A Change in the Wind

George Jones and the Replacements: two drama queens

This week George Jones, by consensus one of the greatest of country singers, passed away. Have to admire his ability to tell a story (as in the wonderfully rich Southern California, a duet with Tammy Wynette) but also his ability to make a story:

...make no mistake, he could be menacing, a word that came to be associated with Jones for much of his life. To sugarcoat his worst impulses is to ignore the truth: When Jones was drunk, coked up or otherwise out of his mind, he turned bad. In "I Lived to Tell It All," Jones' astonishingly honest 1996 autobiography, he tells of being drunk on his tour bus and shooting five bullets from a .38 near a teetotaling manager who wouldn't join him in finishing a bottle of vodka.

Jones once drove a lawn mower to a liquor store after his wife hid his car keys, and then sang about it in a ditty called "Honky Tonk Song": "I saw those blue lights flashing over my left shoulder / He walked right up and said 'Get off that riding mower.'" Jones was one of a kind — in both the best and worst use of the term.

The same could be said of Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. Westerberg was just as witty, and just as wild, if not more so. From Aquarium Drunkard: 

"Toward the end of their touring behind Pleased to Meet Me, the Replacements gigged in Portland, Oregon with the Young Fresh Fellows opening. And in the history of notorious Replacements shows, this one ranks high. Though it’s difficult to nail down the exact story behind the fabled night, the following anecdotes show up repeatedly: the ‘Mats pelting the Young Fresh Fellows with various objects during their set; the band breaking into a room (the show was held at the now-defunct Pine Street Theatre) purloining costumes (of which they then wore ontstage); the band being far too drunk to play effectively; clothes being taken off and thrown into the audience — and the audience, in some cases, returning the favor. This last part is my personal favorite as apparently Tommy Stinson remembered, after throwing his clothes into the crowd, that he had left ten dollars in his pocket. After raging at the crowd to throw his pants back, he instead rifled through the clothes thrown on stage, located twenty dollars in a pocket, and danced around the stage in victory. Another account just reported that they stumbled through a set of less than 45 minutes, played a cover of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69″ and then split. Either way, a typical ‘Mats show."

Is it possible that the desire to tell a story is part of a desire to be dramatic? To be a diva, an acter-out, a drama queen? And that genre is less important than that desire to live in drama? 

Regardless, you have to love the Replacements for writing a song about the city they dissed -- and at the end apologizing for their antics. "Portland, I'm sorry." To apologize to an entire city! Reckless charm. 

Like the lyrics:

Shared a cigarette for breakfast
Shared an airplane ride for lunch
Sitting in between a ghost
And a walking bowl of punch
Can you play a little hunch?

Predicting a delay on landing
Well I predict we'll have a drink
Lost my money on the first hand
Got burned on a big fat king

And your ears are gonna ring
And your eyes just wanna close
Nothing changing I suppose

A fav Mats' song...check it out.

My heart knows what the wild goose knows: Roger Ebert

A personal fav from among his many entries to the New Yorker's caption contest: 

(Didn't win but doesn't matter. Roger Ebert lives on.)

The Sierra Club High Trips and why women liked them

In the High Trips, for about thirty years at the start of the 20th century, the Sierra Club as a mountaineering club peaked, surely. On those brilliantly organized journeys, as many as 200 people at time went into the High Sierras, having committed to a walk of a minimum of two hundred miles, over several weeks of hiking. Though the club's founder John Muir was too old and too busy battling the Hetch-Hetch Dam to go, he greatly encouraged these trips, and they were led by the likes of Norman Clyde and David Brower, with great campfire talks and performances as well as great mountains. 

This was a highly evolved society, divided (roughly) into "mountaineers." of the likes of Muir and Brower and Clyde, and "meadoweers" who didn't care for the heights. (Likely I would have been one of the latter number, had I been so fortunate to have been present on the trip.) 

When I talked to Brower on this and other topics, a few years ago, he bemoaned the fact that the National Park Service will no longer approve long trips for Sierra Club backpacking groups. The limit (in the Sierra, at least) today is about eight days.

In his gentle but insistent way, Brower argued that the transformative power of the wilderness is lost if it is restricted to a handful of days. 

True, and perhaps the time has come to remember those extraordinary trips, before everyone alive who remembers them has passed away...for one, the camp photographers included Cedric Wright and Ansel Adams! Here's my fav pic from their 1929 efforts, by Wright, showing a High Trips expedition summiting at Mount Resplendent:

[Sorry about the angle: comes directly from the hand set Bulletin (pdf).]

These High Trips were for the elite of the Sierra Club, and set out to attract intrepid women, and succeeded (although the trips were predominantly male, the women who did go were as adventurous as any man).  

In her gender study of women in the wilderness, "Nature's Altars," Susan Schrepfer finds some interesting examples of women who were drawn to the wilderness because it gave both them and their mates a chance to shed their gender roles. That was part of the idea of the High Trips, that women weren't the domestic slaves. Wasn't easy on these trips, but after a day of mountaineering, a woman didn't have to do the dishes too. 

The club secretary, William Colby, made this clear in a letter to applicants to the High Trips: 

The irksome duties of cooking, dishwashing, and provisioning will be turned over entirely to a commissary department. All transportation of outfits, etc., will be attended to by a committee, such relieving the party of all drudgery and leaving their time entirely free for the enjoyment of scenery and mountain life. The trip will be particularly attractive for women, and every effort made to secure comfort usually lacking in excursions to the high mountains.

Isn't that a dream? "To relieve the party of all drudgery."

Only in California...

