American Graffiti.

Source: Facebook

What’s the most memorable way someone has ever asked you out?

This is not a request for suggestions—I’m very happy with my wife and have no interest in anything other than friendship with anyone else. I’m curious because something came up recently that reminded me of the most creative way someone has ever asked me out. It was before I met my wife. I was in college and the person and I knew each other—I thought there was something there but was afraid to make the first move. They were out of town one weekend and left me their dorm key so I could feed their fish. I went in and there was a note on the stereo that said “Play Me”.

There was a cassette in the stereo—showing my age, I know—cued up to “Reel Around The Fountain” by The Smiths.

This was, as I said, the most creative way someone has ever asked me out, not the best way. I was an English major so of course I had to analyze every single line of the song. I thought I understood “Fifteen minutes with you/Well, I wouldn’t say no” but did they want me to slap them on the patio? And was that a euphemism? I pretty well understood, though, once it got to this verse:

I dreamt about you last night
And I fell out of bed twice
You can pin and mount me like a butterfly
But, “Take me to the haven of your bed”
Was something that you never said

Still not the best way to ask me out. Someone who really wanted to woo me would use a Kinks song—but not anything from Give The People What They Want. It’s a great album, one of my favorites. It’s just not one for setting the mood; the song “Destroyer” pretty well sums up some of my romantic experiences, but that’s another story.

Most happy memories are tinged with sadness, including this one. I has happier having forgotten it, honestly, and will be happy to forget it again until something reminds me of it. Listening to “Reel Around The Fountain” that first time, though, while feeding a crimson betta fish, was and always will be pure happiness. I don’t know if the person I’ve been writing about here will ever read this. I’m not going looking, but I will say this: in spite of how badly things went we did have a very happy fifteen minutes and I hope you’re happy now.  

My wife has tried several things to keep squirrels and chipmunks out of her flowers. She’s put wire mesh around the pots but that obscures the flowers, makes it hard to water them, and also the squirrels and chipmunks just climb over it. She’s tried traps but we’re both squeamish and don’t really want to kill them so we end up with a live squirrel or chipmunk in a humane trap and, well, what are we supposed to do with it then? No matter where we release them they’re just going to come back. At least once a year one of our neighbors finds a garter snake in her garden and she gets me to come over and remove it, which I’m happy to do because I like snakes, and even though I release it at the very back of our yard I’m pretty sure it just goes back to my neighbor’s garden.

We won’t use poison because that could harm the dogs and also, again, we don’t want to kill the little beasts, just keep them out of the flowers. She tried fox urine and all that did was get the dogs excited and do a little watering of the flowers of their own.

The latest thing she’s tried is pinwheels. Supposedly the movement and sound will frighten away small animals, which sounds plausible but it doesn’t work. The bright side is I like seeing the pinwheels out there among the flowers. They’re fun to watch, they don’t need to be watered, the squirrels and chipmunks leave them alone.

And they remind me of the British comedian Jasper Carrott’s mole story.

Over at Mydangblog Suzanne Craig-Whytock has written a few times about her miniature room which always reminds me of William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour…

He also said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” which seems to contradict the lines from Auguries of Innocence, but I can accept that poets have wide-ranging and even malleable opinions. I also can’t think of William Blake without remembering the time one of my English professors showed the class slides of some Blake prints and a girl next to me kept whispering, “He’s insane…he’s insane…” It’s completely unrelated but I read somewhere that Saint-Saëns whispered the same thing at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. Even more unrelated the first time Allen Ginsberg read Howl at a gallery in San Francisco and said the line “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” the poet Frank O’Hara was in the audience and whispered “Good lord, do you think he means us?”

I’ve gotten excessive with the quotes there even though I really wanted to talk about Headquarters Coffee Shop, a tiny little place on Nashville’s Charlotte Avenue. The space is so small I think it was once an alley that simply got absorbed into a building, but that building is more than a century old so I don’t know if there are any records. If you’re ever there and waiting to order you might look over at the brick wall and see this:

Click to embiggen.

