O Brave New World...

I have my iTunes (oh, Apple Music, WHATthefuckEVER) on songs, shuffle. Shuffling 9,189 songs (apparently 27 days of music, if I wanted to play them once through without stopping). I haven't done this for a long time, but I am enjoying it. Things that have come up in the past half hour: a song from Hamilton, a Turkish singer (possibly Selda; I didn't see the song title/artist), Blue Scholars, the Coup, June Tabor, Prince (which is where I started, on which more in a bit), the Cure... upcoming: Dolly Parton, Woody Guthrie (whom I love, politically but can only bear musically one song at a very isolated time), Fairport Convention, and Mary Wells' "My Guy", no doubt from one of the Motown mix CDs a high school ex sent me several years ago. Like, more than fifteen years ago?

I listen to music on my computer all the time, or frequently, anyway. Often I choose something specific to listen to -- recently Kneecap, for example. but this morning I was reading a New York Times article about the Ezra Edelman (he's the guy who made the amazing OJ Simpson eight hour documentary O. J.: Made in America, which I watched when it came out with my sister, nieces, and brother-in-law) documentary-in-the-making-and-apparently-suppressing on Prince. It is a fascinating article, and I really wish the fucking dismantled estate would not prevent its release by Netflix.

The article itself led me to watching a linked Prince video -- one of his masterful guitar solo with a bunch of 'guitar greats' (all older white guys) on George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". He's incredible and a fucking genius, but also terribly flawed. The estate and one of its controllers, a music industry lawyer, doesn't want it released (according to the article) because it/they are afraid it will lower the monetary worth of Prince's estate.

I was aware of and liked Prince music in the mid 80s -- and I remember seeing an earlier album cover in a record store in the much earlier 80s and being kind of blown away by the sexiness of it. But I wasn't a knowledgeable fan or anything. I wasn't sure what to make of "America", for example. We had Purple Rain at my house, but I think it might have been my sister's album. We didn't own a ton of records, really. Our first albums were both Motown, Stevie Wonder. A friend of the family had given me the amazing double album Songs in the Key of Life when he was visiting from Montreal. Then he realized RQ felt left out so he went out and got her an album of Stevie Wonder's younger Motown hits. I think those were our first records. I know my second and third records were these later Beatles compilations, "The Red Album" and "The Blue Album".

When Prince and David Bowie died relatively closely together -- Bowie in January 2016 and Prince in April of that same year -- there was a landslide rush of people buying their music in celebration and mourning. I didn't buy much Bowie, though the gender-bending of both Bowie and Prince moved me. I already owned a ton of Prince, more because an ex (a relatively recent ex, at that point) had introduced me to a lot of his stuff that I hadn't been familiar with before.*

Anyway, I recall reading another super long article about late Prince (not 'the late Prince', but Prince later in his career, during his Jehovah's Witness period, which confused me -- that period, uh, which extended to the end of his life, not the article. Another filmmaker wanted to make something about Prince, though he was still alive at the time. God, I am rewatching that Kevin Smith talk about it right now, so it was a video, not an article. It's a weird rewatch, after the NYT article about Ezra Edelman's project. The audience is almost entirely white. It seems like a very Reddit-feel (not that I know much about Reddit, for sure). Smith is milking the comedy of Prince being religious and a megalomaniac who wants a documentary about whatever album he was releasing in 2001. Anyway, apparently Edelman interviewed Kevin Smith along with seventy other people who knew Prince, and also had access to the Smith footage of that Paisley Park event from "the Vault".

Man, this entry is a dissection of a fucking rabbit hole, isn't it?

I guess, overall, the NYT article makes me think about artists and how you weigh their life and their work, which I have always been ambivalent about. I mean, I grew up on 19th century kids' classics, from Treasure Island to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin to Frances Hodgson Burnett and L. M. Montgomery and more. I think Polanski's Macbeth is an amazing movie. But I find it hard to re-read any of J. K. Rowling's Potter books, and god knows I wouldn't read anything else by her -- I mean everything else by her is as far as I can tell absolute shit, and the Potter books are more mediocre every time I think about them. More of an amazing publishing phenomenon that swept young adult fiction for a few years. Diana Wynne Jones is a billion times better.

I don't have any neat way to tie this rambling rabbit hole up in a bow. Sigh.





