are gay rights soon to be conventional wisdom?

In his book on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people holding elective office around the world Andrew Reynolds says that the assumption that out LGBT officeholders will be on the left of the political spectrum is not an assumption borne out by his analysis.

The association between being openly gay and being on the Left … is an example of American exceptionalism. It is true that the first adopters of gay rights in most of the world were on the Left, but even then somewhat grudgingly. But today the momentum is with the Right. For the most part conservative parties in democracies, including quite extreme right-wing parties, have remained steadfast in their conservative economic principles while evolving into socially liberal and libertarian movements. In the summer of 2016 the number of out LGBT MPs [members of parliament] in office globally from right-of-center parties actually outstripped the number from left-wing parties for the first time. At the start of 2017 there were seventy incumbent right-of-center LGBT parliamentarians from twenty-three countries, only sixty-three left-wing MPs in twenty-two nations. [G]ay rights … have become a nonpartisan issue in the developed world.

Gay rights aren’t the lightning rod they used to be, even in the United States. Donald Trump, who hates lots of people, nevertheless has not campaigned on the revocation of LGBT family rights. Trump has plenty of followers counting on him to transform the federal courts, lodging there for life judges that would happily strip gay people of their families, and Trump has certainly committed to that program. But it’s not been a talking point, not the way, when you look back, the Denial of Marriage Act was considered impossible to oppose in 1995. President Bill Clinton, the most pro-gay president up to that point even signed DOMA into law, with the stroke of a pen demonstrating how expendable the gays are when your political career looks like it might take a hit. At the time I thought Clinton could have allowed DOMA to become law without his signature, if he truly thought it political suicide to veto it. That, at least, would have shown a teensy bit of empathy, considering how cruel the law was. So, yeah, it’s easy to get a sense of the support from the left-of-center as “somewhat grudging.” 

Contrast the leftishts’ weak tea reform to the rightists’ triple cap latte of hate. The right wing wants to crush the gays. We are their enemies, according to their declaration, and given opportunity they would righteously reinstitute a sentence of prison time for a moment of same sex tingle. According to author Reynolds, right wing animosity has waned so dramatically in the rest of the “developed” world that LGBT voters feel comfortable voting for right wing parties, and the parties themselves feel comfortable including LGB (if not yet T) people among their leadership, not stopping at putting us up for electoral office. 

I find this hard to believe. But I can’t argue with his stats. 

Right-of-center politicians who identify as LGB are members of parliaments in Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

In a few of those places (Sweden, for one?) I’m guessing some other policies of the right-of-center parties would seem relatively left wing to Americans. You know government supplied health care isn’t considered anathema to rightist politicians everywhere the way it is in the US (besides that weird Republican love for Medicare?). Yet aren’t right wing parties everywhere more likely to hate on the gay? 

The Conservative Party in England shepherded in marriage equality in 2013 (the law went into effect in 2014) — but this was only after decades of fighting to keep LGBT people from being accepted into society. When I went to London in 1988 the Margaret Thatcher government was pushing through a law that prevented schools from “promoting” homosexuality by preventing any educator from saying anything nice about it. So it’s nice that the Tories turned around. But I, for one, would find it hard to ever vote for them after their history. Nevertheless, Reynolds says, “Since 2015 the British Conservative Party has won as great a proportion of the LGBTQ vote as any other party.”

Should the Republican Party in the US ever do a switcheroo from gay-hate to gay-respect, it still wouldn’t earn my vote. Reward the people who’ve helped you all along, I say. That plus there isn’t much else in the Republican agenda that appeals to me. Racism? No. Free the wealthy from paying taxes? Not a good idea. Shut out all immigrants? How hypocritical.

Sadly, it is not possible to say that lefties (and moderate leftishts) really have helped us all along. They’ve been much better than righties! Usually! 

On a slightly different but related topic: 

Can you name the country that has the largest proportion of LGB members in its parliament? It’s not quite an independent country, so maybe there should be an asterisk next to the name. But … it’s … Scotland!

Ten of 129 Members of the Holyrood Parliament identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and nine of the fifty-nine Scottish MPs in Westminster [the UK parliament, in other words] were lesbian or gay. [The] Scottish Nationalist [Party] … with over 14 percent [is] the most LGBT-inclusive parliamentary party in the world. … Three of the six major party leaders in Scotland [in 2017] were lesbian, gay or bisexual: the Tory Ruth Davidson, Labour’s Kezia Dugdale, and Patrick Harvie of the Greens. Half of Scotland’s six-member delegation to the European Parliament were gay. In total that meant that twenty-two out of 194 elected representatives in a country of five million people were gay.

