MTV – Little Home In The Valley

I liked Chris Isaak, even before his video “Wicked Game” came out on VH1 in 1989. He seemed like a good guy, played beautiful guitar and worked with good material. And then Wicked Game came along, and my appreciation of the dramatic possibilities of sand sticking to skin rose to new heights. The video also showed how good a pair of men’s white skivvies could look when worn by the right woman.

Moments like that are why I look back on the MTV era fondly. MTV didn’t invent the music video, but they knew what to do with them and made them the background music for our lives for a few years. And then they stopped showing them and nobody picked up the concept and ran with it after that.

Everything changes. Things arise and things fall. This is the way of the universe. However … I wasn’t done with MTV yet when they quit the scene. It left me with a musicus interruptus sort of feeling.

(Don’t bother looking up that last phrase. It only looks like Latin).

But these creative short films are still out there. You just have to look for them. Being passive and spoon-fed (my favorite approach) doesn’t work as it did in the past. We have to do a little work.

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Note: the dramatic header photograph is not my own, but weakling that I am it was so striking
that I simply couldn’t avoid borrowing it.

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Finally broke out the electric bike. Many, many others with more fortitude than myself have been seen cycling around town since early March, so I am rather late to the party. It’s those chilly breezes that hold me back. But the machine itself needed no encouragement, all I had to do was turn it on and off we went.

Each summer I put about 600 miles on the bike just going to the grocery store and running errands. It replaces the missing second car very nicely. Especially in a country where rain falleth on many fewer days than it did back in South Dakota. Robin and I have panniers to carry stuff on the lighter errands and a Burley Nomad trailer for bigger loads.

We’ve had our Burley trailer for sixteen years now, so I haven’t looked at that market for a long time. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many brands and styles there are to choose from these days. When we picked up ours back in 2009 there might have been three or four brands to choose from, but that limited selection is history.

There are trailers for hauling kids, cargo, dogs, and even stand-up paddleboards. Teensy camper trailers . One-wheelers, two-wheelers, homemade ones … it’s a brave new world out there.

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The presidents of the United States and El Salvador have told us that there is nothing they can do about the innocent man now incarcerated in an El Salvadorean prison.

Do they think that the matter is thus closed? That we will accept this Alice in Wonderland brand of insanity? Are they so dangerously removed from reality?

Who would have thought that we would now have our own version of Los Desaparecidos here in America? If this man is not returned to the United States and freed, we are none of us safe. None of us.

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Mothers of the Disappeared, by U2

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I count myself a lucky man. To have had delivered to my door a problem I can sink my teeth into at this stage of my life. And I have Donald Cluck to thank for it. He has brought fascism home to us, with all of its colorful horrors intact. It is possible that most of the people who voted for him still think he’s a good guy and when the dust settles all will be well. But they are daily being disabused of that quaint notion, because this particular “good guy” has used them to get what he wanted and doesn’t need them any more.

He has taken a functioning economy and thrown it into the Vitamix. Of course there will be a little pain for awhile, he admits, but eventually this will pass and there will be endless possibilities of getting richer ahead of us. What he leaves out is that the pain is to be borne by the 99%, and the increased wealth will go to the 1%. Not a good sound bite, that ending, so he leaves it off.

Like all fascist leaders before him he has employed the tactic of providing us with enemies who are at our doors and who are reaching for our throats. And what an abundance he provides. People of any color other than white. People of any faith other than Christian Nationalism (which isn’t a faith at all). People who won’t do what he tells them when he tells them to do it. People who don’t lick boots or kiss behinds with enough fervor. Facts and truth being inconvenient, he has dispensed with them completely.

So what is my new job? To join with others who see clearly the tragedy unfolding in front of us. To work for the removal of Cluck from office. To work with others to address the injustices and inequalities that allowed someone as unworthy as Cluck to get power in the first place.

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Find the Cost of Freedom, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

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It was a blue sky day. The temperature was around seventy degrees. The road through the Black Canyon National Park was still closed to automobiles two days ago, while open to bike and foot traffic. Sooooo … I loaded our machines on the rack and off we went.

When we reached the park, we found the road had unfortunately just been opened to cars, but we decided to head out anyway. Shortly thereafter a wind came up, the blue sky disappeared, the temperature dropped 15 degrees, and a light rain set in. When we finally reached the end of the road and our halfway point, we went into the only shelter, an outdoor privy, and stood there for a while to warm up a bit.

The rain finally quit and we returned to the bikes to finish the trip. But, oh what a ride this few miles of highway provides! It’s a narrow two-lane road that twists its way along, with the lip of the dramatic Black Canyon of the Gunnison River just a few yards away much of the time.