*Let me explain something here: I do stream music, mostly on YouTube, but I don't really use Spotify or Pandora. I want to have the actual bits and bytes on my hard drive -- so I am hardly a vinyl purist or anything. But I also cannot stand not to give the artist money for their work. I go to fucking Bandcamp to buy tracks by unfamous artists like the anti-cop dude who created "The Bonk Song", No$hu. Kind of ironically, that "I want to buy the music I want" thing doesn't apply so much to Prince, because that ex spent hours and hours and hours in Augusta, Georgia one week at his sister's, ripping the CDs of his he thought I would like onto my hard drive. There were a few things that did not last the test of time, like some fucking seventeen minute song about a car crash, which I cannot find ANY trace of (including on the internet... it's not "Warm Leatherette" which I am also squeamish about) and like a lot of 1930s blues that were extremely graphically sexual, or the horrific Shaggs, eh. But the Googoosh music, the Selda music, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, tons of 70s Bollywood, the 90s shoegaze music... there is a great deal I have to thank him for.

15. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

God, no. I get my own sleep schedule so far out of whack by deliberately staying up later than I should because I want non-work fun time, and then I want to sleep too late in the morning (and I partly can since, until August, I am still working from home), and then it gets worse on weekends, and then I also just want to sleep ALL THE FUCKING TIME, because I am hella depressed.

16. What cultural mores, pleasantries, or standards do you not agree with

I'm not great at responding naturally to "How are you?", as I distrust blithe bullshit, and know at some level that no one wants one's real, authentic response.

17. What is a habit you were successfully able to break?

"I've gotten slightly better at remembering they/them for singular." What Microbie said (again). Anything else? I guess, back in childhood (pretty fucking late childhood) I was successful at breaking my habit of sucking my thumb. Not sure there've been many such victories since then.

18. What are your top five favorite concerts?

I haven't been to a ton of concerts, really, unless you count small venue folk concerts, which I will. So, let's see.

Pete Seeger and Florence Reese, at some Northside hella woke church in Chicago around 1981?

Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert, same church, at least once, possibly twice.

Éritage, a Québecois folk group, at Holstein's, a folk bar in Chicago, in... 1983, probably?

The Smiths, at the Aragon Ballroom, in 1984 or 1985 -- whenever the Meat is Murder tour hit Chicago.

Depeche Mode, at the Sharktank (San Jose Arena) in... 2005, maybe? We had nosebleed seats and mostly saw the band members on jumbo screens. But it was really good anyway.

(other memorable concerts, since I go to so few: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith, and oh, god, I always forget WHICH feminist singer songwriter trio this was... Dar Williams, I think -- at the Fillmore, around 2003 maybe? Green Day doing their play/opera whatever, somewhere here in the East Bay, maybe 2004? Not sure; Neil Young, with Lucinda Williams opening for him (first time -- okay, only time I saw, but first time I heard her), 2003; oh, and Billy Bragg twice in Chicago in the mid 1980s -- once at the Cubbie Bear a bar kitty-corner from Wrigley Field, small space, fairly small crowd, which is hard to believe, and once at I think the Metro? Or else at Links Hall? With Michelle Shocked opening for him, then)


19. What is the best thing you’ve created?

Hm. I used to write and illustrate amazing letters to friends, including large size illuminated manuscript ones. I've also made illuminated manuscript letters as models for an art/history project when we've studied the medieval period, and I am proud of those.

20. What are you looking forward to in the near future?

Spring Break is very late this year, but it starts April 10th, and I am looking forward to that. Grades are due for Quarter 3 April 4th or something like that, so I will feel (I hope) fairly unburdened by work.

21. What would you ask your older self if you could?

What a very strange question! I have never imagined asking my older self anything. (I have read Proust, though... a French Studies degree will do that for you). If I... had to? I dunno. I honestly cannot imagine this circumstance. I can imagine warning my past self of at least one thing. But asking my future self?

22. What is your dream job?

Being a published writer (if I could plot mysteries? Not sure). Or an editor. I'd be a really good editor.

23. What is a high and a low from your week so far?

A high last week? Huh. I found out a mug I adore (is it ridiculous to set such store by small objects one owns?) and thought had been lost or broken was not. It is the dumbest thing -- but I like it. I have several mugs I cherish. Most of them are probably ones that are sanctified by being from my family or childhood or both. But this one is a relatively recent purchase (six years? something like that) by a company called Calamityware, and it is in the style of Blue Willow Ware, but in addition to miniature pagodas and bridges and willows, there are also monsters and UFOs and dinosaurs. The company calls the mug "Things Could Be Worse" and I am just ridiculously fond of it.

