non-fiction

Sports Tribalism, Ear Worms, and Falling Acorns

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One of my many irritating habits is repetitively singing/reciting snatches from old songs or jingles or poems that have risen from the playlist of my inner jukebox and loop through my consciousness like irritating commercials that repeat time and again during a television broadcast.

After yesterday’s unexpected Gamecock triumph over the 14-point-favorite Clemson Tigers, a line from Warren Zevon’s “When Johnny Strikes Up the Band” took up repetitive residence in my mind. 

“They’ll be rocking in the projects.”

I sang that line out loud at two or three junctures during my six-block trek to Chico Feo, and it is what came out of my mouth as I mounted a bar stool and received my first All Day IPA from Casey. He gave me a quizzical smile. I explained I was happy because the Gamecocks had finally beaten the Tigers after eight long years so I had a song in my heart.

Sitting to my right were twenty-eight-year-old identical twin Kelsey McCormick, a Chico regular, and a young man I’d never met. We started talking sports, and I confessed that although I intellectually understood the atavistic absurdity of team sports tribalism that I whooped and hollered when the Cocks recovered that late fourth quarter Clemson fumble.

“They’ll be rocking in the projects.”

The young man, whose name is Zac, asked me if I was watching any of the World Cup. I said I was paying secondhand attention to the outcomes and was pulling for Germany because my sons had gone to school there, one in Berlin and the other in Bamberg. I mentioned that Ned is currently living in Nuremberg.

Ned (second from right) on an ad for a bar in Bamberg

Kelsey asked me to guess where Zac was from based on his accent. “Three guesses,” she said.

I guessed Minnesota, California, and Goose Creek, South Carolina.

Zac smiled and said, “Pretty Close. I’m from Montana and lived in Seattle and also Phoenix and for a short time in Sweden.”

I asked him what he did for a living, and as it ends up, he had just retired from professional soccer as a goalie.

So, I had been oldmansplaining the tribal nature of sports fans to a professional athlete, a somewhat famous one as far as American soccer goes.

Zac Lubin

He asked me about my line of work, and I said that I had a novel coming out but had taught English for thirty-four years before my retirement. Kelsey mentioned that she had heard me read poetry at the Singer/Songwriter Soapbox and enjoyed my stuff but was less enamored of the some of the other poets she had witnessed. I mentioned two superb poets, Chuck Sullivan and Jason Chambers, but admitted one or two of the other poets read prose chopped up in lines that lacked the compression that makes a poem a poem.  I mockingly intoned:

As I walk around the grounds of the asylum,

the brown leaves like a carpet in a boarding house,

I think of father’s irritating habit of smacking his lips

while smoking unfiltered Chesterfields.

Kelsey got it. “The more condensed the more powerful.”

“Like splitting an atom as opposed to sorting socks.”

Then I leaned over and asked if they wanted to hear my favorite lines of poetry. I mean, what could they say?

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

And right at that moment, an acorn fell from the sky and bonked Zac right on the head.

Zac asked about the possible meanings of the acorn hitting him at that moment. and I explained that in a piece of short fiction, you could have acorns fall periodically and serve as symbols that support the theme and provide unity. In a comedy, it could be funny, the acorn hitting him on the head, like a cartoon Sir-Isaac-Newton epiphany, that he was in love or something.

“An acorn’s a seed, right?”

“Right, Zac! The acorn seed sperm hits the ovum of your head. It’s a very good omen for your relationship’s growing.”

“On the other hand,” I went on, “in a sad story the acorns could represent failure, dropping off the trees, rolling across the bar, down across the cooler, onto the ground to be crushed by the bartenders’ feet as they concoct Samurai slings and pull drafts.”

Kelsey asked what advice I’d give a 28-eight-year-old and a 33-year-old.

“Find someone to love, be kind to them, marry them, have children, and be happy around the children.”

We sat there quietly for a while.