I love that they’ve taken a hole in the wall—which is what some people might also call Headquarters—and turned it into a little space. It even changes. Here it is a few months ago:

The last time I was there I was working on a short story about a little girl who finds a door to Fairyland but isn’t allowed to in even though she offers up her mother’s iPad and even her baby sister for payment. It was really crowded inside so I went to the back patio.

While I was out there writing I felt like something was looking down from the old window above me. Finally I went to check it out and saw this:

That’s very different thing than what’s inside but I can accept that Headquarters may be small but it has wide-ranging and even malleable opinions. And excellent iced coffee. Make mine a large—I’m feeling excessive.

Even though I’ve said many times that taggers prefer to work on blank canvases and usually show respect for each other’s work by not painting over what someone else has already done I know there are exceptions. I’ve seen exceptions. This one just happened to be really eye-catching and, I thought, pretty funny and clever too.

Any picture of a fish also reminds me of my college friend Katherine who was an art student and painted what I thought was an amazing picture of goldfish in a pond. She added dabs of white and very pale yellow to show light reflecting off the surface of the water and somehow managed to give the whole picture a genuine sense of depth. It was really well done trompe l’oeil. Then some highly regarded art critic visited the campus. He went around the gallery making comments about different student artworks. When he got to Katherine’s he said,  “Some mornings I want orange juice and some mornings I want tomato juice,” he said. “If I feel like orange juice and you give me tomato juice, even if it’s the world’s best tomato juice, I’m not going to like it. Then he paused and added, “This is pineapple juice. I hate pineapple juice.”

Katherine shrugged it off with her usual “Opinions are like armpits; everybody’s got a couple and some stink.” I, on the other hand, was annoyed with more than just his criticism of what I thought was a good painting. Judgments about art, I thought, should be fixed, based in solid reasoning, not just feelings. I didn’t know what that reasoning should be, exactly, but I felt there must be other, better critics out there who’d figured it out.

Now that I’m older—I try not to think about how much older, but that’s another story—I feel very differently about what that art critic said. Part of it, anyway. Art criticism is subjective. There are artists I used to not care for whose work I really like, or at least appreciate, now, and there are some I used to really like who don’t move me like they used to.

And also Katherine’s painting was pineapple juice. I happen to love pineapple juice. I hope I always will.

It’s funny to me when people say “Welp.” What they mean is “Well”, usually as in something like, “Well, that’s it then” but the letter P at the end just emphasizes the finality. In linguistics P is a voiceless bilabial plosive—related to B, which is a voiced bilabial plosive. The letter L, on the other hand, is a voiced alveolar lateral approximant, and you’d think linguists could come up with a shorter term and you’d be right. I remember from college linguistics class that L and R are the liquid consonants. I like that term. I do wish the letter R could also get in there but calling them the lurid consonants would have an entirely different meaning.

I like this graffiti too. It’s bright and sharp. Because it’s only visible along a stretch of Interstate 40 just past Charlotte Pike the simplicity is nice. Only passengers are likely to see it as the cars they’re in speed by.

Here’s the graffiti that used to be in the same spot. I took this picture a little over two years ago but it stayed there for a lot longer. I looked it up in Google Maps and the earlier graffit was still there as recently as October 2023. I don’t know if it’s the same artist painting over their work. If it is their style seems to have evolved—it’s stronger now, more confident, but I don’t think it’s the last thing they have to say.

Source: Wikipedia

The Muppet Movie is the ideal movie for Pride Month.

That may sound like a completely random thought but it’s something that occurred to me both after I watched the new documentary Jim Henson: Idea Man about the life and work of Jim Henson and also reading the article On the Cultural Significance of ‘The Muppet Movie’ in the Nashville Scene.

Neither of those make any connection between the Muppets and LGBTQ+ community–in spite of its title the Scene article is really too short to do anything but highlight a few aspects the original film’s significance–but it’s something I thought about because, like many LGTBTQ+ people—and, for that matter, most of us who’ve felt like outsiders for whatever reason—the Muppets are a diverse bunch of odd characters who may seem like they have nothing in common but who form a family anyway. Jim Henson himself did the same thing, bringing a wide range of performers together into what ultimately became a family as they all worked together and shared time together through multiple projects. Although most of the performers behind the Muppets were straight there were a few who were gay, like Richard Hunt, who was hired to work on Sesame Street in its early years and he performed the character Scooter who was introduced on The Muppet Show.