If it’s so gay friendly, it must be a nice place to visit. I understand they have some pretty castles.

source:

The Children of Harvey Milk: how LGBTQ politicians changed the world

by Andrew Reynolds

2019. Oxford University Press, New York

The unknown 99%

The Viking landers touched down on Mars back in 1975. I was nine. You couldn’t follow events as they happened back then the way you can these days via the internet. But when the daily paper had pictures and accounts of what was taking place on the surface of our sibling planet I was fascinated by the coverage and wanted more. 

Part of the mission of the landers was to test Martian soil for life. But how does one go about designing a test to determine whether there is life in a handful of dust? NASA tried to figure it out. With at least one of the experiments on Viking it was hoped by inundating a soil sample with tasty wet nutrients, microbes would happily start eating and excreting and growing in a way that the Earth-sent instruments could detect. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Do that to any random scoop of Earth soil and sensitive instruments will readily detect life-specific activity. Why shouldn’t it work elsewhere?

Some surprising activity took place, all right. But it wasn’t a life-like response. It was more like an instantaneous chemical reaction. The eventual conclusion was that the inundated soil reacted more like an Alka-seltzer tablet than cellular life — and for similar reasons. Did that mean the soil was sterile? Considering that the soil was continuously exposed to harsh radiation that would kill Earth life and that the soil was extremely dry, it didn’t seem likely that the rapid response to the water had anything to do with life. 

But when you are designing experiments you don’t always know what your test will be overlooking. Most Earth life wouldn’t have responded to that yummy wet food either, according to Sarah Johnson in her book about seeking life on Mars:

When the Viking payload was being designed, no one realized that the vast majority of microbes wouldn’t grow in a nutrient-rich broth — in other words, that they couldn’t be cultured. It wasn’t until we started identifying life by its genes — not waiting for cells to grow in a petri dish but instead breaking them open within a pinch of dirt or a drop of ocean — that we came to understand that less than 1 percent of the life on Earth could be grown in a lab or, by extension, a lab on a spacecraft on Mars.

The 1% of the life that will culture in any given pinch of soil blinds us to the 99% that won’t. Perhaps there was life in that Martian soil sample that the experiment wasn’t designed to find. The situation it would have survive in is so hostile it’s hard to imagine a successful adaptation, but who knows? It might be easier to imagine microbial life under the Martian surface where there really are stores of liquid water and volcanic activity may provide sufficient energy for life to feed on. In other words, we’re still looking.

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

"Hourglass" by Squeeze

I don’t think I saw the video until I looked it up for this post. It’s cute and clever, if a bit distracting. I knew “Hourglass” from the radio — and from repeated plays once I got the album. I don’t think I was able to pull out all the words of the rapidly sung-chanted chorus until I had the album’s lyrics sheet. Then I trained myself to sing along. It was a little tricky. But I got it down!

Take it to the bridge

Throw it overboard

See if it can swim 

Back in to the shore

No one’s in the house 

Everyone is out

All the lights are on

And the blinds are down

In my life many’s the time I needed to dance. Instrumentals are good, lyrics that are howled, crooned, chanted, rasped — all good. The beat in “Hourglass” is good for the hot foot. But in this case the lyrics are a big part of the attraction. According to an interview at songfacts Chris Difford writes the lyrics; Glenn Tilbrook puts them to music. I find it hard to imagine writing lyrics without hearing a song already, so it’s interesting to me that the division of labor here is so sharp. Chris Difford, apparently, does not suggest a tune to begin with, he just hands over words. Glenn Tilbrook will go through pages of offered lyrics and put music to those that strike him. The process for “Hourglass” was more immediately collaborative than usual. “This was the first time we wrote together in the same room,” says Difford. “I'd always thought of writing as a bit like masturbation: something you do on your own, not in the same room as another bloke. However, … within an hour we'd written 'Hourglass.' Lyrically it doesn't mean much but we had some fun writing it.”

The song starts with that thumping drum and nasal horns bleating, then downshifts to some guitar plucking, punctuated by the horns, which sound more assertive now. After about 30 seconds, Tilbrook comes in with the vocal: 

I feel like I'm pounding on a big door

No one can hear me knocking,

I feel like I'm falling flat to the floor

No one can catch me from falling

These are rather alienated lyrics. Unheard, unhelped, the voice, it seems, is also out of time:

The hourglass has no more grains of sand,

My watch has stopped no more turning hands

The crew have abandoned ship

The lights are on but no one is in

The stanza ends with a crewless ship where the lights still burn, a ghost ship, perhaps, adrift. Certainly this continues the alienation, the sense that the voice is alone and unnoticed. If the voice is the ship metaphorically, then the line echoes the joke about the person in a daze, The lights are on, but no one is home. 

