Still going after all these years.
Though my post from yesterday might suggest otherwise, I’m emotionally still in denial about the outcome of the election. So I’m thinking about other things.
Like: where I’m going to set up the Winter Village this year, and how I’m going to get a table big enough to run the train around it.
I feel oddly lucky this morning, in a very specific way. I feel lucky that, this year, I didn’t let myself get totally consumed by the election, as I did in 2004 and 2008, or this morning, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as our 45th president, would feel even worse than it does.
I also feel lucky to have lived through eight years of George W. Bush, and before him, eight years of Ronald Reagan. Because I know I can live through the next four. (Punk rock should help; it did before.)
But not the way I lived through the last eight. If last night taught me anything, it’s that we will never survive as a nation if we continue to allow ourselves to be divided. To that end, the first thing I intend to do differently, and suggest you consider, is:
Listen. You know those people you unfriended on Facebook because of their political leanings? You might want to start talking to them again. And it might be a good idea to find a media site that’s not slanted toward your biases and read that too.
And, by the way, you can’t listen if you dehumanize, or demonize, the other side. Now is probably a good time to de-install Detrumpify.
But I don’t mean just listen to what people on the other side of the aisle say; listen for why they’re saying it. Both sides have been saying some hateful things this election (some more than others), but that doesn’t mean they’re hateful people. They have real concerns too, though they may not always express them in ways we are ready to hear. And not all of their concerns are racist and bigoted. Some of them just want to feed their families.
That doesn’t mean you don’t call out bad behavior, which is why my second thing is:
Speak up. There are going to be a lot of actions and words that are going to anger us in the next few years. I don’t counsel silence. I do counsel raising our voices in protest—against behaviors, not people. If the blatant racism that we saw in the last twelve months continues, silence is not the right response.
Lastly:
Get active. There will be a lot of people who get hurt in the next four years, but there are also a lot of people who are hurting already. Volunteering is a good way to make a difference. Volunteering for a campaign, say for Congress, is a good path too. And for God’s sake, vote.
We live in an odd time in which the transient leaves lasting traces. Photos linger for years online that would have moldered in shoe boxes thirty years ago. And even the smallest of businesses leaves traces—in reviews, websites, photos. But businesses and restaurants that closed before the dawn of the Web linger in obscurity, with no digital record of their existence.
I was reminded of this last night when I told my son the story of my first seafood dinner. “Grandma and Grandpa liked to go to a seafood restaurant in Poquoson, at the edge of the wetlands,” I told him, and then had to explain about what that meant. “It sat at the edge of a dock and was run by a man named Crosby Forrest. And it had a huge swordfish on the wall, and the biggest oyster shell I’ve ever seen.” I held my arms out as wide as I could to show him how big it was. “Anyway, I was probably about two or three, and they brought me to Crosby Forrest’s restaurant.”
“What kind of food did they have?” he asked.
“Oh, they had clam chowder.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a soup with clams in it.”
“Ewww.”
“No, you’d like it. There are different kinds; here in Massachusetts they make it with milk—”
“Ewww!”
“—and in New York they make it with tomatoes, but in Poquoson they make it with broth. They call it ‘Bull Island clam chowder.’ And then they ordered some fish for me. It was flounder, and I ate the whole thing.”
“Did it have eyes?”
“Well, flounder have both eyes on the top of their head. But they took all the meat off the bone for me. They had to, because they didn’t want me to swallow a bone by mistake.”
“Was it good?”
“Yes, and I ate the whole thing.”
“Wow.”
“And then I got cranky, and Crosby told Grandma and Grandpa that I could sleep on the sofa in his office. And I remember waking up and seeing him and then Grandma and Grandpa came and took me home.”
“I wanna go to Crosby Forrest!”
“I wish we could. Crosby died many years ago, and his wife died about eight years ago. But I think the family runs a seafood store now. Maybe we’ll go there one day.”
“Yeah! I want flounder.”