A low last week... I dunno. I feel uninspired, teaching right now. Kids are very unengaged, and I keep getting new (unengaged) kids, which is hard when I am teaching all three damn grade levels. One of my new students came for three days and then I got an email after I enquired about her subsequent two day absence from Zoom, from a counselor at a community intervention service, that she is in the hospital because she tried harming herself. So that sucks.

I know I suck at blogging, anymore. Sigh. It's some mixture of feeling like I have a boring life (not particularly because of the 'Rona, really) and ... well, what is or are the other component(s)? The echo chamber of LJ? I think a lot of it is a deep shame at my physical state. My mobility is really bad now. I own a travelscoot -- the lightest battery powered seat-scooter that exists, as far as I know. But it's hard just to walk around my apartment. This asshole computer guy who was here (masked and gloved, I hasten to add) last week did a double take when I responded to him asking me to come look at something on my computer's zombie corpse (more in a bit on that). And although I have actually not faced much of that kind of judgmental bullshit, it's still hard. Every decision about going somewhere is based as much on my calculations about how difficult it will physically be as it is on danger levels of Corona infection. It doesn't seem to matter that I (hope I) internalized fat liberation politics -- or maybe that it is that I really didn't? -- I am deeply ashamed of weighing whatever it is I weigh. Every summer for the past many, many years, the end of the school year and summer break has led to me being ever yet less mobile and heavier, more subject to edema and the strains of torquing myself around. It's hard to be comfortable sleeping, much less walking.

So here I am. Shame is such a useless, fucked up, self-sabotaging emotion. Like guilt.

In other areas... the lockdown has not been at all bad for me, mostly because I am so lucky that my sister and nieces are in my pod, so I have seen them regularly. Rosie slept over Friday night. My friend Dani has also masked up and hung out once or twice, once with gem's toddler (are they still toddlers at three? Juniper seems close to pre-school-ness rather than baby, now). I find Juniper a little stressful, tbh. They are very intelligent and precocious, but ... Dani never says no. About anything. Dani always cleans up after Juniper's ravages, but it's still stressful. I love Dani, but I would like to hang out with gem by gemself. I like Dani's choice of pronoun, though I am not always perfect about remembering to use it. Juniper still has not announced their gender, which is what Dani and River set as the expectation, from birth.

Another reason the lockdown has not been that difficult for me is that my school district is still fully distance learning. That may change in January with second semester, but oh, how I hope it does not. I need to get my Kaiser doctor to write me a right robust letter explaining my underlying conditions, etc. If there is a vaccine by then, does that cancel out the letter? I guess, "widely available vaccine". Or maybe just "available to those with underlying conditions".

I ... I actually really like teaching from home. I don't feel alienated from the kids, using Zoom daily. We're much more organized with it, this Fall, than we were last Spring. Our union did a pretty good job of negotiating our Memorandum of Understanding rider to the current contract -- though of course now that that is done, the district is pressing every opportunity to make our work lives worse, if they can. Before I get to that... so, my super power as a teacher has always been curriculum and lesson planning, and my kryptonite has always been classroom management. The very term makes me ill -- MANAGEMENT. I have never wanted to be the cop of the classroom, and some fundamental part of me feels that you should be able to help all kids naturally love learning, without bullshit. And that you can lead a horse to water, but not make them drink. And distance learning is kind of the apotheosis of that. Kids can't really fuck too much up for EACH OTHER in Zoom. They can zone out themselves, and we're trying all kinds of ways, individually and collectively, to combat that. But they can't interfere with the majority of a class's ability to learn.

My district has said from the beginning (though NOT all teachers have practiced it) that we cannot demand that kids turn on their cameras. Many teachers hate this, and push kids to do it anyway (though they're not allowed to bribe them with points... which is another thing I hate, hate, hate about teaching, anyway: the gross economy of grades, where learning is transactional and monetized by points. Ugh.) Me, I'm not that bothered by it. At the beginning of the year, I wanted kids to make a Bitmoji of themselves and use it as their avatar/profile pic for Zoom. Some protested that other teachers were insisting they use a photo of themselves. I said, fine, do that if you have to, and if you don't, you have a choice between your selfie, and your Bitmoji. I like how kids change their selfies and their Bitmojis. A lot of classes start with me reacting to new Bitmoji cartoon scenes, or new selfies.