The fast-chanted chorus rushes right in without a pause. The narration is getting a little muddled. Is the ship being taken to the bridge where “it” is thrown overboard — or is “it” being thrown off the bridge? Isn’t one more likely to use “overboard” with a boat than a bridge? Is “it” alive? Nonliving things don’t swim, though swimming could be a way of referring to an object floating in with the tide. If “it” is alive, what is it? The house on shore is as abandoned as the ship, yet the house also is lit up, though with the circumspection of blinds being drawn, so an outsider wouldn’t really be able to tell the house is empty. Contra the cliche about lights being on and no one home, the blinds being drawn suggests introspection, or at least a conscious warding off of the inquiring eye. It interests me that the chorus’ rhymes are fairly subtle: “board/shore” and “out/down”. More subtle than “door/floor” and “shore/floor”. The choice makes the chanted chorus a little softer, a little easier to take.

In the next verse the voice is “calling on a telephone” but no one answers, and is “running up a steep hill” (Sisyphus-like?). Again, the timekeeping devices are dysfunctional, with the watch not stopped, no longer telling time, that is, but timelessly, cartoonishly alive — “shaking its fist” with a “face [that] is hanging out on a spring.” The video for the song really plays up the objects as anarchic, the singer’s (band’s) situation as beyond the realm of the world where people can touch and help each other.

Most the singing is easy to make out, but that line about the face on a spring gets lost among the instruments.

The mood of the lyrics is not upbeat, but the singing is assertive and the music full of spring, especially with those blasts of horn. 

The final stanza echoes back to the first with the “or” rhymes and the singer’s attempts to attract attention. The abandoned ship seems still to have one person on it, though no one beyond the ship sees, and no one on shore responds to the voice calling out. The song concludes with a pratfall, a repeat from the first stanza, a fall which is sad and humorous, and a little bit scary. There’s a sense not only that the singer is “falling” and won’t be caught before hitting the floor, but that the falling is ongoing. A free-fall that never comes to earth is a special kind of alienation, isn’t it?

It’s a fun song to dance to. The haunted house/boat the singer describes but seems almost contented with helped me identify with the song personally. I was feeling lonely and abandoned, too, but if the only one there to dance with was my own self, well, I was going to dance with him.

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

the search for life on earth

The investigation of the universe beyond our own planet is often derided as a boondoggle. The money wasted on a robot sent to wander the barren wastes of Mars could be spent on starving children! 

There is plenty of money to do both. You know that, right? That we don’t do both has more to do with our human prejudices and politics than with the availability of resources. Besides, starving the space budget (metaphorically, of course) hardly guarantees that the freed up money would be transferred to those who need it most. 

Still, the ironies of searching for life beyond Earth while doing a mediocre job of learning about the varieties of life on Earth — let alone sharing the planet with a true generosity of spirit — occasionally jump out at one. I think that’s what happened to Sarah Johnson on this occasion:

Once, in one of my teaching labs at Oxford, … I’d been told to familiarize myself with the [fruitfly] larva’s functioning under a dissecting scope, then mount its brain on a glass slide, to study normal cell division, along with its testes, to study germ cell division into gametes. But even after my professor’s prompt to begin the dissection, I dallied. I pushed bits of sugar in the larva’s confused path and watched as it attempted to climb my tweezers. … What universes were down there [from a fruitfly’s perspective]? What noises were too small [for me] to hear beneath … blades of grass … ? 

I lifted the larva into the pocket of my lab coat and excused myself. I held the slide steady while I walked, glancing down into my pocket every few seconds as I descended … the stairs and found my way to the cafeteria. I left it on a bit of the banana I’d bought for lunch, spat out and dribbled from a napkin, in the base of rubber plant in the zoology building. I returned to the classroom and gazed for nearly an hour at a blank slide under the microscope, a vast field of emptiness.

That so much of the science of living things is based on the destruction of living things in the lab is either ironic or appropriate. I’m never sure which. 

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

word of the day: tenebrous

As soon as worlds beyond our own were imagined, they were imagined teeming with life. Life was taken for granted. Intelligent life, usually. What would the point have been of imagining worlds that were all inert stone or insensate fire or sterile water? In her book on the search for life beyond Earth, Sarah Johnson reflects on the failure to find it:

With a mechanical, largely lifeless universe came a newfound existential sorrow. It meant we were potentially alone in the enormity of the now tenebrous night.

word: tenebrous

definition (dictionary.com): dark; gloomy; obscure.

Dark, gloomy, obscure? Hm. Sounds like the definition of night itself, more or less. Which does kind of make “tenebrous” redundant … A tenebrous night would be a night darker, gloomier, and more obscure than it was already then, right? Well. It can always get darker, can’t it? The night, it can always get darker. 

source: 

The Sirens of Mars: searching for life on another world

by Sarah Stewart Johnson

2020. Crown, New York

"Luka" by Suzanne Vega

“Luka” sounds so sweet, with Suzanne Vega’s chirp-whisper mildly drawing the listener along through a perky guitar and frisky beat. I didn’t really get the story of the song until I’d heard it multiple times. “Please don’t ask me what it was,” I would sing. “Please don’t ask me — wait, what what was? Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight? What’s going on here?”