I wish I had pictures of the restaurant. But apparently it met its demise before the earliest date of the digital archives of the Daily Press. And Google Image Search only turns up pictures of Bill Forrest Seafood, which is a distribution business. Still, the exterior of that business looks awfully familiar; I wonder if he took over the location of the original restaurant. I guess I’ll have to go back home and figure it out.
Boing Boing: “Massive scale” shut-down of polling places in districts known for suppressing black voters. You want to talk about questioning the legitimacy of an election? Maneuvers like this one make me question which party is the crooked one.
An assortment of selections from Doom and Gloom from the Tomb that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while. In reverse chronological order (of posting, not of recording).
Sonic Youth, Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, North Carolina, August 5, 2000 – falling neatly in between the first show I saw of theirs and the next two, squarely in the middle of their NYC Ghosts and Flowers period. Be ready for beat poetry.
Pharoah Sanders – Festival de Jazz de Nice, Nice, France, July 18, 1971 – Live Pharoah? Yes please.
Bill Evans Trio – Pescara Festival, Italy, July 18, 1969 / Vara Studio, Hilversum, Holland; March 26, 1969 – two live Bill Evans dates that sound worth checking out.
Yo La Tengo Does Dylan – of course they do. Curious about the cover of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which is on the short list of Dylan songs that I’d consider singing in public.
Leonard Cohen – The Paris Theatre, London, March 20, 1968 – OMG.
Traveling on the Great Western Railway along Brunel’s line from Bristol to Paddington, my trip was bookended by brass bands. My Uber driver dropped me off near the front entrance of Bristol Temple Meads, and I noted the red-coated soldiers near the door at about the same time I realized they were holding brass instruments. They began playing a soft ballad as I walked inside to sort out my ticket.
A few minutes later, as the trumpet’s line climbed up to a surprising apex, it became clear: this was no ballad. This was Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”
As I stepped back to the door of the station to listen I realized that the band was surrounded by blue-coated men and women holding poppies and donation boxes. And the context clicked into place for me.
In America, the reason for the association between veterans and the cheap paper poppies on Veterans Day is not top of mind for most. Here, where so many young men died in Flanders Fields almost 100 years ago, it’s never been forgotten. This was the way the British veterans kept the memory of that awful sacrifice alive.
At the other end of the Great Western Railway line in Paddington Station was another brass band in red coats, these wearing the bearskin hats of the Queen’s Guard. They were playing a theme from a TV western. The music lacked the yearning of “Life on Mars?” but it didn’t matter; travelers were donating anyway.
Today was a travel day. I flew from Boston to Halifax to London on Tuesday night and spent much of Wednesday in trains, finishing in Bristol. That’s a stretch of countryside between Reading and Bristol above.
The Bristol Temple Meads railway station is the end of the Great Western Railway line and was my destination for the trip. When I exited, I was struck by the plaque of dedication (below) referencing the founding genius of British railways, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I was also struck by the immense stone façade of the station, looking for all the world as though someone had dropped a passenger terminal into an old church.
As for Bristol itself—I won’t have much chance to explore, which is unfortunate. It feels a little like Boston: the same unplanned maze of streets, the same interesting mix of university, industry and technology. Looking forward to speaking at Bristech.
Talking Points Memo: Odd Timing: FBI Releases Closed Case Files on Bill Clinton Pardon of Marc Rich. In addition to the Clinton Foundation investigation, the full set of documents dumped also includes a set of videos from aerial surveillance footage of protests in Maryland from April 29 to May 3, 2015; the report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state; J. Edgar Hoover era records on Nikolai Tesla; and an inquiry into Fred Trump.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, the other records posted to the contrary, the combination of the two Clinton disclosures strongly suggests that someone at the FBI has decided they aren’t going to take any chances that Hillary might be democratically elected President.
Hyperallergic: Folk art relics from the Golden Age of America’s Secret Societies (via Boing Boing). Interesting exhibit of artifacts from the Freemasons and Odd Fellows.
