The other night I noticed a fuzzy yellow object up in the sky and even without checking I knew what it was, since Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky, after the sun, the moon, and Venus. The last time I spotted Jupiter—or rather the last time I wrote a blog post about Jupiter since I didn’t actually see it in broad daylight, I just knew it was there with the SkyView app, although it’s so bright you can sometimes see Jupiter during the day—it was also in, or near, the constellation Scorpius. That got me wondering if Jupiter always hangs out near the scorpion. That seems unlikely—planets move, after all, and after a bit of checking I found that Jupiter has been near Scorpius since some time in late 2018 and by January 2020 will move through Sagittarius, then Capricornus in January 2021, and into Aquarius in January 2022, which still seems unusually regular for a planet.
And even though I’m not really into astrology—which I know is so typical of a Sagittarius—I know Scorpios are supposed to be pretty intense characters, and if you don’t believe that a Scorpio is likely to ask if you want to make something of it, but that’s another story. The mythical Jupiter himself was a pretty intense character too, if you catch my drift. He, and his Greek predecessor, were known as “the father of the gods” for a reason. The planet has seventy-nine known moons, all of them named after lovers or children of the mythical Jupiter, and there were so many.
I would wonder if Jupiter’s presence were adding a little extra sting to Scorpios and if it would have an influence on the other constellations as it moves through the others—if I were into astrology. I’d even look forward to January 2020, but I’ll probably have completely forgotten this by then. You know how short the attention span of a Sagittarius is.
Recently a law went into effect in Tennessee that requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times, since the state is the highest in the country when it comes to distracted driving deaths, one of those things where you really don’t want to be ranked number one although I guess statistically someone has to be. It’s mainly aimed at people using their phones—any kind of hands-free communication is still legal, although I’m one of those people who can’t talk without using my hands, so if you ride with me while I’m ever in the driver’s seat please excuse my silence—but applies to anything. I didn’t even think about the implications until one morning when I was in the elevator and a woman next to me was talking on her phone and said, “Well, you’d better not be talking on your phone while you’re driving anyway.” She got quiet for a minute then said, “What do you mean I can’t drink my drink?” Yes, it applies to eating and drinking too, which reminds me of a joke Paul Reiser made about how the only time you enjoy sitting in traffic is when you’re trying to eat something, but that’s another story.
And I realized that rule must apply to bus drivers too, which might be a little bit of a problem for a bus driver who used to be on my route. Every day she’d stop at a certain fast food place on the route and get a cup of water. I understand bus drivers need breaks just like everybody else and at least she didn’t linger but got her water and came right back out, but from her conversations with riders I learned that it was always her first run of the day. She was also always running late. She blamed this on the driver before her and yet whenever there was a different driver on the route, which happened at least once a week, they’d be on time. Once she was so far behind schedule that when she stopped at the fast food place someone in the back yelled, “Can you please wait to get water?”
She ignored this request and spent an unusually long time in the fast food place.
It may be purely a coincidence—bus drivers change routes all the time—but I stopped seeing her on my route not long after that.
Anyway I wonder how bus drivers will cope with having to keep their hands on the wheel while driving. I have an idea, but it involves a really long straw.
It’s very hard for me to define art. Every definition I come up with always seems to exclude something that, when I think about it, could also be art. For instance if I conclude that art has to be something people make I then think about, say, a spider’s web, which I can find just as beautiful and moving and meaningful as any work of art. It doesn’t even have to be a picture of a spider’s web, which I think most people would say qualifies as art—it can be a spider’s web itself. I tend to have these prolonged arguments with myself that never go anywhere, and I’m not sure if I had the argument with someone else they’d go anywhere either, which reminds me of a story about the art critic David Sylvester. He was still a young man, although already establishing himself as a writer, and was hired as a part-time secretary by the artist Henry Moore, but they spent so much time arguing about art that Moore fired him, although I think any artist should know better than to hire a critic.