I read recently an editor of an anthology of folk songs responding to criticism of the subject matter of folk songs, especially the disjoint between the happy-sounding tunes and the tragedy in the lyrics. The editor said music serves a few different purposes — entertaining and sharing the news don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Puts me in mind, too, of norteno music, where telling thrilling and terrible stories about contemporary Mexico is part of the project, getting people to dance being the rest. 

I primarily knew “Luka” through the radio. Back in the day I caught the video on a video compilation show like Friday Night Videos, I think, being as I didn’t have MTV. Have to say, I’m not particularly fond of the video. But it did change how I saw the song. I thought Luka was a woman. The line about walking into a door was familiar from TV dramas about abused women. No, nobody beat me. I walked into a door. Works for a child being abused too, I guess.

The lyrics are pretty easy to understand, as Suzanne Vega enunciates clearly, and takes them at an even pace. 

Like the previous two songs I’ve done a post for, “Luka” earworms readily. It’s catchy. Sing along. “You just don’t argue anymore. You just don’t argue — anymore!”

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

The Dance Revolution

In her book on the story of disco music Alice Echols traces the nurturing of the sound to gay dance clubs. In order for there to have been gay dance clubs, first gay people had to be able to dance, yet same sex close dancing was illegal throughout the US up until the late 60s. In 1969, Echols emphasizes, the government’s policing of same sex closeness was still an active and dispiriting part of LGBT life. Echols believes that the relative freedom experienced at the Stonewall Inn was what opened hearts to the possibility of real escape from oppression rather than hiding and cowering. 

[W]hen the Stonewall Inn opened in the spring of 1967, management and customers alike behaved as if the dance floor had been won. The unlicensed bar was a firetrap that doled out watered-down drinks in dirty glasses, but it quickly developed a loyal clientele because it was the only gay bar in New York City that as a matter of course permitted dancing between men. In contrast to another gay bar, the Tenth of Always, where ‘you knew that when the chandelier would flick on, you’d have to sit down,’ at the Stonewall ‘you were never told not to dance.’ Indeed, the only time the dancing came to a halt was when the police arrived. … [The raid that sparked the Stonewall riots] was hardly the first time that the police hit the Stonewall, but it was the first time they had not given notice to the management. And it was the first time that gays, angry about being treated like scum, fought back. 

The dance floor, Echols is saying, became a site of the transformation of consciousness, where emancipation of the public body allowed a change in how gay men saw themselves and each other — and how, in a new solidarity, they saw the non-gay world. Dancers, no longer threatened by the paddy wagon, could enjoy themselves without looking over their shoulders. 

It wasn’t just that the music’s volume and relentlessness encouraged physical intimacy and greater sexual straightforwardness between men. Disco’s sonics, with its thunderous bass and its bass drum kick, operated like an ‘audio orgasmatron’ … The music and the drugs pretty well obliterated any lingering sexual shyness. Moreover, the sweatbox quality of many gay discos made stripping to the waist all but necessary, which in turn made working out practically obligatory. … ‘Within a short five years, sculptured pectoral muscles had become one of the main attributes of gay male desirability.’ … Worked-out pecs came to be called ‘disco-tits.’ … [G]ay men rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other. … ‘We’re the men we’ve been looking for,’ as the protagonist of [novelist Edmund] White’s The Farewell Symphony put it.

I like recreational drugs. I like club music. But my body is not so into either. I’m not one who could go clubbing regularly because my body would just crash. Too many migraines, too many body aches, too little sleep. Besides, the drugs are too expensive, the music ultimately monotonous. As to ever having disco tits — I actually like working out, but my body that doesn’t. That sounds weird to everyone I’ve ever said it to. Still, it’s true. I can’t ramp up my work out routine to get those pretty muscles because my body basically says, nope, and sends me to bed for three days. 

I always kind of envied club kids, their energy, their active social lives, the sex. But it’s not a lifestyle I could participate in, other than briefly and at a remove. But if we credit Alice Echols’ argument, the club was where gay liberation really began, so good for them! Dance the revolution!  

source: 

Hot Stuff: disco and the remaking of American culture

by Alice Echols

2010. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

“Need You Tonight” by INXS

This was the song that turned me on to INXS. The video is pretty great, too. It’s just the band playing, but they’re being playful, and the visual effects, the musicians sliding into and out of the frame in collage-like isolation, holds one's attention. 

The album featuring “Need You Tonight,” Kick, was on my Christmas list. We always put a few things on the Christmas list — so we could be surprised but still get what we wanted — “Oh! You got me that one!” I don’t remember what I didn’t get in lieu of Kick. I was happy to get Kick!

I felt like I was on the cutting edge, man. 