“Hey, Wesley,” Kelsey said. “You haven’t asked what advice a 28-year-old would give a 70-year-old.”

I smiled. “What’s your advice?”

“You get to decide how old or young you get to be. It’s up to you. I mean, mentally how old you want to be.”

I said that teaching keeps you young, and I was appreciative of that.

We finished our drinks and said our goodbyes, Zac was headed up to Montana Monday, and Kelsey would be at the Soap Box. He plans on moving down here and starting a soccer-related business.

Kelsey wanted to know if Zac fit in at Chico Feo. “Desitively,” I said. “He’ll be rocking in the projects.”

Moms for Liberty: Vice Crusaders Farting Through Silk

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Moms for Liberty: Vice Crusaders Farting Through Silk

“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings, too.”

Henrich Heine

“the vice-crusaders, farting through silk,
waving the Christian symbols . . .”

Ezra Pound, Canto XIV

Wandering through war torn Twitter these days reminds me of Neville Shute’s On the Beach, a novel dramatizing the last days of the last survivors of a nuclear war who await their inexorable doom as a radioactive cloud descends upon southern Australia. Except in this case, Twitter is already burning; perhaps a better analogy would be wandering through the streets of ancient Rome during a hostile takeover.[1] Many of the posts project a Titanic-tinged, goodbye forever friends, end-of-an-era, fin de civilisation vibe.

Among the tearful good-byes, the cancer chemo updates, and the political diatribes, I ran across this depressing piece of tweeted news:

Of course, it’s possible that race had nothing to do with the dismissal. However, the timing is problematic, the board has not provided the grounds for his dismissal, and Moms for Liberty’s viewpoints on Critical Race Theory certainly seem racist to me.

For example, the MFL[2] chapter of Williamson County Tennessee complained that showing students films of Bull Connor’s thuggish cops unleashing attack dogs, fire-hosing protesters, and beating Freedom Riders with billy clubs created “negative view of Firemen (sic) and police.”[3]  The same Williamson County MFLers wanted to counterbalance the negativity of the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo with praise for the Church: “Both good and bad should be presented,” they demanded.

Of course, book censorship is also a high priority. In this morning’s Post and Courier, there’s a below-the-fold front page story headlined: “Removal of books sparks outcry in Beaufort.”[4] On Page A5 the headline “Horry board OKs controversial library book changes.” And below that story, the continuation of the front-page Beaufort story lists 97 titles removed from Beaufort County Public School libraries, including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, Margaret Atwood’s The Hand Maid’s Tale, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

The MFLers seem especially, almost perversely, antagonistic to LBGQ children and want to prevent those children from reading about themselves, to keep them from knowing that they’re not alone, that happiness may very well await them.

[Cue Yeats]:    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

                        Are full of passionate intensity.

I guess what we’re going to have to do is organize, be vigil, curate candidates, donate money to try to oust these fanatics from the boards.

I mean, removing Martin Luther King, Jr. from school curricula harms our children much more than their reading about sexual ambiguity. I mean, this smacks of Soviet-style state run education where a free exchange of ideas is forbidden.

[1] I.e., during an invasion of barbarians: burning, looting, pillaging, raping,  . . .

[2] I’m sick of typing out its blatantly Orwellian double speak. The liberty of ban books. From now on it’s MFL. (In a rare display of discretion, I’m not going to provide my alternative wording for the initials.

[3] Not to mention snarling German shepherds. BTW, these examples are culled from Kelly Weill’s article in the Daily Beast:  “Moms for Liberty’s conservative activists are planning their next move: Taking over school boards”

[4] The home, of course, of Pat Conroy.

A Speech on Scholarship

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Scholar by Osman Hamdi Bey

A friend recently sent me the copy of a speech that a friend of his had delivered at a Cum Laude induction at Exeter, which reminded me that I too had given a similar speech at Porter-Gaud in the 2010s, so I thought I’d pass it along, for what it’s worth.

