"But as the show gassed on, it also started to feel like zealotry porn: There were only so many fingers you could watch chopped off, only so many gouged-out eyes."

"After a while, the red robes started to look more like cringe cosplay than a pointed protest symbol. When the series finale aired last year, I didn’t bother watching, especially after reading that the titular handmaid, June, never reunites with the daughter she’s spent the entire series trying to rescue.And now we learn why: Because without that loose end, there could be no 'Testaments.' Our new protagonist is June’s teenage daughter, Agnes, who is being raised by a wealthy Gilead family and trained to become a perfect upper-class Gilead wife. Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus and go to the weirdest finishing school in suburban Maryland. Mostly they spend their days learning needlepoint and flower arranging, but sometimes they break up the monotony by ecstatically cheering while watching a petty criminal lose his hand to a buzz saw...."

From "A 'Handmaid’s Tale' sequel answers questions the original forgot to ask/'The Testaments' extends the authoritarian thought experiment that began with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel by turning focus to the enforcers" (WaPo).

Yikes. Zealotry porn. Are there really so many people who feel drawn to observe bloody amputations? And then they think the show is criticizing other people, not them. Are they titillated... by the amputations and by seeing how terrible those other people are?

Anyway... Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus... sounds like something in a song by Prince. I racked my brain, but all I could think of was "The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began..."

And, yeah, it's "racked my brain," not "wracked my brain." The rack is a torture device.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you just might get some sleep tonight.

Ever notice that in "Friend of the Devil," there's a line "Ran into the devil, babe, he loaned me twenty bills" and then later "I ran down to the levee but the devil caught me there/He took my twenty dollar bill..."? Seems like the imagery is muddled. First, there are 20 bills and later, there's a 20-dollar bill, which is a single bill. 

Alligator.

That's yesterday, with evocative clouds. Today was blustery:

Bob Weir's "Bobby shorts" were NOT hot pants.

All respect to Bob Weir. My blog tribute to him is here. But now I need to talk about a NYT article that talks about his pants, his shorts. Here: "Bob Weir, a Virtuoso of Hot Pants/The Grateful Dead guitarist wore short shorts like no other" (NYT).

Okay, I am an expert on this subject... and not because I've been talking about the issue of men in shorts for 20 years. I was there, at ground zero, in the summer of 1971, when the "hot pants" fashion trend peaked. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was 20 years old, and I worked — for what was probably less than $2 an hour — in the juniors department of Lit Brothers department store in Camden county, New Jersey. New hot pants outfits came in every week and we positioned them on the racks near the store entryway so they'd, presumably, mesmerize the passersby. I saw and handled this merchandise in real time. It was not made of denim. It was polyester. It was certainly not cut off and frayed. It had neatly finished edges. And most important, it had a 2-INCH INSEAM.

Now let's look at what that NYT is calling hot pants:

The article leans heavily into the idea that these shorts are really really shorty short. Key language: "chopped-to-the-heavens jean shorts," "Mr. Weir’s shorts were short," "snipped high enough that fans quite a distance from the stage could make out Mr. Weir’s upper thighs," "not Daisy Dukes, they were 'Bobby Shorts,'" "The Bob Weir Inseam... five inches max."

5 inches! 5 inches, you say?! Hot pants had a 2-INCH INSEAM! A woman in shorts with a 5-inch inseam would — in the era of hot pants — have been seen as frumpy and ultra-modest. 

Don't fight with me. I am a 1970s hot-pants purist. I was there. I didn't measure the inseam at the time, but I handled the merchandise, and I've researched the measurement, and the number is 2 inches. You may marvel — I'm marveling now — at how these pants could adequately enclose a woman's crotch, let alone a man's.

I am not taking one more step 'til I know where I'm going.

"In an event that became part of Grateful Dead lore, a 16-year-old Mr. Weir was wandering with a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., on New Year’s Eve 1963 when they heard a banjo playing..."

"... and followed the sound to a music store where Mr. Garcia, five years his elder, was preparing to give lessons. 'We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave,' Mr. Weir later recalled. 'I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.' Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions was the earliest iteration of what would eventually become the Grateful Dead...."

From "Bob Weir, Guitarist and Founding Member of the Grateful Dead, Dies at 78/His songwriting and rhythm guitar playing helped shape the San Francisco band’s sound as it became an American institution" (NYT).

He said this last March: "I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it."

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

Goodbye to Phil Lesh.

