"Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, marries Riley Hawk, son of Tony Hawk, in ceremony officiated by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe."

Metafilter discusses this event, saying things like: "The bride and groom are 31 and 30 respectively. You cannot fathom how old this headline makes me feel in my bones" and "My 46-year-old self, realizing that Frances is four years older than her father was when he died, is going to be sitting in the semi-dark this evening, listening to old albums and thinking about things."

"Am I the only one who liked the girl afraid to drop in?…one father-daughter dynamic 2022 in a nutshell. Plus, she can drop in."

Writes Barbara, in the comments to last night's TikTok post.

That prompted farmgirl:

Barbara- I just watched the Father/daughter.
That is what America should look like.
What a great Dad!!

I'd only written "She's scared to drop in." So I didn't let on what an immensely cool father/daughter interaction there was. It makes me want to be more obvious:

I've assembled 10 TikToks to keep you occupied for the next 10 minutes. Let me know what you like best.

1. This is your pilot speaking.

2. The puppies are not yet ready to play.

3. She's scared to drop in.

4. If you baby-talk, will your friend baby-talk back?

5.  Drew Barrymore really wants you to go out in the rain.

6. Backstage with The Beach Boys.

7. When Sting had to endure the Jose Feliciano version of "I'll Be Watching You."

8. A "Moonstruck" visual.

9. When the Wisconsin man goes to Hawaii.

10. The deadline gave us purpose.

"A man in his 50s with red hair and a beard allegedly approached another man to ask him if he wanted to help him 'take people.'"

"The man called the Kalispell Police Department to report the redhead who didn’t give any other specifics. A very intoxicated man seen lying on the ground reportedly turned down a bartender’s offer to call him a cab after they closed up for the night. The man did not want help from law enforcement either.... A white car containing a dog had reportedly been parked near garbage cans for two days and someone claimed they didn’t see the dog let out once.... Someone asked officers to check on the welfare of a teenage hitchhiker they picked up on the bypass and dropped off at a bike path. They said he was on a skateboard and was trying to get to Lakeside. Officers made contact with the skateboarder who was OK."

 
I don't know. There doesn't seem to be much news this morning. I'm reading The Daily Interlake police report and feeling vaguely encouraged.

"I want to go back to being the little girl I am. I don’t want to have responsibility. I want to go on being the lively little girl I am for all of Brazil."

Said the 13-year-old Rayssa Leal (in Portuguese), quoted in "They’re Olympic gold and silver medalists. And they’re 13 years old." (WaPo). She won the silver medal in first Olympic women’s street skateboarding event. The winner of the gold was Momiji Nishiya of Japan. 

We were just talking about the American skateboarder, Alexis Sablone, in this post, 2 days ago. Sablone is quite a bit more than twice their age. She's 34. She came in fourth. 

At 34, Sablone is everything Nishiya and Leal are not. She has a graduate degree in architecture from MIT, is an artist, a graphic designer and has created her own shoe for Converse.... She joked about recently seeing Leal’s mother at a skating contest and thinking, “I’m older than you.”...

"She identifies as queer because the word is ambiguous and less-restricting than something like lesbian, which she dismisses as 'too gendered.'"

"She isn’t transgender and doesn’t want to be called 'they' or 'them,' nor does she like the term 'nonbinary,' though she knows it is likely how people see her in her androgynous clothes and beanies and ball caps. 'I think it’s a preference of what words feel comfortable,' she says. 'Why does the word "woman" make me feel uncomfortable, but "girl" always feels fine? Female feels fine. I mean, it’s just like some words I like and feel like me and make me not have to think, because on a normal day I just don’t really like thinking about myself in these adjectives or descriptive-like columns.'"

From "Olympics/She has an MIT degree and doesn’t think skateboarding’s a sport. But she plans to win a medal" (WaPo). 

"She" is Alexis Sablone, and the sport is divided into men's and women's events. The plan to medal is as a woman. 

It's interesting to see this hint of a comeback for the word "girl," and I can understand a young person's feeling that "woman" seems overly mature and stodgy. 

And I'm going to look out for the eclipsing of homosexuality. Is it going to go out of fashion and become, once again, the love that dare not speak its name... this time because it's "too gendered"?

"Until the skateboarders came along, Vans had no real direction, no specific purpose as a business..."

"... other than to make the best shoes possible. When skateboarders adopted Vans, ultimately, they gave us an outward culture and an inward purpose

Wrote Paul Van Doren in his memoir, “Authentic,” quoted in "Paul Van Doren, 90, Dies; Built an Empire With Vans Shoes/The sneakers became a hit in the skateboard world and later a multibillion-dollar nationwide sensation thanks in part to a Sean Penn movie."

This is 9 minutes of Sean Penn in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Scroll to the beginning if you want more, but I've clipped 15 seconds where you'll definitely be able to see the shoes:

"I was just sitting there, and I'm like, 'OK, I'm not gonna sit here and wait for nobody to pull some jumper cables... I'm not gonna flag anyone down.'"