Jim Henson wasn’t gay and neither is Frank Oz, but they were very close friends. Friendship is a form of love and I think they expressed that through the Muppets’ most endearing, enduring, and difficult couple—the on-again-off-again-who-knows-what’s-going-on-or-off relationship between Kermit and Miss Piggy. A relationship between a frog and a pig may seem transgressive, if not downright impossible, but love is love. Henson and Oz also originated another long-term Muppet couple, Bert and Ernie, who also love each other enough to stick together in spite of–or maybe because of–their differences.

There’s another old Muppet couple, Waldorf and Statler. I don’t like to stereotype but others have pointed out that they’re apparently single men who spend all their time together, and most of it at the theater where they sit in a booth making catty remarks. Whatever their relationship is they make each other laugh, and that counts for a lot.

Speaking of theaters Henson chose to model The Muppet Show theater on British dance halls, Theaters have a long history of being safe places for LGBTQ+ people—it’s not a coincidence that Polari, slang used by gay men to communicate discreetly—was also popular among actors, singers, and circus folk. And the Muppet theater, like Sesame Street, is a place where everyone is welcome.

These are just a few thoughts I had but the Muppets are multi-layered and complicated and, more than anything else, they’re for everyone. The Muppet Movie begins with Kermit singing “The Rainbow Connection” and ends with all the Muppets singing it together, and accepting each other. It’s why the Muppets still matter, and because they’re united by what they share rather than what makes them different we can see ourselves in them. Personally I’ve always felt a kinship with Fozzie Bear, who manages to make the worst jokes funny, but the point is that there’s at least one Muppet for everyone, and those lines still ring true:

Someday we’ll find it,

the rainbow connection,

the lovers, the dreamers, and me.

There are two quotes from Shakespeare that I’ve heard cited several times as evidence of The Bard contradicting himself. First is probably the most famous:

O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…

That, of course, is from Romeo & Juliet, Act II, scene 2. Then there’s:

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

That’s from Othello, Act III, scene 3, and it’s spoken by Iago. It’s a noble thought and I understand why people quote it but of Shakespeare’s villains Iago is one of the worst.

Even if these ideas are contradictory, and I think they’re much too complicated to say they are, Shakespeare didn’t speak through his characters. Maybe he spoke through his plays—there have been whole books written about how the death of his son Hamnet might have prompted him to stop writing light comedies and turn to the darker subjects of his tragedies—but that’s a controversial idea.

Anyway both Juliet and Iago understood that names carry a lot of weight which is why the Oprah tag I’ve noticed around Nashville caught my attention. And it’s been noticed by others too. Is it a callout to Oprah Winfrey? She did live in Nashville and attended both high school and college here, winning Miss Black Nashville in 1972 and Miss Black Tennessee and started her career at a local radio station.

Maybe it’s just someone else named Oprah, or someone who chose it as their tag for aesthetic reasons. Whatever the story behind it is I don’t think the famous Oprah has anything to worry about. If she were inclined to quote Shakespeare herself she might say, “Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.”

And if you recognized the line from Titus Andronicus, Act V, scene 3, “Why, there they are both, baked in that pie,” give yourself ten bonus points.

Every spring and summer local libraries put in community gardens. It’s a great idea that brings people together—although at the Richland Park Library there’s also a weekly farmer’s market that draws big crowds so you have to get there early to find a parking space. Like a lot of Nashville’s libraries it’s also placed in a neighborhood where it’s within easy walking distance for a lot of residents so that helps.

The pizza garden is a brilliant idea since it brings kids into the community gardening project too. Obviously there’s basil in there but also tomatoes and in the larger plot they’ve planted zucchini and peppers. I’d like to see a pineapple planted in there somewhere. There’s also a large rain barrel set next to the library building that people use for watering its gardens. And the Richland Park Library has a “catalogue” of seeds for anyone who wants to take some seeds to try growing plants at home, or that they can donate to if they have any extras. As you can see it’s decorated with a very hungry caterpillar.

Looking at all this made me realize how much libraries and community gardens go together: they belong to everyone but they also need care and tending and also—librarians will get this—occasional weeding.