I thought he would live forever.

Very sad to see "Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84/One of the first rock bassists whose instrument regularly took a lead role, he also had a hand in writing some of the band’s best-known songs" (NYT).

In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”

Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing leads of the lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen. 

A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band to improvise at length without losing the listener.

"I spent most of Mr. Trump’s speech not far from the stage, sandwiched between two exceptionally kind older guys clad in camo..."

"... one with a matching hat that read 'Ultra MAGA warrior.' One of them rustled me up a chair, offered to serve as a wind shield and even tried to lend me his gloves so my fingers wouldn’t freeze. I was comfortable enough, but after nearly an hour of listening to Mr. Trump’s usual ravings, I decided to call it a night."

Writes Michelle Cottle, in "What I Found Inside the MAGAverse on the Eve of Trump’s Trial" (NYT). That's a free access link, so you can find more of Cottle's experience among the deplorables and her seeming surprise at finding them happy, not angry, and pretty nice.

"There was a vibe of unity, common purpose, faith and joy. I didn’t run across anyone sweating the trial. But I spoke with plenty of folks like Lauren Herzog — who was rocking pigtails, a MAGA hat and an American-flag pajama onesie — with her husband and a bunch of their friends, who were happy to field my questions about whether they were concerned that Mr. Trump would soon be in court. There was much laughter and even more cross talk, but the bottom-line ruling from the group was, 'Nah.'"

"If I do my job well, you come away listening to 'Blue Suede Shoes' the way people heard it in 1956, or 'Good Vibrations' the way people heard it in 1966..."

"... and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians.... I can explain the appeal as best I understand it.... But what I can’t do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*.... That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it.... [T]hey always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn’t capture what they did, and that the only way — the *only* way, they were very clear about this — that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs."

Says Andrew Hickey, beginning the long-awaited Episode 165 of his phenomenal podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs": "'Dark Star' by the Grateful Dead." 

Listen to the whole thing, but tell me, did you see The Grateful Dead live and while on psychedelic drugs? Having seen The Grateful Dead live and used psychedelic drugs but not at the same time is not enough.

Bob Dylan broke from his well-established "Rough and Rowdy Ways" tour set list and played The Grateful Dead song "Truckin'"....

... last night in Tokyo, Japan:

Rolling Stone reports. 

It says that's the first time Dylan has ever played "Truckin’." "Truckin'" is one of the songs he wrote about in "The Philosophy of Modern Song": 

"The deification that those folks made of Jerry is basically what killed him. It disgusted him, and rightly so.... I’ve seen where that goes. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way..."

Said Bob Weir, quoted in "Bob Weir keeps the Grateful Dead alive — and always evolving/Fresh off a run of shows accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra, the 75-year-old guitarist keeps looking ahead to the next step in his musical journey" (WaPo).

“I’m trying to assimilate what I understand, and that is time is a human construct, a marker we put on things that doesn’t necessarily exist,” he explains. His mind is on the next tour, but it’s also on how his music will be remembered and kept alive by people that haven’t been born yet. “With the Grateful Dead, if it’s done right, there’s a chance they may be a part of the conversation in two to three hundred years..."

"[W]e were betrayed into thinking we were legalising something and we are legalising something else."

"I’m not concerned about legalisation per se, I’m concerned about legalisation without regulations that curb the development of a product into something different. It concerns me a lot. It’s like you voted for legalising X and it later becomes 100X. So it was not what you voted for."

Said Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, quoted in From "Potent cannabis strain ‘causing psychosis time bomb’ in US" (London Times). 

What's available now has a THC level "as high as 90 per cent." What people were thinking about when they voted for legalization had something more like 5 per cent.

When I started reading this article, I was expecting to see some impressive evidence connecting high-potency cannabis to psychosis, so I was dismayed to encounter low-potency stuff like: "[E]xperts have warned of a possible mental health crisis after the emergence of super-strength marijuana products and states are scrambling to study a link between heavy use and psychosis."

ADDED: "As we cruise into the 1980s... 1978, going on 1981, what you see before you is a 10...  no, wait... 12! — 12-foot-long, burning [indecipherable] of marijuana..."

What could be sweeter than watching Bob Weir earnestly endeavoring...

... to do TikTok?

“I don't think that you need to rehash ending comments any further, but I just thought of this. There is a Grateful Dead documentary on Prime..."