Kids are also super NICE this year. Now, that is quite possibly just the tendency of this year's group -- but some of it may be the slack we are all giving each other in these weird times. Kids are patient with Zoom fuckups. Kids share tips, with me and with each other, on hacks and fixes. Kids put questions in Chat eagerly. Kids write me constant emails and comment constantly in Google Classroom. My rate of work return (for "asynchronous assignments" as we now call them) is pretty steady around two-thirds... which is not that much worse than face2face, tbh. Relying solely on Google Classroom for assigning work and grading work is better than I thought it would be. I may keep to that once f2f returns, really. Except for some notes and classwork. I definitely comment much, much more in feedback with G Classroom. Which makes grading take a long, long, long time. I guess I can only really keep to it if the district ends up giving the checked out Chromebooks to students. I fucking hope they do. They can buy more for the schools, so it's one-to-one at school AND kids all have them at home. There's nothing else (along with school funded hotspots) that even approaches the beginning of equity not only during this lockdown but IN FUCKING GENERAL.

So, I've been trying to digitally adapt the work I habitually give every year, the assignments I am wedded to. The most difficult part for me is working in art, which I do naturally in the f2f classroom. But I am getting there. In seventh grade Social Studies, we are coming to the end of the European Middle Ages, for instance. I spend most of the time on life for peasants, and we read Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice in English/Language Arts, to go along with it. (And there were some fun assignments getting them to illustrate the book from the internet, and a final project where they cast the book as a movie and put internet heads of actors on the cartoon figures I supplied in a Google Slides show, and found appropriate text quotations for each main character OR wrote a three-or-so-slide sequel, imitating Cushman's literary style). But now we are on to the 1% -- knights, lords, ladies, kings, and queens. For this, I rely on William the Conqueror, a quick descent of his family tree, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I kind of fell in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when I was given a paper doll of her, from a book of Famous Women in History paper dolls (the kind of present I was always being given by my parents) around age ... 11? Maybe 13? Not sure. But I colored it in, and was fascinated by her (I didn't realize until I just found on the internet a photo of that paper doll book's Eleanor of Aquitaine page that it actually had primary source quotes about her by Marie de France! That's hella cool, since I use Marie de France as a historical personage in my culminating assignment).



Anyway, the culminating project for the Middle Ages is to have the students write an Illuminated Manuscript Letter from one of Eleanor's circle to another -- they can be or write to Eleanor herself, too. The historical personages I use, with a little historical fudging: Eleanor, Louis VII (her first husband), Henry II (her second husband), Marie (eldest daughter), Alix (next daughter, both with Louis VII), Young Henry (eldest surviving son with Henry II), Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joan, or John (all children with Henry II), Sir William Marshall (a knight and eventual Earl who served Eleanor, Henry II, Young Henry, and Richard I and John I), Petronilla (Eleanor's younger sister... sadly actually dead by the year I decree the letter must be written in... but oh well), Rosamund Clifford (Henry II's most flaunted mistress), Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, whom some identify with Marie of France, and who many historians believe is a half sister of Henry II, and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen, who there is no RECORD of as a correspondent of Eleanor's... but who knew Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and who left literally hundreds and hundreds of letters behind in one of the treasure troves of the medieval period.

In the classroom, we spend a fair amount of time learning techniques for creating the illuminated initial letters and borders -- I teach them a bunch of Zentangle doodling, and provide parchment paper for the final drafts. I was depressed to lose this project... but then I figured out that I didn't have to use a clunky Google Doc (it is no fun to try to manipulate images in one) but could change the size of a Google Slide, in Custom, to 8 1/2 by 11. So now kids could Google image search initial letters and various frames or parts of Celtic interlace, etc.

Now all of that is replaced by feverish Google Image searches, flipping, resizing, rotating, and cropping. I will not know how theirs have come out (in terms of the LOOK... I've given feedback on their rough draft CONTENT already) until after Thanksgiving. I did two this year as models to show them what I mean.





and





They're very different from one of my handmade copies of years past...





(I think this is now the longest entry I have written, or illustrated, in a long, long time)

I wish I had my last year's model at home with me, but apparently I did not take a photo of it, sigh. It was Abbess Hildegarde to Eleanor, and I illustrated it partly with medieval herbal drawings, kind of like the Voynich manuscript, but real.