Congratulations, inductees for embodying excellence. 

However, as John Donne famously proclaimed:  No man is an island.  These honorees did not arise on the foam of the Aegean fully formed. 

First, we need to acknowledge your parents.

Who read you bedtime stories, salved your skinned knees, said no, then sent you to time out.  

We need to acknowledge your teachers.

Especially those in the so-called lower grades who are not present to hear this praise, the ones who taught you how to read, how to form letters and Arabic numerals, how to add and subtract. 

I suspect none of us has forgotten our first grade teacher’s name.  Not you ninth graders, not you, Dr. Mac.

Mine was Mrs. Wiggins.  Who would be about 125 by now I guess, but who will live on as long as there’s one surviving student who remembers her.

And, finally, we need to acknowledge all of the friends of the inductees.

Research has shown that as far as influence goes, peers of teenagers wield by far the most potent power in high school, much more than parents and teachers.  So, thank all of you for being good friends, for providing needed support, or offering good advice.

Also, keep in mind that if you are a senior and not on this stage this morning, it does not mean that you won’t be honored when you graduate from college.   

And, likewise, your being inducted into an honor society in high school doesn’t ensure that you’re going to be inducted into a collegiate honor society.

Life is a process – we’re not seeds, nor buds, but an ever evolving becoming.

Interestingly enough, though, high grades and scholarship are not synonymous.  The student who gruntingly masters information for grades lacks the scholar’s curiosity and never comes close to experiencing the scholar’s joy.  So when I urge you to become engaged in your studies, it’s not so you’ll receive accolades or a handsome salary, it’s so that your life will be more meaningful.

The following statement is going to sound absolutely absurd to many of you, but I fervently believe it:  Being a true scholar is much more profitable than being a CEO, movie star, or hall-of-fame athlete, because if you become a true scholar, i.e., a life long learner, you will escape the nets of boredom, and boredom, as far as I am concerned, is death-in-life.

Despite the caricature of the pallid, bespectacled outsider ill-at-ease in his own body, I dare say that true scholars enjoy charmed lives because they’ve mined the kryptonite that protects them from those empty temptations of the temporal – all of those singing sirens – those manufactured products that are a lot of fun but not all that enlightening – e.g., Modern Warfare 3, or as I have rechristened it, Modern Warfare 3 Homework 0.  

The metaphorical kryptonite that scholars possess is a love of learning.

They have, as Joseph Campbell put it, found their bliss, and are following it.

What thrills a scholar is delving deeply into the profound mysteries of being. 

The scholar marvels at the truncated evolutionary transformation that takes place in the womb.  

The scholar attempts to fathom the idiocies that resulted in WWI.  

The scholar is fascinated by the metamorphosis of Jamaican dance hall toasting into rap music and then hip hop and traces the underlying musical commonalities of all three sub-genres as she conjectures how popular music reflects 21st century American society.

In short, the scholar seeks to see the immense interconnectedness of things, to rip down Maya’s veil of illusion.  

True scholars have found the elixir that is the antidote to one of Adam’s curses – labor – because for a true scholar labor and love are the same, the quest to know more and understand better.

And although Adam’s other curse – that ferry ride across the River Styx – cannot be avoided – by studying what Yeats called “monuments un-aging intellect” – the cave paintings of Lascaux,  The Tragedy of Prince Hamlet, the  3rd Law of Thermodynamics,  Beethoven’s 9th Symphony,  Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal –  our deeper understanding can be liberating and offer comfort as we contemplate our own demise.

I’d like to end by reading two quatrains of a poem that conveys this theme much more powerfully than I could ever hope to do. 

It concerns Alexander the Great who supposedly wept when he thought there was nothing left of the world for him to conquer, and Sir Isaac Newton, who took a very different view of his accomplishments.

It’s called “Worlds”

By Richard Wilbur.

For Alexander there was no Far East,


Because he thought the Asian continent


India ended. Free Cathay at least

*

Did not contribute to his discontent.