Well worth a bit of damp and shiver.

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Ridin’ the Storm Out, by REO Speedwagon

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Let’s think of the present political season as opera, shall we? It makes some sense that way. The participants are given to warbling daily arias that mostly involve loud vocalizations with small content. Every word of one person’s utterances is attacked by the opposite side who respond with their own attacks on everything from grammar to logic to underlying sinister meanings.

While we don’t have the “fat lady”singing as in the old jest, we do have the overweight and orange-tinted man, who is never given anything to sing that has an extended set of lyrics, because of his short attention-span. His companion is a man of darkness and twisted sense of humor who thinks nothing of resurrecting an old video that once nearly cost a young woman her life, as a joke.

On the other side we have our heroine, who is saying just as little as she can, having found that a picture (or a video) is truly worth a thousand words. Her sidekick is a wise and amiable dispenser of homespun truths who has already coined two words or phrases that have resonated with the electorate – “weird,” and “mind your own damn business.” Not bad for a Minnesotan, but then, no one knows what to expect from these denizens of a land where winter lasts eleven months and residents wear peat moss.

We’re still in the first act of this musical drama, and who knows what is to come? One of the problems with finding music for the Dark Side is that no first-rate musician wants to lend their tunes to them, leaving only Kid Rock to help with the score.

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On a walk yesterday we saw two Cedar Waxwings high in a bare tree. Just the two. It’s a very pretty little bird, always looking very well groomed. They were chatting away up there, too far away for us to hear what they were saying.

(Admission: This pic is not mine, but was pilfered from the internet.)

Their natty appearance is striking in comparison with the crow, for instance, which often looks as if it just got out of bed and hasn’t checked out its look in a mirror yet.

Actually, the bird in the photo closely resembles me this morning, when I found my mirror image especially unkempt. My hair was so vaguely directed that the only way I could orient myself as to front vs back was to look for my eyes.

(This pic isn’t mine, either)

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When my kids were in their teens the original and only true version of MTV was on screen in our home as soon as the sun came up. I couldn’t avoid being somewhat up to date on pop musical trends because the station was always there playing in the background to educate me. Life was good, but then MTV lost its mind and never came back.

Music videos are still out there, of course, but you have to go looking for them instead of having them curated for you and served up with a golden spoon. (Sigh). Once in a while one comes along than is really moving, like this anti-war and reflective tune by the group Green Day, 21 Guns.

The title refers to the salute given by an honor guard, as at a funeral. When the group’s album American Idiot went to Broadway as a musical it didn’t do so well, and was shelved after a run of just about a year. This is that Broadway cast, doing the best song of the bunch. On a video where these beautiful people will always sound just as good and will never age.

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My ear worm this morning is not a song, but a poem. It is Invictus, written by William Ernest Henley. It was one of those short writings that I was encouraged (forced, cajoled, pressed, threatened) to learn by rote and later to regurgitate in front of the class. Which I did. Rote memory and regurgitation were specialties of mine back then.

At the time I thought the poem overblown. “Who talks like that, anyway?” But I have been tenderized by life and find that I am more susceptible to things of the spirit because I have had ample opportunity to observe their importance. Or, more to the point, what their absence can mean to the soul of a person or of a nation.

Rather than blow any further smoke, I present Invictus to you. There is no need for you to memorize it. No test looms next Friday. It’s just a handful of words that I have carried in my head for a very long time.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

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Today I think that it is a pretty awesome piece of overblown. If I am not the captain of my soul, I think that I am at least a deckhand. Let me add this song by Bruce Springsteen, who I think is basically echoing some of the sentiments of Mr. Henley. I could be wrong about that but I’ll let The Boss tell the story.

Tougher Than The Rest, by Bruce Springsteen

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Amy Tan has written a book which is a journal that she kept of the birds she saw in her backyard. At the time she was a novice birder, and she decided to learn the art of sketching those birds as she journaled.

Since I have the drawing skills of a moribund slug, I am envious. It all takes me back to second grade, where the best artist (far and a-way)among my classmates was Geraldine Hong. I never handed a paper in if it was going to immediately follow one of Geraldine’s. Dreadful were the comparisons back then, and my talents haven’t improved in 77 years. When I finish a drawing even I can’t tell what it is.

The book is a delightful read, the illustrations showing the improvement in her artistic skills over the several months that the journal covers.

Now, if you are Amy Tan, an accomplished writer and you travel in elevated creative circles, you do get help along the way from scientists, artists, and the author of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds, David Allan Sibley. Not too shabby.

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From The New Yorker. A subversive cartoon.

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