Anyway I’ve realized in these lengthy debates that art isn’t even necessarily something that’s created, at least not intentionally. Whoever left a door in a frame standing next to the road probably didn’t put it there are any kind of artistic statement—it was on a stretch of road that was about to be closed for several months for maintenance and I think the road crew put it there to hang notes on, or maybe they were planning to build a temporary office around it. From that perspective it’s just an ordinary door, but it’s how you see it that makes all the difference. The wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s first Narnia book seems to be just an ordinary wardrobe until Lucy steps into it, eventually followed by her siblings, and two books later Lucy, Edmund, and their cousin Eustace are transported to Narnia by a painting. Recently the Orangutan Librarian—the blogger, not the one who works at Unseen University, although I think they’re both equally well-read—compiled a list titled Favourite Fantasy Worlds I’d Love to go on Holiday To… which is part of what sparked my thinking about that door out by the road, and doors in general, as well as windows, paintings, and books as portals to other worlds. We were, if not debating, at least in conversation, even if one of us was unaware of it. Anyway that brings me around to the conclusion that the one defining characteristic of art, the one thing I can be absolutely certain of, is that it takes you somewhere.
One of the ongoing joys of life after cancer is that I get to have my blood regularly drawn. Fortunately I have plenty to spare and, having recently celebrated five years since my initial diagnosis, I only have to give up a sample every six months or so before regular checkups with my oncologist. And usually it’s so quick and easy it doesn’t feel like they’re drawing blood so much as making a quick sketch of it. It’s a different nurse every time, although they all always tell me, “You’re going to feel a little stick,” I also get to make the same joke. When they slide the needle in and all I feel is a slight pinch I exhale and say, “I can tell you’ve done this before.” I mean it as a compliment and it always makes the nurses laugh, and of course making the medical team laugh is my top priority even though it should probably be my health. I also wish just once a nurse would tell me “You’re going to feel a little prick” so I could say, “You could at least take me out to dinner and a movie first,” but that’s another story.
Anyway the other day I went in to give up a blood sample and instead of the usual routine I said to the nurse, “So, first day on the job?” because it felt like I’d just had a piece of lead pipe jammed into my arm. Then I said, “Boy, that’s gonna leave a mark.” The nurse kept on with what she was doing so I said, “Are you using the whole fist?” None of this made any impression on the nurse, but she did ask, “Do you have any plans for this Fourth of July?”
“Well,” I said, as flashes of pain popped in front of my eyes, “I have just gotten a preview of the fireworks.”
We still get a newspaper, an actual, physical, paper-and-ink newspaper, although just on the weekends–I have so many other things to read that the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday editions are about all I can keep up with, and even then I mostly pull out the Arts section and recycle the rest. A few times I’ve seen the guy who makes the deliveries, driving slowly through neighborhoods some time after dawn, his emergency lights blinking. He has excellent aim. He always manages to hit the ditch next to the driveway. Our neighbor gets a paper too, but I wonder how many homes still get a newspaper. It’s a dying business. I don’t want to wax nostalgic about the bygone era of kids on bicycles throwing a morning newspaper onto the porch of every home just as the residents were starting to stir but I also want to wax nostalgic about the bygone, or nearly gone, era of regular newspaper delivery. Not that I ever had a paper route, or even knew anyone who did before I went to college.
I met Jeff early in my sophomore year at a small gathering at his place. Maybe it was a party but I don’t know if you can call four people a party, and anyway his room–part of a row of student apartments next to the fraternity houses, so that it was both off-campus and technically part of the campus–while bigger than a dorm room was still pretty small. We drank and talked through the night. He played Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”. At some point early on I quit drinking, but Jeff didn’t, and at around three o’clock in the morning he said, “I need to deliver papers. Can you drive?”
Well, sort of. I didn’t have a license and it had been a few years since driver’s ed, but I decided driving a car is like riding a bicycle; you’re just less likely to fall off. It had been a few years since I’d last ridden a bicycle too. Following Jeff’s directions I drove to a warehouse downtown where we picked up a stack of newspapers, then through the neighborhoods of straight streets where all I had to do was hold the steering wheel while he bagged and threw newspapers.