But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more


Serene. To him it seemed that he’d but played


With several shells and pebbles on the shore


Of that profundity he had not made.

I ask you, who would you rather be? 

Thank you, and again, congratulations.

The Pickleball Extravaganza

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Yesterday afternoon, after dropping Caroline and Brooks off at the airport, I returned to my pet-ridden but otherwise empty house, and like a good canine stepdad, took KitKat to the dog park where she spazzed out with her patented chihuahua/Jack Russell berserko barking – high-pitched, frantic – perhaps off putting to the other dog owners. However, being dog lovers, they smiled at her, leaned over, and scratched her tiny head, understanding that dogs, like virtually all animals, are territorial.

Folly Dog Park

Unlike KitKat, the humans at the dog park are friendly, non-territorial. We know each other as acquaintances, and welcome newcomers into “our community.”

After I returned KitKat to the house, I decided to do a very not unusual thing, i.e., to ride my bike to Chico Feo for two or three (or as it turned out, in this case, four) low-alcohol Founders All-Day IPAs.[1]

When I arrived, the bar was pleasantly uncrowded. I conversed with my pals Mike and Francesca, bantered with the Irishman Jack, checked out Cory’s multifunctional Swiss-like army knife thingamajig, and talked Dharma with Megan, a poet, my Buddhist friend who through mediation is engaged in the very difficult process of dismantling her ego. She’s shedding intoxicants –­ ­not only alcohol and drugs, but social media, the World Wide Web itself, preparing to leave Folly to travel the world.

A band was setting up, and someone asked Solly, the greatest of bartenders, who was playing, and he said they were associated with the charity pickleball tournament being held this weekend at the Folly Beach tennis courts.[2]  Then, a bit later I spotted my pal Billy Grooms, the City Councilman, hauling a handsome trophy to be awarded to whoever[3] wins the tournament. It appeared that Chico was helping to promote the event.

Billy Grooms

Billy, a hip-looking fifty-something, seemed to be spearheading the tournament, and as a former manager of FM radio stations in the Columbia area, he’s an expert promoter. He sat next to me at the bar and rhapsodized about the salutatory effects of playing pickleball. As more and more tournament people filled the area in front of the bar, I joked that they had elevated the median age of Chico Feo by a decade or so, that I was feeling downright young, though that was hyperbole. Most of the patrons looked to be in their fifties of early sixties.

Billy likened the pickleball community to the movie Cocoon in which old hedonists fly off into outer space to recapture their youthfulness. Billy mentioned that the close quarters of the courts create a sort of intimacy as doubles partners face off at each other at close range. He extolled the camaraderie that pickleball creates, mentioning that opponents often engage in G-rated trash talking.

In other words, pickleball is a helluva lot of fun, not to mention great exercise.

Megan had spotted some young women across the bar dressed up as old folks, sporting white wigs and unhip attire, and wondered if they were mocking the pickleballers.

Although I was wearing a fedora, not a pith helmet, I immediately assumed my amateur anthropologist persona and went over to ask them what was up. “Noooo,” they chimed in unison in their pleasant upstate twangs, “we love pickleball.”

As it turned out, they were bachelorette party participants. One of the women, a short twenty-something in a white wig, assisted by another costumed woman on a stool, performed a magic trick for me with boxes and colors, and I dutifully played along. “Yes, green was the color I had chosen!”

All in all, it was quite a night at Chico with a much more wholesome crowd, some of whom seemed to have stepped directly out of a family friendly sitcom from the Sixties, Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley types. When one country club Republican-looking fellow shook my hand and said what a pleasure it had been chatting with me, I accidentally blurted, “Yeah, mon,” which perhaps confused him and made me feel slightly guilty.

Meanwhile, in front of the band stand, young couples danced with their toddlers. I warned Solly that now these wholesome folks had discovered Chico, they’d overtake the joint, displacing lovable territorial losers like I-and-I.