This project is a lot of work for kids, but I have gotten some really, really cool projects in the past. Some beautiful art work, and some amazingly thoughtful letters. One of the best broke the rule that the letter had to be set in 1175, two years into Eleanor's castle captivity. The student made an illuminated manuscript with fake blood spatter, written by Thomas à Becket to Henry II in 1170 AT THE ALTAR as he is interrupted by being assassinated. Hat tip to you, past student. I will admit that I do a Google Slides show as we start the project of a TON of images from the medieval world of manuscript illumination, starting with initial letters and ending with a) cat cartoons in margins (the cat memes of their day, no kidding at all) and b) true medieval crime, with multiple images of Becket's murder from different medieval times and places. Next time I do a handmade model, I am totally working at least one cat in.

I was going to write about the computer mess and also folk music. But this entry has been long. Maybe I will actually do another sooner than nine months from now.

I should watch that Ken Burns documentary on Country Music. Two people I read on LJ/DW (hi, microbie and shadowkat) are reviewing it as it goes. I went and listened to Dolly Parton singing "I Will Always Love You", and then from there, to "The Last Thing on My Mind"... I love Dolly. The second song, though... it's Tom Paxton's. He's one of the folksingers I grew up on. Pretty much any singer whose songs my mom sang brings me to instant choked throat and tears. I talked to my friend Mischa, and she says that year two after your mother's death (maybe the death of anyone you loved, but I know she was speaking of the second year after her own mother's death) is worse, in terms of grief. I am definitely blindsided by crying and sadness this second year. Music crystallizes this, especially two things: songs she sang, and songs, or singers, she would have loved and will never know.

She would have loved Tyler Childers. And a couple of weeks ago -- I think I got this from my Facebook feed -- I encountered another group she would have loved, a lot. She and my father and my stepmother and Bill, my mom's boyfriend and our quasi (quondam?) stepfather* all really loved Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash ... and the supergroup that they created, The Highwaymen. Well, there is a new supergroup (that term is sort of gross, but whatever) of women country singers, called The Highwomen, which has reinvented that song, about rebellious women through the centuries. Members: Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, and Natalie Hemby. For one verse of the main song, they also have "U. K. songwriter Yola" singing, as well as guest appearances at various points by other women. The eponymous song is wonderful. It's exactly the same tune. The lyrics -- especially the verse about the Freedom Riders (the one sung by Yola)-- give me chills. My mother would have LOVED it. She loved a song whose lyrical focus is very similar -- I don't remember who wrote it**, but Christy Moore recorded it -- "Unfinished Revolution".

These are the contrasted lyrics (I particularly appreciated that Christy Moore's song includes acknowledgment of women in Afghanistan against the Taliban LONG BEFORE 2001, when the Soviets were almost the good guys (never forget the Spartacists' Workers Vanguard Best Headline Ever: ALL HAIL RED ARMY IN AFGHANISTAN***.))

Unfinished Revolution

From the health centre porch she looks to the North
Where Nicaragua's enemies hide
Polio crippled and maimed before things were changed
Slowly they're turning the tide
In the twilight she stands, with a rifle in hand
And a memory of what used to be
Now she's part of the unfinished revolution

Feudal landlords they've known seen overthrown
Afghanistan comes into view
Learning to read and to write is part of the fight
But for her it's something that's new
Down all of the years ashamed of her tears
Imprisoned behind a black veil
Now she's part of the unfinished revolution

Soldiers kicked down the door, called her a whore
While he lingered in Castlereagh
Internment tore them apart, brought her to the heart
Of resistance in Belfast today
Her struggle is long, it's hard to be strong
She's determined deep down inside
To be part of the unfinished revolution.

She holds the key to the unfinished revolution.