"'So I grab my [Ocean Spray cran-raspberry] juice, grab my longboard, started heading to work," Nathan Apodaca told NPR.

The story could have ended there. As many know by now, it didn't. As Apodaca rolled down a hill, he casually turned on his TikTok account, @420doggface208, and created a video that would make a cultural sensation of his fairly prosaic, if resourceful, commute to work. "When I heard 'Dreams,' that's when I figured, 'OK, this is it,' " said Apodaca, a 37-year-old father of two. After the video took off, that 1977 hit single, "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, catapulted back on the charts, tripling in sales. The band also reported its best week ever on streaming.... In its first hour on TikTok, the video gathered some 100,000 views. It now has more than 35 million. It has been crowned with meme status. According to figures from TikTok, 134,000 tribute videos have been made, inspired by Apodaca, totaling almost a half-billion views. The lieutenant governor of Montana, Mike Cooney, did a tribute, as did comedian Jimmy Fallon — and endless others....

From "TikTok Sensation: Meet The Idaho Potato Worker Who Sent Fleetwood Mac Sales Soaring."

NPR applies its genteel seriousness to analyze the instantly, easily likable clip. It's got to mean something. Apodaca offers his idea: "There's just too much chaos right now. Everybody just needed something to relax to and vibe out with." Well, he's right! 

Extra fact: Ocean Spray bought him a new truck. Oh! The free advertising it got! A new truck, cranberry colored and loaded with cranberry juice. Yet surely his promotion of the drink is worth millions. 

And, Mick Fleetwood expresses thanks:

Mick Fleetwood just recreated @doggface208's insanely viral – and perfect – video. Beyond wholesome. ❤️✨pic.twitter.com/o2h3Pqy0uY

— Complex (@Complex) October 5, 2020

"She has always been a night owl, but has recently become nocturnal, typically going to bed around 8 a.m. She attributes the change in her sleep pattern to the news, which she says she watches constantly."

In case you were wondering if it is possible for you to live your life like Stevie Nicks. Yes, it is. Put on the TV news and watch the news all night. Go to bed after a few of the morning shows. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Oh! The glamour!

I'm getting my info from "The moonlight confessions of Stevie Nicks" (Yahoo reprint from L.A. Times).

She does not have a computer. She does have an iPhone, but it doesn’t have cellular service and she uses it only as a camera. Despite her distaste for social media, Nicks has gone viral a few times in recent months. Earlier this week, the internet discovered a TikTok video in which "doggface208" skateboards while singing along to Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," swigging from a container of cran-raspberry juice and generally living his best life.

Oh, yeah, I saw that. It underscores the notion that Stevieness is accessible to all:

I don’t use this verbiage often but this is a whole vibe. simple as that pic.twitter.com/NfdLsgLkxu

— DrewFrog (@DrewFrogger) September 25, 2020

Downtown Madison this morning... let's see how the lockdown is progressing.

There's certainly no rule against going outside, and that's what I did, taking my ebike down Willow Way and the lakeshore path to the Memorial Union. Click on the image to see the official "dos" and "dont's" of the "social distancing" to follow "if you spend time outdoors."



Here's how it looked on the Union Terrace:



Here's how that strip of lakeshore looks in good times:



That's from June 7, 2013 (when fewer students are in town than the end of April). Notice the picnic tables. They're not there today — now that they're regarded as vectors of disease and not places to stretch out and absorb sunlight.

Here's a pic from May 2, 2010:



Note the iconic tables and chairs that are gone today.

I walked through the terrace and up State Street and back. No trouble keeping my distance from anyone. I think I saw about 200 people along the way. At one point, I thought about writing this blog post and telling you that I did not see one person wearing a mask, but then I saw a young man in a mask. He was skateboarding. Was the mask ironic?

At the Freedom Café...

... you can say what you like.

"I don't think I'd die for a taco. But I might die as a taco."

I don't know how I missed the viral video of the skateboarding taco, but I'm seeing him this morning, because he's on that Village Voice list of 25 New Yorkers who need the Pope to forgive them.

Now that the topic is skateboarding, I want to tell you something about the new skateboarding park in Madison, Wisconsin. It's taunting a man:

“I go out my door on my way to work and see this thing; I pass it every day,” says [Allen] Burger, a machinist who has been riding BMX bikes for 15 years. “If [the rules against biking in the skateboarding park don’t] change, I just want to move. It’s like having the love of your life dangled in front of you... This is so upsetting to have a park right there... I’ve totally lost motivation."

Yes, he's a Burger and that other guy is a taco. That's just serendipitous.

“I do feel bad,” [says Patrick Hasburgh, one of the organizers behind the Madison Skatepark Fund]. “It’s a strange thing as a skateboarder to have to exclude someone after being excluded as a skateboarder. But really, the park isn’t designed for that.”