“Need You Tonight” was one of those songs that I would rush to the record player to repeat, picking up the needle, eyeing the shiny line between songs, and settling the needle back to where it would pick up those opening clicks. It’s just that light percussion for the first several seconds, then Michael Hutchence stage-whispers, “Come over here.” 

Seductive! Michael Hutchence is pretty! I would have come to his command. Of the other band members, Tim Farriss, who appears in the video in a black baseball cap, always caught my eye. Those dark brows and big eyes. 

Finally, a guitar strums, sharp and jangly, at 20 seconds. The riff is repeated. A few seconds later the warm throb of the rest of the music bumps up and carries you along through the rest of the song. “All you’ve got is this moment,” Hutchence says, though, as I often do, I had trouble picking out the words. Something about a garden? “The twenty-first century's yesterday.” It is? Well, I like lyrics that are a little odd. 

While I want the lyrics of a song to please me, the lyrics are rarely what first get into my ear. If I don’t groove to the music, I don’t much care what they’re saying. Sadly, you’ll have to forgive me in regards to critical analysis of music. Beyond the lyrics my analysis isn’t much better than the old American Bandstand rate-a-record standby, “It’s got a good beat. You can dance to it.” And “Need You Tonight” passes that test!

When Hutchence gets to “Slide over here / And give me a moment,” I’m ready, I’m dancing, I’ve been dancing, what? does he want me to stop dancing? But it’s the refrain, “You’re one of my kind,” that stuck with me. As one searching for his kind, it’s something I wanted to be able to say. Not to mention, “I’m lonely.” As an intermittent insomniac, I identified with “I’m not sleeping, whether or not it was because I was really hot for somebody.

I like the question / answer part of the lyrics, especially the answer to “Whatcha gonna do?” “Gonna live my life!”

Yes, Hutchence is addressing this to a “girl,” but the best those of us with same sex yearnings could hope for in pop music (until very recently) was a genderless “you.” And, you know, “girl” just becomes punctuation after a while. “I need you tonight,” I sang along. “I need you tonight.”

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

“Why Can’t I Be You?” by The Cure

“Why Can’t I Be You?” was the song that turned me on to The Cure. It was so weird and so catchy, blaring horns, Robert Smith’s whiny/screechy vocals, that stomping beat, loud, giddy, comically lascivious, gender-neutral. 

I kept an eye out for a used copy of “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me,” The Cure album on which “Why Can’t I Be You?” appeared. Being a double album, even used it was more expensive than most of my purchases. 

I loved to put “Why Can’t I Be You?” on the stereo and crank it up and whirl and thrash around the room. It was a song to lose it to. 

The lyrics are not your usual love stuff. Why can’t I be you? Is that envy? A desire so fervid the lover wants to become the beloved? It’s kind of trans — transformational, transgender (perhaps). Were the beloved of the same sex the plaint could include envy (you’re so much prettier than me); why can’t I be more like you? Why can’t I be just like you? I want to be you! 

I love the line, “I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins.” The kissing starts with the feet and goes up to another beginning. There’s a little bit of dissonance with that head, too — it begins at the top, right?, but it could also begin on the way up, at the chin or nape. The underside of the head would be where the head would begin for one working their way up from the feet. I like the instability of that. Where the head begins, where the head ends. Then there’s the other head. The head of the cock. How high up does the singer climb?

The singer sees everything “you do [as] kissable.” Not every part of you, but everything “you do.” The beloved actions are kissable. The lover is so besotted, they are full of action, “run[ning] around until … out of breath,” the actions even becoming violent, “hug you to death,” and, boy, that appetite is worked up and yet the lover is feeling “bitten … cooked.” It’s a messy song lyrically. And the way the words are shouted, crooned, whined, yowled … the messiness of the lyrics seems right.  

There were other songs on the album that I grew fonder of. “Just Like Heaven” and “Catch” are much sweeter and catchy and easy to like. “Why Can’t I Be You?” can get grating, and I stopped playing it for a while. But in the right mood it drives you the kind of crazy you need.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the video. I often like videos. But sometimes they detract. I’m not sorry the images in this video weren’t a major part of my experience of the song. Still, it’s goofy fun. I like Smith’s blobby fur suit. 

source: Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

Live 105's Cool 105.3 for 1987

 

When I was growing up I didn’t hear much I liked on the radio. And I disliked so much of what I did hear that I preferred not to have the radio on. 

Buying music was also tricky. You couldn’t listen to records before buying them in our small town music store. And if you had been allowed to, I probably would have felt too self-conscious. Suppose you try a few records — and you don’t like any of them? The music store is in business. They want you to buy stuff. I couldn’t afford to buy more than one record every few months. Besides, there would have been other people — other kids, probably — who would have been waiting to use any listening station. 

