to have figured that out, though, he should be smart enough to realize that if aliens are capable of advanced interstellar travel they’re probably already aware of us. And if they’re not aware of us they’ve probably already scanned this solar system and discovered that there’s a nice rocky little planet full of water and silicon and heavy metals and Viagra and whatever else they might need to continue their galactic cruise. And if their technology is that advanced then everything we have is theirs for the taking whether we advertise our sentience or not. That’s also why I admit that Hawking may be right. I hope someday we’ll meet aliens on friendly terms, but the universe is a cold, hostile place. Some nights when I look out and see the moon cut into pieces by the spreading branches of a tree I wonder what is out there and I am afraid.

Hail and farewell Stephen Hawking.

Hail & Farewell.

Probe Uranus.

Author: March 13, 2018 8 Comments

Source: NASA

On March 13th, 1781 the astronomer William Herschel spotted what he thought was an unusual comet but which he and other astronomers would quickly discover was a planet. It’s the first planet discovered in modern times which makes Uranus very special. Take a little time to explore Uranus, probe its mysteries, and consider what we’ve learned about Uranus since William Herschel first looked up and saw it two hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Like its neighbors, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, it’s a gas giant. Uranus is full of hydrogen and helium but also in its depths contains ice and rock. Uranus also has a complex cloud system with the lowest clouds believed to be made up of water while the upper layers are methane. There’s a lot of methane in Uranus.

On January 24th, 1986 the Voyager 2 spacecraft probed Uranus. Astronomers at the time called it “the most boring planet” but subsequent studies have shown just how interesting Uranus is. Less than a decade earlier, in 1977, astronomers first discovered rings around Uranus, and then in December 2005 the Hubble telescope detected two additional rings much farther out.

There are also twenty-seven known moons orbiting Uranus. The largest, Titania, orbits Uranus every 8.7 days and because of its closeness to the planet the same side always faces Uranus. Uranus itself orbits the Sun every eighty-four years, which means that since its discovery Uranus hasn’t even been around the Sun three times. However Uranus has a very fast rotation: one day on Uranus is just seventeen hours and fourteen minutes.

Of course Uranus is not alone. There’s also the city of Uranus, right in the middle of Missouri. Uranus is a well-known tourist stop along the historic Route 66, although I think the stretch surrounding it should be renamed the Herschel Highway. The city is known for its fudge factory and also a tattoo place for people who want to be able to say they got a tattoo in Uranus.

Today and every March 13th I hope you’ll join me in spending a little time contemplating Uranus.

Source: Indiegogo

Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

Rides From Strangers.

Author: March 12, 2018 4 Comments

It was early in the year and early in the morning so I was standing at the bus stop in the dark. This was before a new bus shelter with a light had been installed–I was just next to the BUS STOP sign, and while the bus drivers always stopped for me I wondered how they even managed to see me there in the dark. Traffic zipped by so fast I figured I was a passing blur while I waited to be a passenger, but whenever I saw the bus coming I stepped up and waved to make sure I’d be seen. I was standing back, though, when a guy in a white pickup truck stopped and rolled down his window.
“You wanna ride?”
I wasn’t hitchhiking or even walking–there were times when a neighbor would see me walking home and would pull over to offer me a lift since they were going my way. And this got me thinking about hitchhiking, something I’ve never done. It’s funny that I can only think of two hitchhiking stories, both fiction. There’s Roald Dahl’s The Hitch-Hiker, which is a fun story about how he picked up a hitchhiker with an extraordinary talent (there’s an audio version here), and also Larry Niven’s The Deadlier Weapon, which is a fun story about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker who puts a knife to his neck, but it turns out the driver has, well, the title kind of gives it away. Anyway I thought it might be interesting to have a story of my own from the rider’s point of view, and while some people would have good reason to not hop into a stranger’s car I felt like I’d be able to take care of myself if things took a wrong turn. And I knew that, as a driver, I often see people at bus stops, some of whom I recognize from having ridden the bus with them, and I think about offering them a lift, but only if I happen to be going their way.
Then I realized I didn’t recognize this guy, but at the same time what were the odds that someone with nefarious intentions would happen to be just passing by me at that moment? And it’s not like I was standing on a streetcorner in a miniskirt at two in the morning. I’m not sure I’ve got the gams for a miniskirt so I’m going to wear something at least knee-length, but that’s another story. I was doing all this mental calculus at a rate I’m sure exceeded the speed limit–it probably took you longer to read all this than it took me to think it is what I’m saying, but while he was waiting for an answer I saw the bus coming along.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Sure.” He sped off down the road, which kind of confirmed for me that it was a friendly offer. If he’d wanted something, I reckon, he would have been pushier.
The bus stopped and I got on.
“If that truck hadn’t made me slow down I might have gone right past you in the dark,” the bus driver told me as I got on, and I sent out a mental note to the guy in the pickup truck. Thanks for the ride.

Adventures In Busing.

Dragon Soup.

Author: March 10, 2018 8 Comments

Nashville’s Fannie Mae Dees park is a local curiosity. Created in the 1970‘s as part of the urban renewal craze it’s named, ironically, after a woman who opposed its development and other changes to the neighborhood around it. Its real attraction is the sculpture at its heart which has earned it the nickname “Dragon Park”, although the sculptor originally called the work a sea serpent. It was built by Pedro Silva, a Chilean-born New York artist who earned national attention for his whimsical benches around Grant’s Tomb. Meant to revitalize the area he employed local graffiti artists and when Silva came to Nashville he enlisted the help of local volunteers, using a few rough sketches but mostly improvising. Near the Vanderbilt hospital complex it’s attracted a lot of visitors over the years, including R.E.M. who took pictures in the park for the cover of their 1987 album Document, so I guess it’s not just a local curiosity.

Anyway right now the dragon is in trouble, in need of repair and closed off to the public while funds are being raised for restoration. And a curious thing has happened: the walls put up to block off public access have become canvases for local graffiti artists. A lot of graffiti now covers the walls, and most of it is…not very good.

In fact most of it might be unintentionally contributing to the fundraising because people will want to get rid of it. I’d like to see the dragon come back too. It’s an important piece of Nashville history. And yet, while it’s good that most of the graffiti is temporary, some of it is pretty good.

It may even be good enough that it deserves to be recognized as part of Nashville’s history too.

 

American Graffiti.

Lost & Found.

Author: March 5, 2018 13 Comments

So I found a Fleetwood Mac CD while I was walking home from the bus. Maybe whoever it belonged to tried to fit it in their smartphone and realized it wouldn’t play so they threw it out in frustration, or maybe they were fighting off hordes of attackers, although I would have thought Tusk would be a better weapon. It reminded me of the time I found an egg along the same route, which still baffles me, and also generally how much trash I see strewn alongside the road, usually when I’m on my way to or from the bus. A lot of what I see is expected: paper, fast food containers, bottles. My pottery instructor uses blue glass in some of her works so whenever I see a blue bottle I pick it up and I realize that probably looks weird to people driving by to see a guy walking along carrying a big vodka bottle, but I try to make it look less weird by carrying a big bottle of orange juice in the other hand. Sometimes I find unusual things, like the time I found a nice dress jacket, maybe worn by someone whose job interview went badly, or odd little containers or toys, that I think I might take home and turn into an art project, and also just to a little bit of the trash off the street. It’s surprising that an average of four large cargo containers are lost at sea every day but less surprising that I found one while walking home and I can’t tell you how hard it was to pick that up and carry it home, but that’s another story. I think you can understand that the lesson here is that you can pick your friends and you can pick up trash but if you’re picking up your friend’s trash a guitar player should always have a pick.

 

Adventures In Busing.

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