"... and the last episode, when the Dead were carrying on the show for the fans, the fans who were becoming increasingly rowdy, BTW. The show was killing Jerry, and did kill him. The Deadheads wouldn't even buy tickets for the show, but just would show up 'for the party.' The band was getting kind of sick of it an had no way to control it. Anyway, there was a lot about that final episode that reminded me of your blog. Like I said, you have stated your reasons clearly enough, so I am not asking you to use this in any way, but just credit it to 'Tim' if you should choose to do so."

That's (obviously) from the email. Here's the Amazon Prime series, "A Long Strange Trip." I've watched some of it, but not the last episode. Now, I will watch it. I have thought about my problem with the comments with an analogy to having a party at my own house.

"He took objection to the word 'Styrofoam.' He said, 'This is so uncharacteristic of your work, to put something as time-dated as the word "Styrofoam" into it.'"

So said Robert Hunter, talking about Jerry Garcia's only problem with "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo," quoted in "Jerry Garcia’s 50 Greatest Songs" (Rolling Stone).

"Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo" is one of those titles that calls to mind no actual song, but once I start playing it, I know what it is:



#33 by the way. My favorite Jerry Garcia song is ranked at #46, so I'm not really into the numbers. For the record "Uncle John's Band" is #1. The other "uncle" song — "Me and My Uncle" — is not even on the list. [ADDED: It shouldn't be. It was written by John Phillips.]

I like that Jerry cared about the timelessness of the words.

When Al Franken intersected with The Grateful Dead (back in 1980).

Don't miss the sexual harassment — at 3:30 — and the attempt to justify it with the invocation of the lyric "We can share the women, we can share the wine." Comically justify it. They're mocking the justification.

Here's a Reddit discussion from a year ago: "We can share the women we can share the wine?/Looking back, what are the most problematic Dead lyrics?"

Here's a defense of the line at Dead.net:

It’s unfortunate that the opening lines of the song ["Jack Straw"] are often taken by listeners at face value—I always felt very strange about the roar that would emerge at the lines “we can share the women, we can share the wine.” In fact, as has been pointed out, that attitude led our pair of ne’er-do-wells onto a path of self-destruction. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else heard that at shows—that inappropriate roar of approval—kind of like the line in “Baba O’Riley”: “You’re all wasted!” Hmmmm... and that’s a good thing?

“I got hit with a chop block when I was a defensive end in high school. My ankles were weak for years. So when I became an exercise junkie..."

"... in my 20s, I used to turn my ankles a bunch. Anyway, I had a friend, a Shoshone healer. Rolling Thunder. I used to see him work on people with an owl’s wing and cedar smoke. I said, ‘Chief, would you consider doctoring my ankles?’ He stood me up and said, ‘When you’re running, have you ever thought about looking down at where you put your feet?’ Here he pauses for effect And I haven’t turned my ankle since.”

From "The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Is 72 and Still Working Out Like a Beast/What do you get when you cross a Grateful Dead legend and epic, age-defying workouts?" (Men's Health).

Hey, that reminds me. I went out for a drive yesterday. I wanted to see some fall colors and meditate on the local landscape. I turned on the car radio — satellite radio — and just happened to hit the preset button that played this:

"River going to take me, sing sweet and sleepy/Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home...."

That's my favorite Grateful Dead song — "Brokedown Palace."

Goodbye to Robert Hunter.

Robert Hunter... died Monday night. He was 78. No cause of death was provided.... “He died peacefully at home in his bed, surrounded by love. His wife Maureen was by his side holding his hand. For his fans that have loved and supported him all these years, take comfort in knowing that his words are all around us, and in that way his is never truly gone. In this time of grief please celebrate him the way you all know how, by being together and listening to the music. Let there be songs to fill the air.”...

"There is a road, no simple highway..."

It's Winter Storm Xyler...

... bearing down upon us.

What did Winter Storm Xyler make you do?

It made us load up the car at 3 a.m. on Friday in Moab, Utah, and — after a stop to look at the stars from a vantage point in Arches National Park — drive until 4 a.m. this morning — 1300 miles back to Madison, Wisconsin.

We listened to the Grateful Dead channel on the satellite radio the whole way (just about, so it seemed). That felt like the right car-driving music for the occasion.

River gonna take me
Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back home

When I woke up this morning — in a bed, in a bed — that's the song that was in my head.

I'm so glad to be back in Madison with this vantage point on the Xyler snowfall.