It made me think of some of the few artifacts that have surfaced from the University of Virginia’s secret societies. Most of them have left behind only their rings or ribbons, but a few other items of stranger affect survive, particularly from the Hot Feet.
My favorite is the crown of the Hot Feet, pictured above and worn by James Rogers McConnell, among others. Though the crown was updated by the time that Lewis Crenshaw wore it, it is still a fascinating reminder of this intersection between UVA mythology, folk art and the American tendency toward the borrowed ritual image. It would be fascinating to see if any of the other … intriguing artifacts pictured below from 1906, showing the coronation of Charles S. McVeigh outside the East Range, survive.
Welcome to Cocktail Friday! Today’s cocktail is a relic called The Chauncey.
First, a note: how do I pick the cocktails to feature on Cocktail Friday? Sometimes it’s a cocktail I’ve known for a while and just haven’t got round to featuring. Sometimes it’s something I’ve tried in my travels.
And sometimes I’ve added something to my bar and I’ve gone looking for a cocktail to feature it. That’s this week’s cocktail, The Chauncey. It’s a great example (if not a classic per se) of pre-Prohibition cocktails’ tendency to break the rules and combine liquors that we would never dream of combining today, like rye and gin. For good measure, it adds red vermouth, brandy, and orange bitters, which round out the flavor profile and add up to something unusually complex and good.
Aside: Bernard DeVoto, author of the cocktail classic The Hour, would have hated The Chauncey. In addition to adding something to gin besides dry vermouth, he hated mixed drinks made with rye or bourbon (“the Manhattan is an offence against piety”), non-Angostura bitters (“all others are condiments for a tea-shoppe cookbook”) and—even worse—orange bitters (“Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them into anything that is to be drunk”). Very odd for a man who fondly remembered drinking at the Knickerbocker, no bastion of drink purity, in its heyday! So drink this with pride, and a certain defiance.
As always, if you want to try the recipe, here’s the Highball recipe card. Enjoy!
Paulina Borsook, Freedom to Tinker: Neophilia and Human Nature. After a well written illustration about how concern about Internet behavior and regulation is more “nothing new under the sun,” Borsook offers a bibliography that would make a fantastic syllabus for a college course on the roots of Internet culture, policy, and journalism.
A Wikipedia page I was largely responsible for has been spared the axe, and I feel like a successful defense lawyer.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that’s free for anyone to edit, that aspires to surpass other encyclopedias in quality. To meet both goals it has evolved a series of rules, a few arbitrary but most well thought out and endlessly debated, that determine what stays in and what goes. Rules like “Wikipedia is not a directory” and “Wikipedia is not for promotion” are self explanatory; “Wikipedia is not a memorial” may take more careful reading. (I find this page a helpful summary.)
So when Wikipedia editors get in an argument about whether something belongs, it is through a formal process called AfD, for “Articles for Deletion.” And the discussion often goes down the various principles listed above, frequently referred to by initials rather than by name.
That the ensuing debate is called Wikilawyering is unsurprising, as is the fact that that term itself can refer to misuse of rules to obey the letter of the Wikipedia policy while violating its intent.
But in the end, your article is likely to prevail if you have taken steps to ensure you write about notable things, cite your facts, and avoid original research and puffery. It’s a great educational process, in that way.
OS X Daily: How to batch rename files on Mac OSX easily from the Finder. Awfully useful. Though it’s not “instant” on files in iCloud Drive.
Slashdot: Satya Nadella: “We clearly missed the mobile phone.” What is so frustrating to those of us whose fortunes were tied to Microsoft’s (I was an intern in 2001 and an employee from 2002 to 2004) is that it wasn’t for lack of trying.
There was constantly something going on in mobile, often with senior leadership taking the reins. But too often it was trying to push a version of the Windows user experience into a handheld format.
The lesson? Don’t let your product portfolio strategy overrule user experience, or users will overrule you.
The New Yorker: Billy Bragg’s Railroad Songs. Splendid write-up of Bragg’s new album, and its connection to America in the year of Clinton vs. Trump.