I rode along with him a few more times after that, and one day we even took a half hour road trip to a bigger town. He was looking for a book at a bookstore that turned out to be closed when we got there. A few days later I went by his place and knocked. There was no answer. I couldn’t find him the next day either. The day after that a girl I knew told me Jeff had been reported for smoking pot in his room, maybe by one of the fraternity guys who would have recognized the smell from one of their own parties. The details were obscure but at the time any drug use was dealt with swiftly and harshly. Jeff was expelled and left without telling anyone. The abruptness of it has stayed with me even as the newspaper delivery business slowly fades away.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that for many mark the start of the modern LGBT rights movement. It also marks the 41st anniversary of the rainbow flag as a symbol of LGBT movement. It was designed by artist Gilbert Baker and flown at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade on June 25th, 1978. It supplanted the pink triangle as a symbol of gay rights, which reminds me of the time I started to go into a pub but then hesitated because there was a pink triangle in the window. It was off to the side, in the corner of a window, and so small I might have missed it, but I saw it anyway and thought it meant it was a gay pub then wondered why that would be a problem because I just wanted to get a pint like everyone else in there, so I went in and had a pint. And while I can’t say whether anyone in there was gay–there were men and women at the bar engaged in local talk but it seemed to be a place that welcomed everybody–I realized the pink triangle in the window was a Bass ale logo that had faded in the sun. Anyway to get back to the rainbow flag, ten years ago the radio program/podcast Studio 360 asked listeners to submit ideas to redesign the rainbow flag and asked fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi to judge. He picked this redesign of the United States flag with only seven stars:
Source: Core77
The stars represented the only states that allowed same-sex marriage at the time: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. Vermont would be added later that same year, other states would follow, and with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015 same-sex marriage became the law nationwide, so the flag that Mizrahi picked six years earlier effectively had fifty stars. The flag Mizrahi picked made a statement that was quickly outdated, and limited to the United States, but LGBT people are everywhere.
For what it’s worth the design I would have picked is this one, since I think it’s a truer representation of the human spectrum:
Source: WNYC
There have also been variations of the rainbow flag almost from the beginning. Originally the flag’s stripes were hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. Pink and turquoise were removed in 1979 and replaced with blue. Later there was a variation that included a black stripe as a memorial to AIDS victims, a tragedy that, like Stonewall, galvanized and propelled the LGBT rights movement.
I think the rainbow flag persists and has become so popular because it’s an inclusive symbol. A few years ago I was in a small town and went to a coffee shop and, as I was going in, I noticed a rainbow sticker. It was off to the side in the window and so small I might have missed it, but I didn’t hesitate to go in because I knew the coffee shop was a welcoming place.
Anyway I’ve noticed something interesting in the way the flag is often displayed. While it’s usually flown from a flagpole with its stripes oriented horizontally I’ve seen it more frequently hung in buildings and windows vertically. It’s a simple, and probably unintentional, redesign, one that puts the stripes side by side, so that all the colors are equal.
The swimming pool had two diving boards over the deep end. There was the low diving board that hung about three feet above the water. The only difference between jumping from the low diving board and jumping from the edge of the pool was that the low diving board put you a little farther out over the water. And it was kind of springy so you could bounce at the end of the board and it would propel you upward slightly. I liked to jump from the low board into the deep end and swim all the way to the bottom, twelve feet down, and look up. The watery surface overhead was like a shimmering screen, and the sun was like a sapphire. Then I’d have to come up. Or, on slow days when the pool wasn’t crowded, I could jump off the low board and swim all the way across the pool without surfacing. The first time I did that it was exhilarating. I felt like I’d really accomplished something, and what I accomplished was nearly hyperventilating at the edge of the pool because I was breathing so hard, which reminds me of the time I was at my grandparents’ house and my grandmother picked up the phone. She listened for a moment then said to my grandfather, “All I hear is heavy breathing.” My grandfather grabbed the phone and began sternly lecturing the person at the other end about decorum. Then he got quiet and listened and said to my grandmother, “Jim’s car broke down and he just pushed it two miles uphill to the service station.”
