Plus ça Change -- "January, 1795" by Mary Darby Robinson

Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving.

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;
Courtiers cringing and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

Wives who laugh at passive spouses;
Theatres, and meeting-houses;
Balls, where simp’ring misses languish;
Hospitals, and groans of anguish.

Arts and sciences bewailing;
Commerce drooping, credit failing;
Placemen mocking subjects loyal;
Separations, weddings royal.

Authors who can’t earn a dinner;
Many a subtle rogue a winner;
Fugitives for shelter seeking;
Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.

Taste and talents quite deserted;
All the laws of truth perverted;
Arrogance o’er merit soaring;
Merit silently deploring.

Ladies gambling night and morning;
Fools the works of genius scorning;
Ancient dames for girls mistaken,
Youthful damsels quite forsaken.

Some in luxury delighting;
More in talking than in fighting;
Lovers old, and beaux decrepid;
Lordlings empty and insipid.

Poets, painters, and musicians;
Lawyers, doctors, politicians:
Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes,
Seeking fame by diff’rent roads.

Gallant souls with empty purses;
Gen’rals only fit for nurses;
School-boys, smit with martial spirit,
Taking place of vet’ran merit.

Honest men who can’t get places,
Knaves who shew unblushing faces;
Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded;
Candor spurn’d, and art rewarded.

sometimes there's a buggy....

Grading Day, so Link

Blast! I begin each term with such an effective schedule--no course assignments overlap, due dates are spread out, and so on. Blast! Each term's schedule ends up collapsing about week four. Granted, "collapse" is a bit hyperbolic, but it's inevitable that something will occur to shake up the term's choreography. Yes. I am behind schedule.

Anyway, I've been responding to student work all week, and the end approaches: I sit with 50 papers before me. I will meet with half of the authors in conference tomorrow and Friday. The remainder I will respond to via email today and tomorrow.  As much as I'd love to spend today writing about SCOTUS and WKRP in Cincinnati, I've my priorities. Instead, I'll leave a link to Lawyers, Guns, and Money, where you'll always find insightful challenging posts on a number of issues (academia, politics, ideology, pop culture, etc). Love that blog.

Country Roads.

 Let me talk about music (some more)

While growing up, my exposure to music was limited. 

            My family didn’t have wide-ranging tastes. My mother collected LPs by standard artists: Elvis (Blue Hawaii, Gold Records, and 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong: Elvis' Gold Records – Volume 2), Gene Pitney (Greatest Hits), 101 Strings, and Henry Mancini. My grandparents had Sinatra (Sings for Only the Lonely and Ring a Ding Ding—still my favorite Sinatra album), and a multi-volume Time-Life classical collection. Mind you, no one ever seemed to listen to these albums; they collected dust.

             One Christmas, my grandmother presented me with a Mickey Mouse turntable and a few soundtracks from Disney animated films. I listened to those LPs until they popped and jumped, as LPs were wont to do, and then I moved onto the grown-ups’ records. I believe I was the only child in town who went about singing “A Foggy Day” under her breath. In contrast, my classmates were talking about Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard. I had no idea who Sweet might have been, and I certainly had no access to the LP (and Lord, by the time I heard my classmates talking about Desolation Boulevard, it must have been five or six years old). Someone wither inherited the album from an older sibling or they discovered it somewhere in “the city.” 

       Radio-wise, we lived in a mountain-bound community where one AM radio station held sway; FM was non-existent without fancy equipment to help capture stations from 100 miles away. This radio station, based in Idaho’s Silver Valley (which I think was KWAL), operated only between 5:00 AM and about 7:00 PM daily. It played a blend of farm reports, news updates, Paul Harvey commentaries, and country/pop hits (for example, I remember hearing both Lyn Anderson’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," and Wings’ “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”). Essentially, you can say that while children elsewhere had the option of spinning a dial to discover radio stations offering different genres, I had what was pretty much a news station that played music, rather anodyne music, as filler. I did gain an appreciation for Paul Harvey that continues to this day.

Let Me (Start) Talk(ing) About Music For a Bit...