In any case, there wasn’t a listening station. So my brother and I had to judge music by the album covers. Our eyes were caught by the sci fi style of Boston, for instance. Actually spinning the record once it was home — no. I kind of liked parts of Boston songs, but the music had nothing on the guitar spaceships album art. When I did find an artist I liked, it made sense to buy more by them. A buddy turned us on to ABBA and to ELO. Over time I lost interest in ELO — not that there isn’t ELO I still like. ABBA wore a groove in my head. Yet there had to be a world beyond ABBA. 

My brother David made friends who listened to stuff a bit outside the late-70s mainstream. Thus he brought home Talking Heads, whose music intrigued and irritated me in equal measure. David Bowie, ditto. 

I remember in a class in high school (1980? 81?) we pushed our chairs into a circle and did a get-to-know-you intro. You were supposed to say a couple things about yourself, like what music you liked. When my turn came around I said, “I don’t like music.” This drew shocked reactions and some protests. I hadn’t liked any of the music my classmates named. In my experience there was no genre that made me happy. I liked individual songs, whatever boxes they were supposed to fit in. I liked my mother’s folk songs — but not all of them, that’s for sure. I liked very little country music, very little disco, very little rock. 

If you put those little bits all together maybe you’d get a decent mix tape or two. Which would have been a nice thing to be able to do. 

There were San Francisco radio stations that probably would have interested my ears, but their signals weren’t strong enough to be received in Sebastopol. MTV launched in 1981. We couldn’t afford to subscribe. 

I stayed up late to watch some video compilation shows on broadcast television and finally in New Wave found a genre that didn’t annoy more frequently than it pleased. 

By the time I was attending junior college, SF’s KITS had switched its format from Top 40 to “Modern Rock,” or New Wave / Post Punk, synths, jangly guitars. I would listen while doing my homework. And I was regularly going to Santa Rosa where there was a good record store called, helpfully, The Last Record Store. The Last Record Store featured used records, and a lot of the used records were recent. So, without breaking the bank, I could try out artists I knew by only a song or two. 

KITS (now calling itself LIVE 105) offered listeners an opportunity to get their playlist. I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope and got what you see above. 

Clearing out a box of papers during the covid-19 shutdown I unfolded the playlist and smoothed it out. Yes, I recognized most of the songs. Some I loved. But even those I didn’t care for didn’t make me want to rush to turn off the radio. 

The accessibility of music these days is entirely different from when I was a kid. Pretty cool that I can do quick internet searches and turn up any song on this list. What I loved back then, I followed up on back then. Other songs have provided a hit of nostalgia, without my wanting to add them to my music library. “The Great Commandment” by Camouflage; “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless. But I could now! If I wanted.

your reward

Gary Panter is best known for designing the set for PeeWee’s Playhouse. He’s also a comics artist (think surrealism rather than superheroes) and a musician. 

In an interview with Aaron Cometbus about comics, Gary Panter mentions money. Cometbus flinches.

Cometbus: Every interview seems to veer into a discussion about money …

Panter: … I get approached by young people all the time. ‘How can I have a career in art? How can I have a career in comics?’ Well, if you did the drawing, that’s your career. That’s it, your reward. You did the drawing, you got to do it, you were alive.

In other words, you better have a day job.

Still, there’s nothing fresh about saying that, and I would pass over yet another enjoinder not to depend on your art to pay your bills — because what’s to say? — except I actually find a little poignant Panter’s “you got to do it, you were alive.” Because doing these things for love, the art, that’s experiencing life. You get to be alive. 

source:

Cometbus #57 

by Aaron Cometbus

2016. 

M&Ms … or salmon …

I’ve heard of various seemingly fussy contract stipulations that rock stars require at a show, like a bowl of m&ms — but there must be no brown ones. On the surface this just sounds eccentric — or arrogant — but I remember reading that one of the reasons for weird stipulations that are easy to check is that, if those are conscientiously followed through on, then less obvious details are probably taken care of too (things that might affect the quality of the sound, say). 

Maori musical artist Mihirangi says she includes an interesting (and heartwarming) requirement in her contract.

“Whenever she performs abroad, [her] contract stipulates that the organisers must facilitate a meeting with local indigenous groups, to learn about their culture and land and to request permission to perform on that land. ‘I actually can’t perform unless I meet with the local indigenous elders. It’s a cultural thing for me, it’s who I am, it’s my spirituality. It’s really empowering, when you go on stage you feel like you’re becoming part of the local family and that you have a right to be there. You’re connected through the family you’ve met who’ve supported you and nurtured you by opening this space for you. I suggest everyone do that, not just indigenous people.’ … One of [Mihirangi’s] first such experiences came from a meeting at a festival in Canada. ‘The local indigenous people had never had that sort of meeting happen before. They were so honored by it that they came to the festival and caught salmon in the local river and fed the entire festival. … Just that little act alone gave them responsibility, gave them a sense of purpose and empowerment of their own culture, of their own land.’

source: 

“The Power of Language” by Jim Hickson

Songlines

#155, March 2020

Title to Indian Land, part three

I sold it. 