Anyway the high diving board, twelve feet high if I remember correctly although it seemed like it loomed a hundred feet overhead. It might as well have been that high. I wasn’t going up there. Well, I did. After all it was there, a mountain to be climbed, or rather a ladder to be climbed and jumped off of. I told myself that I was interested in swimming, not airing, and that if I really wanted to drop twelve feet I could by going from the surface of the pool to the bottom. It drew me, though. I had mastered everything else at the pool—not that there was much to master. After swimming from one end of the pool to the other without taking a breath about the only other thing that was left was talking the guy who ran the concession stand into letting me have a full cup of orange soda without ice so I got more orange soda and spent about half an hour sitting in a beach chair feeling bloated and miserable, but that’s another story.
The same summer I made the first swim from one end of the pool to the other I made up my mind I was going to jump from the high dive. The worst that could happen, I figured, was that I’d fall in the water.
It was about that time, on a slow, hot afternoon when there was hardly anyone around, when even the lifeguard was barely paying attention, that another kid walked out to the end of the high dive, bounced a couple of times, lost his balance, and fell sideways. He landed flat on his back on the concrete below. I didn’t see it happen. I just saw him stretched out as though sleeping, and the emergency team with the stretcher that took him away. He survived, and word got around that he recovered, but he never came back to the pool.
Later that summer, on a busy day when the pool was crowded, I got in line with all the other swimmers who were going off the high dive. I climbed the ladder, walked onto the board, and gripped the handrails. The handrails ended about halfway. Beyond them was just the board and open air. I stood up there holding the handrails for what seemed like an hour, then climbed back down. No one laughed or made fun of me. The next person in line, an older guy, just nodded at me, climbed the ladder, and did a spectacular dive off the board.
The next summer I watched a couple of my friends go off the high dive. Sometimes we’d do synchronized jumps, me going off the low dive and, of course, hitting the water much sooner, or I’d wait and try to time it so we’d hit the water at the same time. And finally one day I decided I was going to do it. I climbed the ladder. I gripped the handrails as I walked out toward the end of the board, then let go. I didn’t bounce and I walked slowly, and when I got to the end of the board I jumped, feet first. It wasn’t an impressive dive, or even a dive really, but I plunged into the water. That was all I wanted—to make that leap.
Twenty-six years ago, on June 27th, 1993 I married my wife. It wasn’t as frightening, probably because the justice of the peace who performed the ceremony looked so much like John Cleese that my only regret is that when he read the vows I didn’t say, “What was the thing in the middle?” It was really her by my side that assured me, though, and every day I look forward to a new leap.
A few weeks ago I went to the taping of an episode of the BBC World Service Arts Hour, a program that goes around to different parts of the world. Host Nikki Bedi talks to people wherever she goes about the local arts and culture and for some strange reason when she was here in Nashville the focus was country music. The episode is now available. It was an interesting, sometimes spirited discussion, and my only complaint is that whenever they asked for questions for feedback from the audience I raised my hand and got ignored. Why wouldn’t they call on me? I didn’t even end up on the cutting room floor—there was nothing to cut. Maybe that’s just as well. I’m just a schmuck who doesn’t know a lot about country music, or music in general, but here are some thoughts I wish I’d gotten to share.
The opening discussion was about what qualifies as country music, whether “country” is even a distinct, definable genre anymore. As both people on stage and in the audience commented for most younger listeners these days music is basically genreless. They download or just listen to individual songs or whole albums without much thought about what category the music fits into. That reminded me that back when there were still record stores, even though I gravitated toward certain sections, I could find something I wanted to listen to in every category. That’s still true for me. My taste in music is so wide-ranging that my friends will agree I’m pretty much tasteless, but that’s another story.