Be true to your depression: James Hillman

The late great Jungian analyst James Hillman, on depression. Christian myth, the soul, and the path depression offers to those who experience it. 

From his compilation A Blue Fire:

"Depression. Because Christ resurrects, moments of despair, darkening, and desertion cannot be valid in themselves. Our one model insists on light at the end of the tunnel; one program that moves from Thursday evening to Sunday and the rising of a wholly new day better by far than before. Not only will therapy more or less consciously imitate this program (in ways ranging from hopeful positive counseling to electroshock), but the individual's consciousness is already allegorized by the Christian myth and so he knows what depression is and experiences it according to form. It must be necessary (for it appears in the crucifixion), and it must be suffering; but staying depressed must be negative, since in the Christian allegory Friday is never valid per se, for Sunday -- as in integral prt of the myth -- is preexistent in Friday from the start. 

[edit]

Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from, and denials of it than goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology. 

Yet through depression we enter depths and in depth find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it -- but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul."

If this is a path, it's pretty clear why it's not often taken. I always sensed there was some reason I didn't like the Christian allegory. Never understood so clearly why before.

Or, as Robert Frost put it, 

The best way out is always through. 

What Obama has in common w/JFK...and Kurt Cobain

In a recent interview with Franklin Foer of The New Republic, Barack Obama said he liked to shoot:

FF: Have you ever fired a gun? 

BO: Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.

FF: The whole family?

BO: Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there.

In this Obama is much like past presidents, including John F. Kennedy Jr., who in this picture, taken at Camp David before his inauguration, went skeet shooting with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Or, in the words of Kurt Cobain: Load up on guns and bring your friends...

[pic via BeschlossDC] 

Ojai Valley News: CA shale oil 3/5ths of Prudhoe Bay

In the Ojai Valley News, friend Marianne Ratliffe digs deep into the story of how fracking is coming to Ventura County in particular and the state of California in general, and uncovers a world of new information on the latest. Terrific story. 

Here's the punchline, I think: 

California is the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the nation and is on the verge of a shale oil boom. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported last year that the Monterey Shale formation in California could hold as much as 15 billion barrels of oil. 

Holy cow. That's three-fifths of the oil of the Prudhoe Bay reserve, estimated at 25 billion barrels, the largest oil field in the U.S., which has brought previously unheard of wealth to Alaska. 

Rickshaw Run: the ultimate journey-not-destination

Nick Anderman, a near-relative -- my daughter's boyfriend -- is with three other friends adventuring through India in a fundraising race via underpowered ricksaw, which, as this writer for the Atlantic points out this month, is pretty much the ultimate journey-not-destination.

Nick and his pals are avoiding the big cities because they're impossible to cross in a reasonable amount of time. We hear it takes two days to cross Mumbai in a rickshaw, at least for a Westerner. 

Here's a photo of the route through India, with an appropriate notation, and a brief explanation of Nick's teams', um, method: 

As they say in Hollywood, you gotta love it. 

The Fair Barbarians: The "New Woman" Climbers of 1900

In Nature's Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism,Susan Shrepfer reveals how in the early 20th century the mountains became a sanctuary for what was briefly known as "The New Woman." Unfettered from womanly duties and heavy skirts, these women found a freedom distinct from their urban sisters, the flappers, and arguably more meaningful. Writes Schrepfer:

The majority of women climbers...wrote of deliberately seeking mountains because they were places where they might escape artificial encumbrances, walk as equals of men, and dress comfortably. This implies that women who climbed saw clothes as signifying confinement, subordination, and discomfort. Mountains were places in which to act "the fair barbarian," to indulge "Bohemian tastes," to "redefine the concept of necessities, and to trim skirts." The growing acceptance of athleticism helped such women redefine their feminiity. According to historian Sarah A. Gordon,  "The novelty and marginality of clothing for sports provided a space in which women contested notions of "feminine" and "appropriate" bodies, behavior, and appearances. The "new physical culture" of sports "infused and informed the emerging concepts of the New Woman."

The New Woman apparently faded away with the onslaught of World War II. Now, of course, women can do whatever they wish in the wilds. Heck, a nine year old girl completed the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012. 

"Monkey" is the older kid: she completed the Muir Trail at age seven. 

John Lennon sends a postcard

A touching remembrance and review of a book of letters and postcards from John Lennon sends me out looking for a postcard by the much-loved writer and wit, and sure enough, right away:

Here one is, complete with a fascinating story. 

Also notable this year: the debut of a John Lennon emoticon: ((ºjº))

Marlon Brando ambles insolently onstage: Paglia

Camille Paglia describes a familiar scene, and makes it new:

Marlon Brando, carrying a “red-stained package” from the butcher and sporting blue-denim work clothes as the lordly, proletarian Stanley Kowalski, ambles insolently onstage at the opening of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “Bellowing” for his adoring yet tart-tongued wife, Stanley is the strutting male animal in his sexual prime. The setting is a seedy tenement in the multiracial French Quarter of New Orleans, whose picturesque verandas open to the humid air. Street sounds and sultry, insinuating jazz riffs float in and out. 

 

The exotic location, boisterous energy, and eruptions of violence in A Streetcar Named Desire were a startling contrast to the tightly wound gentility of Williams’s prior hit play, The Glass Menagerie (1944), whose fractured family is cloistered in a stuffy St. Louis flat. Streetcar exploded into the theater world at a time when Broadway was dominated by musical comedies and revivals. At the end of its premiere, the audience sat numb and then went wild, applauding for thirty minutes.

From A New Literary History of America, ed. by Greil Marcus, among others.