The deadline for getting in the paperwork was July 31. I got the deed notarized on July 20 and mailed the next day. 

The offer letter came this spring. Just before the covid-19 shutdown. Originally the deadline for taking the offer was May 8. The offer letter explains:

We are pleased to include you in the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, which is part of the Class Action Settlement Agreement often referred to as the Cobell Settlement. The intent of the Buy-Back Program is to consolidate highly fractionated tracts of Indian land, allowing for better utilization of the land for social, economic or cultural purposes benefitting the tribal community. Interests purchased under the Buy-Back Program will be transferred to the Tribe in trust.

I had fractionated interest in four tracts, or about 17 acres. This is pastureland. The offer letter proposed the following purchase amounts:

Tract #1 … $2.24

Tract #2 … $1.58

Tract #3 … $9.94

Tract #4 … $104. 35

That totals $118.11, though they throw in $75 for filling out the paperwork. Which is nice of them. 

After the covid-19 shutdown the deadline was extended to July 31. So I made it. I think. I haven’t heard back yet. “Allow at least 60 calendars days for approval of the sale and processing of your payment,” says the letter. 

The heirs to this land are multitudinous. “Fractionated,” that’s no joke. One of the tracts has 116 owners. The others 109, 29, and — this is not reasonable either but only seems so in contrast — 15!

My favorite part of the deal isn’t the money. It’s that I got the names of ancestors: Marie Kempton, Sarah A. Kempton, Bernard E. Kempton, and Bernice Kempton. 

And aerial photos of the land, like this:

Indian land, part one and part two

the poets haven’t forgotten

Deep in our own pandemic, references to a similar event, the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918, will jump out at one, won’t they? 

Grace Marie Grafton devotes a poem to the California painter, Rex Slinkard (died 1918, age 31), “Death at an Early Age”: 

“he died … 

of what was called the Spanish Flu. 

… as his fever rose and

held him in fire, he asked to be carried

down to water. They say that he sang

next to the waves as he died.”

There’s a transgender aspect to the poem that also gives it a contemporary connection: 

“He imagined himself a woman …

… break[ing]

into shattered forms that walk together

near the surf …”

*

Lucille Lang Day, in her poem “Journeys,” briefly looks in on journeys of some in her family tree. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, for instance:

“… my mother’s

mother dies again of pneumonia

in Massachusetts in the flu epidemic

of 1918, and my mother comes over

mountains, rivers and plains 

to California …”

The “again” in the line above refers to the grandmother dying in Day’s imagination — once from the physical life, then again when her grandchild revisits her memory. 

*

sources:

Lens: poetry of art in California

by Grace Marie Grafton

2019. Unsolicited Press, Portland OR

Becoming an Ancestor

by Lucille Lang Day

2015. Cervena Barva Press, West Somerville MA

1961 agenda of Southern whites is the same as today’s

In Jeff Chang’s book-length essay on contemporary art and race, Who We Be, Chang quotes a pollster who illuminates a clash of cultures between whites and blacks in the south: 

 

In a 1961 study, Henry Allen Bullock argued that all consumers purchased things in order to have the security of ‘belonging,’ but that Blacks and whites had very different motivations. … 

Bullock illustrated his point by pointing to how Southern whites and Blacks that he interviewed completed the sentence ‘If I could change the world I would …’ The list of whites’ most frequent replies included: 

‘Make it so that people would not park in front of my driveway.’ 

‘Stop the neighbors’ children from cutting across my lawn.’ 

‘Destroy the United Nations.’  

‘Change the Supreme Court.’ 

But Blacks said: 

‘Make all people the same.’ 

‘Establish brotherhood.’ 

‘Do away with war.’ 

‘Break down segregation.’

I know who I want to bring home for dinner. 

source: 

Who We Be: the colorization of America

by Jeff Chang

2014. St Martin’s Press, New York

Title to Indian land, part two

I am looking at the spring 2020 statement describing the income on Indian land in which I inherited an interest. In Title to Indian land, part one I said at a glance the statements seem to add up to less than the postage on the envelope. 

Does a closer look bear that out? The spring 2020 statement has codes on it that I don’t understand (they probably just identify the tracts), but the accounting looks pretty simple. Let’s review the numbers in the CASH column. 

Nine transactions are listed. The first is CASH 0.10 … the second 0.01 … 

0.07

0.11

0.10

0.02

0.02

0.10

1.00

Out of that I could buy two Forever stamps. 

The largest numbers are cumulative. A beginning balance is listed as 44.39, an ending balance as 45.92. I don’t know how long that $45 has taken to accrue. Years? 