Something else I thought about, though, is how genres in music really never have been clearly defined—or rather they’ve been defined more by who’s making the music and how it’s marketed than anything else. Take, for instance, “Lola” by The Kinks. Tweak the lyrics a bit—change it from a club down in old Soho to a honky tonk in New Orleans and the drink from champagne that tastes like cherry cola to moonshine that tastes like muddy water—and you’ve got a country song. Even the subject, a naive boy who meets a woman who may be more than she appears, could fit into country, although LGBT themes in country music is something I’ll come back to later. Similarly “Beast Of Burden” by The Rolling Stones and even Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” could be country songs with just a little change to the instrumentation–after all British rockers were heavily influenced by the blues and country music long before they invaded the U.S. airwaves. The major difference between rock and country has primarily been that the latter is unplugged, although I remember when Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road”, played with The Pogues, got regular spins on rock stations. Then there’s a band like Credence Clearwater Revival that in record stores and radio stations was classed as rock but had distinct country, blues, and folk influences.
The issue of diversity in country music was a big topic with performer Jimmie Allen talking about his own experience and how there are more African American country singers than people realize. Conversation veered into Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Country Road”, but it also got me thinking, how much difference is there between country and the blues? Again this is a question of genres, and here the line is even more blurry than it is between country and rock. While genres may have their uses the classification of music is a form of segregation since the main difference between “country” and “blues” mostly seems to be who’s doing the playing, even at Bob’s Country Bunker where they play both kinds of music—country and western, but that’s another story.
Source: Tumblr
Also on stage was Australian singer Morgan Evans who came to Nashville to play and record country music, a reflection of both its international appeal and the fact that “country music” is no longer regional–if it ever was. Australia has its own tradition of country music with singers like Slim Dusty and the band Bullamanka. Their songs range from covers of popular Australian tunes and American country songs to originals like “The Bunyip Of Hooligan’s Creek”, which combines Australian mythology, environmental themes, and reflects the Celtic influences on country music.
Another major part of the discussion was also focused on the decline of women in country music—although this is also primarily a problem on country radio. With the rise of satellite radio, not to mention the ubiquity of apps you can put on your phone, how much of an audience does traditional radio command anymore?
As part of that subject country singer Cam performed her song “Diane”, a response to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, which Dolly Parton loves, so you know it’s a good song. Speaking of both Dolly and women in country music, her song “Nine To Five”, written to promote the now classic film she starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, was both a major hit and a call for women to get the respect they deserve.
And to get back to the question of genre, in spite of some stylistic differences, I’d put both Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” and Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” in the same category of women’s celebratory anthems. It’s also interesting that much of the focus of the show Nashville, that ran from 2012-2016 on ABC and from 2016-2018 on CMT, was on three women: Rayna James, played by Connie Britton, Juliette Barnes, played by Hayden Panettiere, and Scarlett O’Connor, played by Clare Bowen.
Nashville also had a subplot about character Will Lexington, played by Chris Carmack, who struggles with being gay but ultimately accepts it. The day after the BBC World Service Arts Hour taping country artist Ty Herndon was on NPR’s All Things Considered to talk about his real coming out in 2014, and changing the pronouns in his song “What Mattered Most”. There was also Chely Wright who came out publicly in 2007, and let’s not forget k.d. lang who came out in 1992.
When Trae Crowder, the “liberal redneck”, took the stage for a quick comedy set which included learning as a kid that his uncle was gay which helped shape his views, I was reminded how much of a sense of humor country music has, from Ray Stevens to Cledus T. Judd, who could easily be described as the “Weird Al” of country music. And there’s one of my favorites, Roger Miller, who amazingly always sang with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
Crowder also reminded me of an old joke: why don’t Southern Baptists have sex standing up? Because people might think they’re dancing. That got me thinking about how much country music deals with topics that are off-limits in “polite company”, such as alcoholism, or at least drinking, and infidelity. Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.”, written by Tom T. Hall, is a scathing account of institutional hypocrisy that was so popular it spawned both a movie and a TV show. Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe” recounts a suicide, and Loretta Lynn’s “One’s On The Way” is humorous but also a subtle stab from a woman who’s being kept barefoot and pregnant. On a similar note there’s Deana Carter’s more recent “Did I Shave My Legs For This?”