He shook his head like that ain’t ever going to happen.

Addendum: The next night I ran into the bachelorettes who had been in costume, and after reading this post, they wanted the world to know that they’re not twentysomethings but thirtysomethings. Whatever, they were a blast to hang out with. Safe travels, ladies.

photo credit Mikey

[1] Note to writers: the phrase “low alcohol Founders All-Day IPAs” is technically redundant because “low-alcohol” is implied in the adjective “all-day.” However, it sounds too cool not to say – low-alcohol Founders All-Day IPAs. I say ear music should trump over-rigid grammatical purity.

[2] Note, they’re called “tennis” not “pickleball” courts. Last week the NYTs ran a lengthy article about pickleball’s bourgeoning popularity and how traditional tennis players resent having their courts overtaken by practitioners of what they consider a bastardized version of their beloved sport. In fact, Megan, the Buddhist, falls into the traditional tennis category.

[3] In the a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds mode, I consider using the pronoun “whom” as a subject an almost unforgivable grammatical lapse.

Complaining About Mansplaining

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Is there anything worse than contrarians mansplaining conspiracy theories?[1]

What really gripes me is not so much the ridiculousness of their arguments but the smug all-knowing tone these crackpots employ as they confidently explain, for example, that the US government is injecting tracking devices into its citizens via the COVID vaccine or that Princess Di and JFK, Jr. are alive and well shacking up in Bolivia.

Whenever I fall victim to such an occasion, I immediately call bullshit, and if that doesn’t work – if my interlocutor insists on droning on – I end the conversation by stating that I’m seventy, the clock’s ticking, I’m incapable of being convinced, and I’d much rather spend this precious moment doom-scrolling or watching the shadows of the trees sway on the fence of this beer garden rather than learning about how Kennedy and Diana survived their crashes and ended up in La Paz.

I’ll admit this scenario rarely happens, maybe once a year[2]; more frequently, I fall victim to someone mansplaining something I’m all too familiar with, e.g., the plays of William Shakespeare or the principles of Mahayana Buddhism.

Once again, it’s the all-knowing tone I find more offputting than the presumption that I’m ignorant.

In this situation, I might interrupt and say something like, “Yeah, I dig. By the way, who’s your favorite minor comic character? Mine’s Thersites from Troilus and Cressida,” or “‘By the way, have you ever contemplated the affinities of quantum mechanics and Buddhism? You know, ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form.'”

Sometimes these ploys don’t work because mansplainers are terrible listeners. It’s as if they’re reading internal teleprompters or something. They feel compelled to educate you, or perhaps to highlight their own learning.

Anyway, here’s a handy little chart courtesy of Kim Goodwin and the BBC.

[1] Okay, I mean besides pedophiles, serial killers, Amway representatives . . .

[2] A negative byproduct of hanging out in bars. I can’t recall ever being accosted by a conspiracy theorist at a dinner party.

These Terrible Dreams That Shake Us Nightly

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Zdzistaw Belinski

These Terrible Dreams That Shake Us Nightly

                                                                                                Macbeth (3.2.18-28)

In the wee hours this morning, I suffered through one of my post-retirement nightmares, a reprise of I’ve Never Been to Class and the Final Exam Is Tomorrow.  However, in this morning’s remake, I’ve transitioned from slack-ass student to unconscientious teacher.

In the dream, I’ve returned to class after a holiday with no lesson plans, no homework assignments, with nothing but empty words, my in-class bantering the equivalent of padding an essay with strings of superfluous phrases that take up space but denote next to nothing.

I hate dreams like this!

Well, I’ve decided rather than squandering thousands of dollars in therapy paying for advice from a virtual stranger who probably hasn’t read Ulysses – not to mention Jung and Freud – I’ll prepare lesson plans for phantom dream classes in the hope that I can short circuit my old-fashioned neurosis by being prepared.