Last night I attended a show at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, PA (just outside of Philadelphia), which shook me in its intensity, its energy, and its theatricality. Sharon Van Etten opened the show; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds headlined. Van Etten received a warm (if not always enthusiastic) response from the audience*; Cave and the Bad Seeds? The audience gave them a thunderous response throughout/

I was struck by this rapturous audience's makeup: many people older than me, sure (Cave himself is 55), but people younger (some much younger) than me made up a significant part of the crowd. How did these adolescents and young adults discover Cave and musicians like him, e.g., unconventional or non-mainstream performers? In the Internet age, it seems a foolish question, true. Really, though, isn't the answer the same as ever? Musical discovery, and the development of taste, is determined by environment and technology.

Contrast someone raised in a small, homogeneous community with limited resources with someone raised in a city like Philadelphia, with its diverse musical history and wealth of radio stations. In the latter, it's a no-brainer that you'll be exposed to music of all genres. Add the Internet, a primary source for music for at least 15 years, and the problem becomes one of filtering what's good rather than trying to find music at all.

My experience has been vastly different from that of the average Millennial, and I'm sure it's an experience that people born before 1985 or so could relate to, especially if they were raised in a small, rural communities. so I am going to talk about that in a series of posts (that's the plan, anyway). A musical biography, if you will. If your experience is similar, feel free to chime in with your own anecdotes and memories.

And if you have a chance to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' tour? Do it. Don't think. Don't consider, simply do it. You'll be well rewarded.

* Van Etten noted that she wasn't Nick Cave more than once, and at one point said she had "only two more songs" before the Bad Seeds would come on. Apparently, someone in front commented on this remark: Van Etten relayed that "the girl dressed like a princess says 'yeah!' [and to the girl in question] "Good to see you again."  Take from that what you will.

Let Me Talk About Music for a Bit

My greatest hits from childhood, all played on one of these: 

Dipping a Toe (Again)

I've kept this blog off and on (mostly on) for a number of years. It never reached a huge audience, and that's okay. I began it as an outlet because I was encountering a number of big events and required a means of expression. The big events continued (as they do), but I pretty much stopped blogging after the death of my late husband.

Now, you might be thinking, "if maintaining M, P, & G, S, had been a real outlet, then she would have not only kept at it, but maniacally so." To which I say, "nah." But then, I expect that any widow or widower would say this: you lose interest in nearly everything after losing your spouse. I didn't fall into a depression so much as I just--felt neutered. I am still trying to emerge from that state. It comes and it goes, but I can say that colors are reappearing and interests are being re-piqued. And that's all one can ask for.

The point is that I'm going to attempt to reintroduce myself to blogging now that I'm feeling like I can "speak" again. So there it is. Onward and upward. 

A Petty Quibble

While reading arguments over who has experienced worse treatment at the hands of America's political partisans, George W. Bush or Barack Obama (a fairly childish argument in and of itself), I commonly see references to a "snuff film," a "liberal assassination fantasy" about President Bush, with the implication that American leftists were responsible for it. Not so.

That film, titled Death of a President (2006), was not, as is often believed, a product of the "professional left." It was not produced in the United States nor by an American citizen. It is a British film, with a British director, British writers, and British financing.

Like this post's title indicates, it's merely a petty quibble, and my wish here is to clarify.
Cheers

Netflix coming to iPhone

Sure enough, after introducing "Netflix for iPad," Netflix announced that a similar app is in the works for iPhone and iPod Touch. Streaming movies in the palm of your hand!

And David Lynch's head explodes.

Getting Medieval at 3 A.M.

So I'm at the OED online looking up "medieval" as an adjective to check its usage history (for a project), and I find this:

b. U.S. to get medieval: to use violence or extreme measures on, to become aggressive.

1994 Q. TARANTINO & R. AVARY Pulp Fiction 131, I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna git Medieval on your ass. 1996 Rolling Stone 13 July 85/3 And with the metal-on-metal grinding and old-school synth whoops..Faust and O'Rourke really get medieval. 1999 Washington Post 9 May F1, I have no idea why we're talking about sending ground troops to Kosovo when we can send a fleet of Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators over there. What's Milosevic going to throw at them--Yugos? These things will get medieval with Yugos. 2000 N.Y. Times 5 May E8/1 The teenage crowd screamed and cheered--but only when Macbeth got medieval on someone.