I’ve never seen a penny. Do they pay out when the accrual reaches a certain level? $50? $100? 

The money is meaningless. Clearly. If there is meaning in this ownership share it is as evidence of heritage. Which I like. 

name check

D. A. Powell has hit the big time. He’s won awards, been the subject of adoring essays, publishes in very competitive venues, goes on reading tours. That sounds like the big time to me.

I don’t know how many books he sells. I hope he sells some. Doug is a poet. Poetry sales can’t hope to match a mid-list mystery novel. In poetry the big time isn’t big money. Still, he’s been noticed. 

Doug found his feet as a poet in the Sonoma County poetry scene about the same time I did. He’s not much older than me, so we were peers. Weren’t we? Despite the smallness of the scene I don’t remember running into Doug much. I’m sure we had poet friends and acquaintances in common. 

It’s not easy to get around Sonoma County without a car. I didn’t have access to one, except when my mother would drive me somewhere — and, for a brief period, I got to use her old car after she bought a newer one. I was fortunate in that the Russian River Writers Guild based its reading series in Sebastopol, where I lived, and getting to it was a walk of about ten minutes. 

One of the organizers of the Russian River Writers Guild, Mo Hurley, has set up a blog for RRWG memorabilia. Going through a box of old papers last week I came across some copies of The Obligatory Hug, the RRWG newsletter. One of the Hugs wasn’t represented on the blog, so I snapped images of it and posted them.

In that Hug there’s a calendar of the reading series Doug Powell ran at a cafe in downtown Santa Rosa. I was never invited to read there, but many of the names are of people I knew well. I don’t remember if I ever attended. (See above about lack of transportation.) Since these poets would read in Sebastopol, maybe arranging to get to Santa Rosa didn’t seem necessary. 

In other words, Doug and I never really hung out. As he began to make a name for himself in the national poetry scene, I took for granted that Doug had no memory of me. 

Besides the RRWG blog Mo has set up a memorial blog for Marianne Ware, another RRWG stalwart, a self-declared mother figure for SoCo writers, and an instructor at Santa Rosa’s community college. Marianne was a sweetheart, and a fine performer of her own, often hilarious, writing. 

Reading through reminiscences at the Ware blog, I was surprised to find myself name-checked. By D. A. Powell. 

[Marianne Ware, Doug writes, was o]ne of the first of many passionate and gifted poets I met in Sonoma County. Donna Champion brought me to the Russian River Writers Guild for a holiday party, and introduced me to Maureen Hurley, Glenn Ingersoll, Paul Mariah and Marianne. I was nervous & young, and whatever poem I shared with the group that night was, I'm sure, crap. But Marianne, a gracious and nurturing presence, smiled and told me how wonderful the poem was. 

Wait, I remember the poem now! It's in a drawer somewhere, if I haven't burned it. Yes, it truly was crap.

I remember reading a manifesto Doug wrote, championing a new poetics — Badism. Write crap! Don’t be ashamed. Own it. 

Maybe, by 2010 when he wrote the note about Marianne, Doug had eschewed his old Badism beliefs. After all, he’d hit the big time with good stuff!

source: http://marianneware.blogspot.com/2010/06/class-act.html

“the world everybody else lives in”

A poet’s perspective, according to Mary Ruefle:

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

a continuity of taste

Mary Ruefle describes a continuity of taste:

I was … reading, for the first and last time in my life, my own private journals, which I began writing when I was sixteen and ceased to write when I was forty. As is my habit, I was copying selected passages from the [poet I was also reading at the time] into a notebook. Later that evening I began reading a journal I kept twenty years ago. In it, I was reading the notebooks of the [same] poet … and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before.

In my Best Poems posts I list all the poems I copied out in my own hand over the previous year. Have I have copied out the same poem more than once? There are two occasions I have copied out the same poem in different translation. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about reading over my personal anthology and coming across the same exact poem in English — only a handful of years separating the duplicates. How did I not remember? Surely, the poem seemed awfully familiar.

Not that this was a problem. I mean, I liked it. I’ve wondered occasionally if I would copy out some poem in my personal anthology if I were to come upon it all unseen. In that case, the answer was clearly yes. 

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY

be suspicious of your sources

I don’t recall having heard this before: 

[A] month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.  

On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only ‘the Japanese continuing their propaganda …'   

That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize. 

Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

The Wikipedia entry for William L. Laurence doesn’t tell the story quite that way. “For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with [an] eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won [the] Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946.” 

Wikipedia goes on:

In 2004, journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman called for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper, The New York Times, of his 1946 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists argued that at the time Laurence ‘was also on the payroll of War Department’ and that, after the atomic bombings, he ‘had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people.' They concluded that ‘his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.'

source:

Children of the Days: a calendar of human history

by Eduardo Galeano

translated by Mark Fried

Nation Books / Perseus Group, New York