The Highwomen

I was a Highwoman
And a mother from my youth
For my children I did what I had to do
My family left Honduras when they killed the Sandinistas
We followed a coyote through the dust of Mexico
Every one of them except for me survived
And I am still alive

I was a healer
I was gifted as a girl
I laid hands upon the world
Someone saw me sleeping naked in the noon sun
I heard "witchcraft" in the whispers and I knew my time had come
The bastards hung me at the Salem gallows hill
But I am living still

I was a freedom rider
When we thought the South had won
Virginia in the spring of '61
I sat down on the Greyhound that was bound for Mississippi
My mother asked me if that ride was worth my life
And when the shots rang out I never heard the sound
But I am still around
And I'll take that ride again
And again
And again
And again
And again

I was a preacher
My heart broke for all the world
But teaching was unrighteous for a girl
In the summer I was baptized in the mighty Colorado
In the winter I heard the hounds and I knew I had been found
And in my Savior's name, I laid my weapons down
But I am still around

We are The Highwomen
Singing stories still untold
We carry the sons you can only hold
We are the daughters of the silent generations
You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations
It may return to us as tiny drops of rain
But we will still remain
And we'll come back again and again and again
And again and again
We'll come back again and again and again
And again and again

The second song on the album with the same title as the group and as the song above is "Redesigning Women"... which... is kind of hilarious. It sort of sounds like a mash-up, culturally of: that sitcom I couldn't bear, called Designing Women; the movie Nine to Five, and that Enjoli ad from the early 80s: "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan... and never, never, never let you forget you're a man! ENJOLI!"

* * * * * * * * * *

Otherwise... I am catching up on S4, 5 and 6 of Downton Abbey because I'd like to see the movie. School is out of the honeymoon period; wrangling sixth graders through Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is kind of difficult; it's an evaluation year (PTSD ahoy!); I'm exhausted after work all the time; I read a funny YA romance called My So-Called Bollywood Life which name checked a million Bollywood movies I have loved, including my all time favorite, Rang de Basanti; I am also trying to catch up on The Expanse, and starting (belatedly) Pose.


*Bill... like my mom, he played guitar and sang, and he looked KIND OF like Willie Nelson. He certainly liked weed as well as Willie did and does. At some points, Bill really emphasized the likeness. I'd be glad to have some tapes to digitize of Bill singing, but I don't. Like my father and mother and stepmother, Bill, too, was a socialist -- a member of the opposition in the Socialist Workers Party which eventually morphed into Solidarity. He worked on the railroad as a switchman, was injured on the job and lost his foot -- going between cars as you're "told" not to do, but are tacitly expected to do in order to get across the yard in time... Pretty much, Bill had the worst extended run of bad luck of anyone I've ever known personally. A brain aneurism, alcoholism, firing for same, a year of working at day labor jobs and doing AA before getting his job back, and then losing his foot in a work accident. A crappy pay-out and post railroad career as a pizza deliveryman. And ten years later, cancer.

**It was apparently Peter Cadle

*** Hmm. That might be SLIGHTLY apocryphal, though I remember being at a Central American solidarity demonstration in Chicago in 1980 and seeing the paper being sold... apparently, though it was ABOUT Afghanistan, the headline just said "ALL HAIL RED ARMY". Still memorable, though.

I feel like I just did a topic like this, recently.

I am fond of "Ordinary Man", both the Christy Moore and the Dick Gaughan versions.

I have always loved "The Great Silkie", which my mother sang after the manner of Joan Baez

I like "Louise" by Heaven 17 (or Human League; I never remember which version of that group it's by)

I love "Somebody" by Depeche Mode, though it kind of makes me cry a little.

I adore everything I've ever heard by Latin Quarter, but especially "Modern Times", which is about McCarthy's HUAC trials, and Charlie Chaplin's refusal to cooperate.

That's so hard! I have more than 7,500 songs, and I like them all or I wouldn't have them...

I will try, though, and I'll try to do it looking over my whole life thus far and what songs have stayed with me most consistently.

1. "The Bonny Light Horseman" by Planxty

2. "Over the Hills and Far Away" (theme from Sharpe's Rifles featuring a young Sean Bean)

3. "Beeswing" by Richard Thompson, also sung well by Christy Moore

4. "Modern Times" by Latin Quarter (and also "Radio Africa", same 80s Brit alterna pop band)

5. "True Love Knows no Season" (or "Little Musgrave", or "Accidentals/Aragon Mill") all by Planxty

That's ridiculous, to try to limit it to five.

1. I'm listening to a CD made from a record I bought from a rare folk collector or something, which I used to own, but my mom lost somehow. It's La Ronde des Voyageurs by a short-lived group called Éritage, from Quebec. I have also just bought their only other album (I didn't even know it existed!) from eBay, and hope to persuade my brother-in-law to help me turn several Quebecois folk albums into CDs... this one, too, actually, because the guy who sent it to me -- record album and CD -- made the CD just two long tracks, face A and face B. The other albums are EARLY (not recent) records by Édith Butler: L'Acadie S'Marie, Avant D'Être Dépaysée, and Asteur Qu'on Est Là.