Although I only taught history for four semesters in the last two years of my career, I really enjoyed whupping up assignments for the one-foot-out-of-the-door seniors who signed up for that elective, America in the Sixties.[1]

So, my first vaporous assignment is for a history class.

[Confession: Yes, MAGAs, you’re correct: many teachers (but not all) strive to indoctrinate students, which the following assignment certainly attempts to do].[2]

Assignment: Undoubtedly, in the last fifty years, the two most popular Presidents within the Republican Party were Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

Although they shared certain characteristics (species, gender, race, celebrity, divorces, party affiliation, fetishization of the Second Amendment), they also differed in several significant ways (in geopolitical attitudes vis a vis Russia, in their views of free trade vs tariffs, in their demeanors, in their adherence to Constitutional traditions).

In a well-developed essay devoid of superfluous phrases that take up space but denote next to nothing, compare Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, exploring both similarities and differences. Make sure to address three of the above areas of difference.

In your conclusion, speculate on societal dynamics that explain such a radical shift in Republican ideological viewpoints. Aspects to consider: Fox News, declines in literacy, the prevalence of social media, socio-economic disparities . . .

It’s trickier for an English class because in my nightmare, it’s inevitably my British Lit survey that I’ve not prepared for, which begins with the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and ends with Seamus Heaney.

It’s spring and we haven’t gotten past Chaucer!!!

I’m doomed! There’s no way to prepare. Cue Lady Macbeth’s scream in the Trevor Nunn BBC production.

[1] I suspect that course might be the root of my incompetent teacher nightmares because I felt as if I were shortchanging the students given my lack of knowledge, my ignorance of Chicago style research methodology, and my dearth of experience in organizing and implementing a history course.

[2] E.g., when I taught Old Testament in the 7th grade, I ended the unit by having students write a “character sketch ” of Yahweh. Almost every essay was negative: Yahweh was insecure, a “jealous God,” a belligerent Asshole who drowned innocent puppy dogs and kitty cats because His own Creation sucked. Not to mention, that his chosen one to regenerate the earth, ark-builder Noah, got shit-faced post-deluge and passed out naked in his tent, which freaked out his sons. Couldn’t Yahweh have found a Jimmy Carter equivalent instead? Isn’t he supposed to be omniscient?

Dysfunction, So-Called Strong Men, and American Idiocy

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Be thankful (if you’re not reading this from Russia)[1] that the cosmic crap throw of innumerable permutations of space/time has landed you in a nation that doesn’t ambush males lounging in neighborhood saloons, drag their startled selves to recruitment centers, and in less than a week, transport their untrained asses to the killing fields of the front lines as cannon fodder in an idiotic war instigated by a short-of-stature Napoleon wanna-be.[2]

Russian conscripts saying goodbye

It would be nice if my fellow Americans (especially elected Republican representatives and senators) would take the long view and recognize so-called strong men (i.e., authoritarian rulers) short circuit collaboration, gum up the machine of government with ego, and therefore create dysfunctional nations, because, just saying, not only are two heads better than one, but a few hundred heads are even better than two.[3]  

It’s not as if the Trump administration functioned as a well-oiled drama free machine, as if the Donald possesses a vision that extends beyond his next iPhone notification. Oh sure, if Trump were president, he would have magically insulated the U.S. from the universal phenomenon of global inflation. [Cue the Lovin’ Spoonful]: Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in the heresy of evangelicals; do you believe the rantings of a damaged girdle-sporting narcissist who wears more make-up than Mae West in her Myra Breckinridge days?

Trump without make-up

Alas, power trumps decency. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott and the rest of them will keep their cowardly lips sealed. Look what happened to Liz Cheney.  There is – no offense Jesus – short term profit in the forfeiture of one’s soul.