When the subject of politics came up I was surprised there was no mention of The Dixie Chicks who were cast out of country music for a remark about George W. Bush but who also, at the height of their popularity, took on domestic violence with “Goodbye Earl”, which I’m sure raised a few eyebrows among the execs, but they were willing to let it slide as long as it sold.
Anyway, like I said, this is not a comprehensive review of music history, but rather just some thoughts that came into my head during the show. It’s probably just as well they didn’t call on me. I don’t know that much about music.
One day I was sitting on the bus, absorbed in a podcast as usual. I barely even noticed that the bus had stopped to let some people off. Then it started rolling again. Then from behind me a guy started yelling, “Hey! Wait! Stop!” I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep and almost missed his stop, or had just been so absorbed in something he was listening to he forgot where he wanted to get off. Then he ran to the front of the bus holding a small purse. The driver let him out and the guy yelled, “Hey ma’am!” He ran to a woman walking up the sidewalk and handed her the purse, then ran back to the bus and got back on.
“She does that all the time,” said the driver. “Most of the time I just keep it up here and give it to her when she gets back on.”
I laughed at how bus drivers get to know certain people, and also wondered how many purses that woman lost and if she’d memorized all her credit card numbers, and wondered if I’d chase someone down the street to return a purse, then went back to listening to my podcast.
I was reminded of that incident when I heard about a scientific study to find out whether people around the world would return a lost wallet if they found one. And the good news is they will. Some researchers were surprised by that, and even more surprising to them was that the larger the amount of money in the wallet–some wallets had no money, some had about $13 in local currency, and others had about $100–the more likely people were to return it with the money in it.
Is that really surprising, though? The fake wallets were made to look like they belonged to tourists, and a lot of us who’ve traveled can relate to the experience of losing something so vital as a wallet and money in a strange place. And a lot of locals want tourists to leave with a good impression of a place. What does it say about us though that anyone finds the results surprising? People have a tendency to live up to expectations. For instance most people expect me to be completely oblivious.
So The Huntress915, who’s tough enough to take on the other 914, nominated me for a Sunshine Award, which is nice since I have a dark sense of humor, and The Huntress is a pretty amazing person. She’s smart and accomplished and from Texas, and you know what the say about how you shouldn’t mess with Texas. At least I hope someone knows it because I can’t remember it. I think it might be “Don’t aggravate the Lone Star State”, but that’s another story.
This is my first Sunshine Award, although I have been nominated for the Liebster Awardtwice, and I can never figure out how to add these to my blog, just like I haven’t figured out how to make it easy for people to leave comments without dealing with spam. And the other rule I always break is that I never nominate anyone else for the award. I appreciate the recognition and I want to pass it on and there are a lot of blogs I really like–more than the usual recommended five–but blogs are also a personal thing and I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to break out of whatever they’ve got planned. So if you’re a regular here or follow this blog or just dropped by consider this your Sunshine Award, and I’ll try and fix those grawlixing comments.
Oh yeah, and there’s one last thing: five random facts about myself. Here goes:
-I can guess anyone’s age within five years if they tell me their birthday.
-I was once arrested for impersonating a member of the Bulgarian royal family. I was in Liechtenstein at the time.
-I can eat an entire jar of peanut butter. It usually takes a couple of months.
-I have an extensive collection of walks into a bar jokes.
-I’ve been known to make up weird random facts about myself.
The other night I noticed a fuzzy yellow object up in the sky and even without checking I knew what it was, since Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky, after the sun, the moon, and Venus. The last time I spotted Jupiter—or rather the last time I wrote a blog post about Jupiter since I didn’t actually see it in broad daylight, I just knew it was there with the SkyView app, although it’s so bright you can sometimes see Jupiter during the day—it was also in, or near, the constellation Scorpius. That got me wondering if Jupiter always hangs out near the scorpion. That seems unlikely—planets move, after all, and after a bit of checking I found that Jupiter has been near Scorpius since some time in late 2018 and by January 2020 will move through Sagittarius, then Capricornus in January 2021, and into Aquarius in January 2022, which still seems unusually regular for a planet.