Maybe it's just me being up at three a.m. and all, but I find this--and the illustrative quotes--hysterical. Pulp Fiction in the OED? C'mon. But I'm happy to know that teenagers are whooping it up at a performance of Macbeth (rather, they have done in the past ten years).

Aside: sometimes I hate that I can get the OED is online. It's too easy. My beloved bought me a (used) copy of the two volume compact. I love it, and I enjoy the whole magnifying glass thing like crazy, but I tend to use it as a place to pile bills more than anything else. Pathetic.

MS Yoda & English Word # 1,000,000

Here's a weird, and annoying, aside: Microsoft Word has gone all little-green-pointy-eared-master on me. It keeps tying to correct the phrase:

“What am I to do”
to
“What to do I am”

Fairly aggravating (this is just one example. Either Word's folks are jokers, unreasonably obssessed with Star Wars, or they're unfamilair with basic English grammar).

On another note: people who watch these sort of things (that would be Global Language Monitor) are anticipating the upcoming one millionth English word. Seriously? The millionth is coming just now? Woo hoo!

Penn's a Stooge

Well, according to the AP, anyway.

Sean Penn is set to play Larry in an update of The Three Stooges. I can see the fit, but Benicio Del Toro as Moe? I don't see it.

Aside: I just viewed Milk, and Penn surely deserved that Oscar. Brilliant.

Le Show

If you've not had the happy opportunity to encounter Harry Shearer's program Le Show, go here to enjoy some delightful music and gentle snark.

Ides

Today is the Ides of March--AKA the date of Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC.

There you go.

Googling Atlantis

Google has had to dampen excited proclamations that Google Earth reveals Atlantis. Google Earth's map of the ocean includes an apparent series of shapes in the Atlantic Ocean about 600 miles from Africa. However, Google says these don't represent the lost city; rather, "what users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process. Bathymetric ( or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor [. . .] The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data" (BBC).

While I'm somewhat averse to Atlantis stories (thanks in large part to folks like Graham Hancock and Erik Von Daniken), I admit that the discovery of the city's location would be way cool.

Motown Turns Fifty.

Yes, Motown turns fifty, and we all get to feel really old. Anyway, to celebrate Motown's demi-centenniel, NPR's All Things Considered has music critic (and former Detroit Free Press journalist) Gary Graff run down six lamentably overlooked singles from Gordy's label.

Graff's list includes some great trivia. For example, one of the tracks he includes, "Does your Mama Know About Me," by Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, features a young Tommy Chong on guitar. Yes, that Tommy Chong. Moreover, Graff claims that Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers "discovered" the Jackson Five, thereby deflating the Motown myth of Diana Ross's role in bringing the Jacksons to Detroit).

Why I Love Henry Rollins. . .

Not that I actually need another reason to celebrate Henry Rollins, but this pretty much sums it up. During a spoken word performance this past spring, someone decided to cut out before the show ended; the attempt to escape didn’t go unnoticed by Rollins:

When a man with long, white hair left early, Rollins called him out. The guy started running out of the theater as Rollins yelled, “Run hippie.”

The event took place in an area pretty notorious for its 60s remainders, by the way.

You Thought Obama Would Do What?

A catalog of misplaced hopes.

The Beard "Mystery"

Okay, Bill Richardson’s post-campaign beard was great. I loved it. But all the media attention it’s getting is rather silly. He shaved it off a month ago--before election day. But, even though he made the talk show rounds sans-whiskers, and the media commented on his smooth look at the time, people are only noticing it because Obama commented on it? And the way the media has picked up on this story--I guess we can say we’re in the silly season, aye?

A Century of Levi-Strauss

Not the denim company, but the anthropologist. Claude Levi-Strauss, whose studies of myth (and a few other things) heavily influenced the social sciences and the humanities in the 20^th century, turned 100 yesterday.