Double alas, propaganda can be effective, especially when targeting the under-educated,[4] so I’m expecting that even despite the January 6 Committee’s powerful case that Donald Trump and his minions attempted to sabotage via coup the peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America, that Donald Trump (aided and abetted by state legislatures) will be elected as POTUS in 2024.

We, to quote one of my TTC students from 1978, “done gone cruzy.”

George Bellows: Dancing at the Insane Asylum

[1] So far this year, the blog has 24 hits from Russia, so it’s possible.

[2] Diagram that goddamn sentence grammar technicians.

[3] Cf: the US Constitution

[4] C.f.:

An Appreciation of David Bowie’s “China Girl”

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Before I begin this paean on the exquisite pop/rock masterpiece “China Girl,” I thought I’d mention that some consider Bowie’s 1983 hit racist because he portrays a diminutive Asian female in stereotypical ways, and, [throat clearing], the sexualization of Asian females has been a Western European/North American thing for centuries.[1]

Take Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, for example, in which the narrator Fowler and his antagonist Pyle clash over the possession of Phoung, a Vietnamese husband-hunter who doesn’t even rate a name in Good Reads’ summary. There she’s merely “Fowler’s beautiful Vietnamese mistress.”

Anyway, Bowie considered “China Girl” a “very simple, very direct statement against racism.”

For an opposing view, here’s a link to “An Asian’s Take on ‘China Girl'”: https://rethinkreviews.medium.com/an-asians-take-on-david-bowie-s-china-girl-232e2a6aaeb4

Anyway, whether it’s racist or antiracist[2], the song itself, its dynamic progression from the bubbly pop of the first verse through the escalation of the narrator’s increasing angst, is masterful as it gradually morphs from a Jackson-5-like pop tune into an echo chamber of Weimer Republic decadence. Throughout, Bowie’s phrasing is pliant as he adjusts his voice to the narrator’s successive moods as he transitions from the sunshine of verse one to “visions of Swastikas” in verse four.

The song begins with a riff that Jonathan Kim (the author of the linked article) describes as a “little plunky Asian-style riff” that “is the musical equivalent of someone saying “Ching chong ching.”

On the other hand, it’s catchy, cheerful sounding and segues into the first verse where the narrator’s calm baritone contemplates his Chinese lover.

I couldn’t escape this feeling with my China girl
I feel a wreck without my little China girl
I hear her heart beating, loud as thunder
Saw these stars crashing

In the second verse, the mood darkens slightly, but Bowie’s voice remains relatively upbeat.

I’m a mess without my little China girl
Wake up in the morning, where’s my little China girl?
I hear her heart is beating, loud as thunder
I saw these stars crashing down

After the chorus, in the third, stanza, a sense of anxiety shadows the vocal as the tempo increases. Also, Bowie renders a sort of rock-a-billy hiccup with the line “I could pretend that nothing really meant too much.”  A hiccuppy muffled semi-sob sort of.


I’m feeling tragic like I’m Marlon Brando
When I look at my China girl
And I could pretend that nothing really meant too much
When I look at my China girl

What follows is an instrumental interlude in which the thumping of bass and drums replaces the tinkle-tinkle lightness of the verse two verses, which then leads to what I called above “a Weimer decadence.”

I stumble into town
Just like a sacred cow
Visions of swastikas in my head
Plans for everyone
It’s in the white of my eyes

My little China girl
You shouldn’t mess with me
I’ll ruin everything you are
You know
I’ll give you television
I’ll give you eyes of blue
I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world

The narrator sees himself as a negative influence, as a potential dictator perhaps, a man with some sort of dark mission, but when he gets into one of these moods, his Chinese lover soothes him, tells him to “shut his mouth.”

And when I get excited
My little China girl says
“Oh, baby, just you shut your mouth”
She says, “Ssh”
She says “Ssh”
She says
She says

A 25-second guitar solo replaces “ssh” as the direct object, and then the verse is repeated two more times before we come full circle and return from the realm of rock to bubbling pop as the playful Chinese riff returns, the bass stepping aside, out of the way.

