Oh no, Scott Regan is playing John Prine’s “Lake Marie” on “Open Tunings,” his morning radio show on WRUR-FM (88.5). That song always makes me cry.
“We were standing, standing by peaceful waters….”
Damn. Sniff.
So yeah, I’ve been on blog sabbatical for a while. Reading, listening to music, walking the dog. But I’ve had absolutely nothing to add to the public discourse over the last month or two. That shouting, antagonistic, barbaric yawp of people sliding into the abyss that inevitably claims all of us. The Etruscans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Manson Family…
These are times that make my brain hurt. But I did continue to scribble notes on scraps of paper. Which I now unload, here, as an unreliable document of the past couple of months.
My respect for COVID over the past two years has led to a dramatically reduced social calendar. The biggest negative? I’ve been watching more television. That Applebee’s commercial with the cowboy swinging his Levis-clad butt in my face was forcing me to re-think my pledge to not throw heavy objects at the TV screen. Thankfully, over the last week, that commercial seems to have receded into whatever marketing hell it came from.
Not incidentally, the best show I’ve discovered during the COVID TV era is a low-fi Canadian faux-dramedy, “Trailer Park Boys.” Anything that depicts humans as irredeemably stupid gets my Emmy Awards vote.
When I heard about it the next morning, I didn’t know what to make of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Judging by the high degree of attention it was receiving in the media, this was big, big news. And two days afterward, a sports gambling company piled on, reporting that geotagged Twitter data showed 41 states supported Rock and nine states were behind Smith.
I have thought long and hard about this. Emerging from the fog with thoughts such as: With Russia invading Ukraine, do Will Smith and Chris Rock even matter?
I just keep repeating to myself…
“Peaceful waters. Standing by peaceful waters.”
I read a review of the recent release of the final book of Simon Gray’s four-volume “The Complete Smoking Diaries.” For true completists, those books are, “The Smoking Diaries,” “The Year of the Jouncer,” “The Last Cigarette” and now “Coda.” From the reviews I’ve read, Gray’s memoir quartet sounds a lot like Marcel Proust’s seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time,” which we used to call “Remembrance of Things Past.” Here’s a review from The Guardian of Gray’s first book in the series, when it was first published in 2004:
It’s perfectly possible to take Simon Gray’s diaries for just what they seem to be: a grouchy-hearted, grimly comic rant against the world by a playwright in his mid-60s who finds himself neglected by the modern theatre, unable on pain of death to drink a drop of his former daily three bottles of champagne, and obliged to confront the ineluctable mortality of his friends and therefore of himself. ‘The Smoking Diaries’ is a lament for the sorrows of growing old, of finding oneself stranded in a place from which there is already no return.
Ineluctable. Or, inescapable, inevitable. As a writer in his mid-60s who finds himself neglected, I am a moth ineluctably drawn to this flame.
Here’s a cocktail napkin on which I’ve scribbled “Food Insecurity,” “Underserved” and a third word that’s been blurred out by a crescent of red wine from the bottom edge of a wine glass. This looks like it came out of a conversation about feel-good euphemisms. Food insecurity is when people are starving, which should not happen in a nation of rich people. Underserved is when minorities can’t have access to decent schools or health care. Which, again, should not happen in a nation of rich people.
On another scrap I find this:
“The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.”
– Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp died in 1968. Was he predicting any artists living today must rid themselves of the artificial propellant of social media? Or did he mean today’s great artists might as well pick out an unoccupied piece of land and dig themselves a shallow grave?
Of course, I write down everything this guy says:
“I think inside every song there are other songs. But I also think, inside your voice, there are other voices that you have yet to discover and that’s kind of why you are here.”
– Tom Waits
And inside every comment is a lie. And other lies that we have yet to discover. And that’s kind of why I am here. My more-recent notes grow increasingly dark. There’s a list of names that basically asks: These people are transparently lying, how do they get away with it?
It’s like dialogue from a political satire. Marjorie Taylor Greene denying she had called for martial law to overturn Trump’s election defeat, despite the presence of an email in which she irrefutably suggests the answer might be in declaring “Marshall Law.”
Or The New York Times reporting that, in a private meeting, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California warned his Republican colleagues that their inflammatory comments might get people hurt or killed, and he was going to call Trump and suggest he resign. McCarthy insisted that story was “totally false and wrong.” And then, oops, here come the audio tapes of McCarthy, proving the Times story is totally true and correct.
Political satire isn’t always funny. Politi-tag this Twitter data and we’ll see it’s largely conservatives backing a notion borrowed from “Fahrenheit 451.” They’re calling for book burning, including high school math books.
Something’s not adding up here. Who are these nimrods, how did they get into positions of power? It’s the media as well, and voices like Laura Ingraham, attacking President Biden’s proposal of student loan forgiveness. She tweeted, “My mom worked as a waitress until she was 73 to help pay for our college.” It apparently escapes the Fox News Harpie that Dear Old Mom working way past retirement age to pay off her kids’ college tuitions might be a sign that something’s wrong with our system of higher education.
And what about the act of throwing a tomato at a presidential candidate? Asked about comments he made in 2016 about that possibility, Trump, the man who would go on to be the leader of the free world, raised this horror in a court deposition released just this week: “You can get killed with those things.”
Attack of the killer tomatoes.
I just keep repeating to myself…
“Peaceful waters. Standing by peaceful waters.”
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