2. Devlin, the kitten, seems to keep making steps forward. Baby steps, but hey, she's a baby.

3. Livestreaming! Of tiny, tiny baby kittens!

4. My older niece stayed over at my house for two nights in a row; it was fun, and lazy. Very little actual kitten-sighting for her, of course. Lots of Psyche, some Olympics, lots of Sims Medieval, and then accompanying our uncle (my dad's cousin, actually) who is something of an Apple fan boy, to finally implement his decision to buy an iPad. Not the new one, the current one. And dinner at his favorite restaurant, P. F. Chang's.

5. Any minute now I am going to go put on water to make tea, and have tea and cereal for, um, early dinner. Oh -- and Maya's blood work came back good, said the woman from the vet office, though there was something about the pancreas markers being "in the grey zone". But nothing that the vet was afraid of.

I feel like I am posting everything I have even vaguely thought of all summer. This one will be a continuation of family history photos. The next one will be on Hindi and matters subcontinental, cultural and otherwise.

So.

Let's see about the order here. My father's Lake Geneva family again, first. I've said this before (and I realized I retold a story in my last post, too, about my great-aunt and grandmother and their early '30s road trips)... anyway, though, it continues to resonate for me, every time I see a photograph that links today to then. My father bought the house he grew up in. His grandparents bought that house in about 1913 or so -- maybe even earlier. And it was originally built in 1877; it has a historic plaque as of this year, announcing that fact. So there are all these photos from the 1920s, and then there are all these photos around and about that house from ... 2011. That physical connection is still very pleasing to me -- and must be, to my father.

I think he *loves* having retired to the small town he grew up in, even if the politics of that small town are pretty vile. From what he says, the best (and the tiny minority) are the few Democrats, though almost all of those are Catholic, and thus anti-abortion. He blocs with these few, these precious few, at his kaffeeklatsch group at the local Caribou, virtually every morning. He blocs with them against the far more numerous Republicans who support Governor Scott Walker and who view everyone (except themselves) as receivers-of-government-largesse. Some are self-made stocks-and-bond trader millionaires, and they're without a doubt the worst. I don't know how my dad can bear talking and arguing with them.

Speaking of vile politics in Lake Geneva (I know, I'm getting away from photos...) -- I read an article in their shitty local newsrag, The Lake Geneva Regional News or something like that, which gloatingly crowed over the fact that local businesses and homeowners would be getting lowered property taxes, by 2 % or something like that -- BECAUSE OF A CONCESSIONARY CONTRACT signed by Lake Geneva teachers. Jesus motherfucking Christ on a stick, that's... god, it's nausea-inducing. And my uncle keeps asking plaintively if I would consider moving back to Lake Geneva to teach school. Seriously, he asks me this pretty much every time we have a conversation. He'll probably ask me this week when we go have dinner at P. F. Chang's. One thing I would be good at, if I did move back and teach in LG (not that this is really imaginable): there's a huge and growing Mexican population, and I could teach English Language Learners. The racism against them is [unsurprising and] hideous.

ANYWAY. Here are two pictures from about 1919 or so, I think.







Both of those are right next to the very house I just spent a week at. The next one is one of my favorites of all of these old photos. It was taken by my great-aunt Fran when she was about 14 or so, eighth grade, I think. It is of, apparently, four of her favorite teachers from Central School, the building behind the women. I love looking at their clothes -- it's partly how I date photographs, because our family pix never have years written on or under them. And it's just fascinating to see what older girls wore versus younger ones. Did they have sex segregated recesses? Because I don't see any boys, on first glance. That school building is still there, with considerable, and fairly well-matching, additions. I could work there! Ha.




Then there are two from WWII, of Uncle Tom, my father's uncle he grew up with, who I believe was closeted. He was 36 when he was drafted, so they didn't send him to either theater of war. Instead, he was just bounced around from army base to army base. He has lots of photos of him posing with much younger guys, as they mostly would have been. He also sent a whole series of photos of one of his barracks, with him making his bed, him sorting his equipment for inspection, the empty barracks as a still life, etc. He sent these and practically daily postcards home to his mother, my dad's Gram, Lil.