Supposedly, Bowie adapted an earlier Iggy Pop version, and gives him co-writing a credit.

Obviously, I really admire the song, think it transcends the typical arc of a pop song yet remains, as they used to say on Bandstand, “danceable.”

[1] I struggled with what noun to use to describe the chronic Western sexualization of Asian females. I tried “predilection” and then “propensity” and finally “tradition” before opting for “thing,” the weakest of words that can describe anything from belly button lint to the resurrection of Jesus. Sometimes, though, you have to choose sound over sense.

[2] After all, as my bosom buddy Hamlet sez: “There’s nothing neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so.”

Cliffs of Fall Frightful, Sheer, No Man Fathomed

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Alexandre Coll

Cliffs of Fall Frightful, Sheer, No Man Fathomed

Who needs actual supernatural ghosts when we all have harrowing memories haunting us?

Take combat veterans for example. Like poor Wilfred Owen who lived just long enough to write this before getting killed in WWI.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Even if you were lucky enough to escape the trenches of that war, the beach heads of the second, the jungles of Viet Nam, and the deserts of the Middle East, you still have no doubt a host of melancholy memories that can arise in the wee hours like ectoplasmic phantoms.

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Lady Macbeth says, “What’s done is done,” but that’s not true as long as the subcranial electric impulses that are our memories decide to break out of their tombs and rattle their chains.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, world-sorrow; an an age old anvil wince and sing –

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.'”

O, the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pernell McDaniel at Chico Feo

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photo credit George Fox

One of the premier artists at Chico-Feo’s Singer/Songwriter open mic Mondays, Pernell McDaniel performs a wide range of originals. Whether he is singing about his beloved grandfather, star-crossed interracial couples, or the abundant goods available at Bert’s Market, his melodies and lyrics seamlessly meld into well-crafted crowd pleasers.

Here he is performing “The Ballad of Chris and Willy” on 19 September 2022.

The lyrics appear beneath the video.

Enjoy!

THE BALLAD OF CHRIS AND WILLY

On the other side of the tracks
On the shady side of town
Two young bucks worked a corner spot
Sharing their love around
Pimpin’ riffs and rhymes
And layin’ down beats and tracks

Chris and Willy made their way
Climbin’ each others backs
Scrapin’ and scratchin’ A
nd tryin’ to get ahead
Where street cred and the dollar bill
Was all the pride they had

And then the big time struck
Like a lightning bolt
And they got swept away in the fray
Not knowin’ that their crooked paths
Would cross again one day

Chorus

Yeah, Chris and Willy had a lifelong feud
Kinda like they never had Nothin’ much better to do.
But, Chris and Willy Never had a real fight
Until a bald headed woman Came between ’em At the Oscar’s one night

Willy married a time or two
And wound up with a chick named Jada.
She was a swinger with alopecia.
She was low hanging fruit for a hater.

Chris got rich on SNL
And later on the silver screen.
His money was green.
But, he was an A-list star
‘Cause his jokes were all so mean.
Then one night at the Oscar’s Willy had a nomination.
And Chris was MC-ing center stage
And tryin’ to be an aggravation.
In a single lapse of judgement
Chris joked about Jada’s scalp.
And Willy stormed the stage
And slapped the taste Out of Chris’s mouth!
Tears filled Willy’s eyes
As he reached his front row seat
While Chris was tryin’ to keep his cool
And checkin’ for loose teeth.
Jada scanned the crowd
Then beamed at Willy in adoration.
But Willy couldn’t let it go
Without one last indignation.
In a voice that thundered Like the cannon fire
When Sherman raped the South He said
“Don’t let my wife’s name Come outa your fuckin’ mouth!”

Yeah, Chris and Willy had a lifelong feud
Kinda like they never had Nothin’ much better to do.
But, Chris and Willy Never had a real fight
Until a bald headed woman Came between ’em At the Oscar’s one night