This last one is an interior shot of the kitchen at my dad's in LG -- it is also another image documenting my father's penchant for careful organization.




The next three photos are of my mom playing the recorder, circa 1954, and then the guitar, circa 1955 to 1959. I have a whole series of scanned photos of my mom playing guitar. I feel like there must be even more photos, and I'd like to scan them, too. I wish she would play again. I think she's afraid that she wouldn't sound good at all. I wish I had learned, myself. I still think about it. The one time I tried, I wasn't very good at coordinating my two hands' activities. But I didn't try for very long.










My dad used to say that when he first met my mom, she was kind of a fixture on the Madison folk-singing circuit, singing Child ballads and the like. I would love to have seen her, though of course I heard them as lullabies, anyway. I can sing a few, still. I'd like to learn more. I used to sing them to Ruby, my niece, as lullabies, though several are quite cold-blooded and bloodthirsty, both.

Finally, here is my FIRST arrest photo, taken in 1985 at an anti-apartheid sit-in at Northwestern University, right before the plastic manacles were put on all of us.




And that's my long and miscellaneous photo post. Also... I'm not putting an LJ cut. I doubt you all have so many posts on your feed that this will be too inconvenient. If I'm wrong, tell me.

Wow. I was reading a friend's blog, which is mostly about Brit socialist politics, but sometimes about music, and he'd just trashed an idiot (no, really, an idiot -- somehow L. had gone until age 47 or so without ever hearing of Kid Rock, lucky him) and posted a video to take the taste out of his mouth, one of the Violent Femmes, which was kind of ... academically interesting to me, as I'd never seen a video of theirs. ANYWAY. That's not my point! My point was that in the comments, there was a little back and forth about iconography in videos (at least, I guess it was about that) specifically, Kid Rock uses confederate flag shit unironically (actually, I don't believe you can use that ironically) and provocatively, because he's an asshole, but someone posted a 1970s clip of a beloved lefty musician whose video had one in the background, because he was playing at a bar. So this discussion of how brilliant and lefty the musician gets started, and leads to exchanges of old clips of him. Man. I had never seen these. I am blown away. I SOOOOOOO would have had a crush on Steve Earle at that age. That was EXACTLY my taste in men. Small, skinny, wiry, long hair, and amazing musician wouldn't have hurt. I mean, I think he's fucking amazing now, and love his music, and think he's a really great actor as well. But. I could never have imagined him as a young guy. And this song is wonderful. Enjoy.



Oh, and the video is "Mercenary Song", from a 70s documentary called something like "Heartworn Highways", with a bunch of alt country singers that included tons of people I've barely heard of, like Rodney Crowell, and Townes Van Zandt. I mean, I've heard of the last guy, but I know nothing about him. I would never have identified him as a country singer, alt or not.

Man, I forgot how much I liked Cyndi Lauper. How could I forget that? Lavamus is a really cheap download site, infinitely to be preferred to iTunes -- ten songs for the price of one, on iTunes, basically. But I often have trouble thinking of WHAT music I might like to download, unless someone else more aware than I gives me a gentle nudge or a strong shove as the case may be.

M. reminded me this weekend that he used to get free concert tix as one benefit of his otherwise horrible former job, and that he saw a lot of music he might not have chosen, had he been paying for the ticket. One of the shows was Cyndi Lauper. He said she rocked, even twenty years after her heyday.

So I've just downloaded several of her songs -- the major ones: "She Bop," "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," "Time After Time," (which I'd totally forgotten she'd done) and "All Through the Night." The last two are so fucking romantic... I'd totally forgotten about them, or that she did them, with her squeaky high soprano I can't reach. I like them.

I remember arguing with more naive friends in high school about "She Bop", because they absolutely refused to believe that it was an ode to masturbation. Listening to it now, I'm tempted to use it to teach the conjugation of verbs for my English Language Learners. Wouldn't that be more motivating than "I am, you are, he or she is..."? I suppose it's a little misleading because it should be "she BOPS", but whatever.

I also got some Sinead O'Connor, which I only own on tape cassette, and some Jarvis Cocker, which isn't music of my youth at all, but of my present, I guess. I got his "Running the World", which is apparently on the soundtrack for Children of Men. I heard of it from a friend of mine in Britain, not from that movie. I think the real title is what the chorus says, which is "Cunts Are Still Running the World." A very class conscious song. I recommend it.