According to the exclusionary Hasburgh — I can has burg — BMX riders put pegs in their hubs that can "take chunks out of" the granite ledges that the skateboarders would only wear away slowly.

Here's the "Equal Treatment for BMX riders in Madison Skatepark" petition.

"Mr. Huntington built the treehouses over several months last year with the help of what he called a 'bronado' of friends."

"He hired contractors to build the skate bowl at the same time. The treehouse crew slept in a bunkhouse on the property, or else in tents or in their trucks. When they weren’t sawing and nailing boards, they loaded up bows and shot arrows; they skateboarded; they swam and fished in the Columbia River; they got stoned and raced motorbikes. One night Mr. Huntington slaughtered a goat and gave a big barbecue for the crew. 'I think of it as a big-boys’ camp,' said Tucker Gorman, a buddy of Mr. Huntington’s [and] a treehouse expert. 'It’s very much like Neverland up there,' Mr. Gorman said."

From a NYT article (with great photos) titled "Escape to Bro-topia/Foster Huntington was an up-and-comer in the New York fashion industry. Then he ditched it all and built his own personal paradise in the sky."

"Bronado" and "Bro-topia" are (unfortunately!) the only "bro-" slang in the article. "Bronado" has been in Urban Dictionary since 2008, when it was defined as "A large gathering of males, drinking and doing nothing." The current top definition is "When a group of bro's begin to fist pump so hard that a whirl wind begins to form and then from that, a Bro-nado rips through the party."

"Brotopia" (without the hyphen) has been in Urban Dictionary since 2007, when it was defined as "A place in which brothers (from another Mother) can bro-lax and or bro-chill in perfect harmony with one another. Although it is believed that a brotopia does exist one has yet to be found." The current top definition is "A totally non-queer land filled with all your favortie [sic] bros."

At the Dog-and-Skateboard Café...

... you can roll anyway you want.

Madison Easter.

We walked downtown and sat in the Peace Park...



Some shops were open and some were closed. A store with massive quantities of Wisconsin-themed clothes had racks of "Final Four" Badgers clothes but nothing representing tomorrow's game. "Final Four" is so yesterday, but the sales guy said the more up-to-date things are not printed yet. "It's Easter!" he said. Who wants to work on Easter? The skateboard shop was closed:



We pondered whether the skateboard people were religious, since they'd taken the trouble to make a special Easter-themed "closed" sign. There's no inconsistency between skateboarding and religion, but perhaps there's a slight disjuncture between religiosity and the use of the human-adult-sized rabbit character, as President Obama is learning if he's reading his Facebook commenters.

At the square, we sat on a bench near the statue of our Civil War hero Christian Heg, the site of some of our fondest protest-era memories — recorded here and here — and we conversed and people-watched until it seemed as though we were accelerating the process of becoming oldies...



... and we got a couple B-cycles out of the nearest kiosk and biked back home along Lake Mendota, which is exactly what we'd done the day before. But yesterday the lake was still maintaining its ice, in layered shards that looked like solid whitecaps. I should have taken a photo then, because today all that water had assumed the liquid form that gets to hog the name "water."

"The Nick Cave skateboard – and five other bizarre musical endorsements."

The weirdest one isn't Smokey Robinson's "the soul is in the bowl" seafood gumbo. It's the Rolling Stones' Rice Krispies:

3 "Price Is Right" things.

1. Via Metafilter, here's a recent episode of "The Price Is Right," displaying in split-screen what goes on behind the scenes.



2. From a recent "This American Life" episode titled "I Was So High," there was a segment about a guy named Josh Androsky who'd been drinking and "doing mushrooms," who for some reason thinks it's a good idea to join the studio audience of "The Price is Right" and the gets the "Come on down" call:

Already without mushrooms it would have been crazy.... Because, literally, old people are dancing with children in the aisles. This one old lady starts booty dancing on Drew Carey. There were just dollar signs and flashing lights. I mean, everybody's going crazy. We were, demonstrably, the least high-looking people there.

Hilarity ensues as he bids $1 on everything, actually wins once (on some damn ring everyone else overprices), and — asked what he does for a living — says he's "a skateboard rabbi."

Drew Carey turns to me and goes, how do you incorporate skateboards into Judaism? I was like, well, Drew Carey, we go to local high schools and attempt to turn religious extremism into religious "X-tremism!"

That fabulous joke did not make the edit of the show that airs, which you can partake of here.

3. I'm not too familiar with the show in its recent form, and by recent, I mean anything after Bill Cullen. It's not just Drew Carey that's unfamiliar. Even Bob Barker doesn't seem to belong. To me Bob Barker belongs on "Truth or Consequences."

"Three West Lafayette youngsters engage in a bit of outdoor sport called skateboarding..."

"... balancing themselves on boards to which skate are attached."



The news — just handed to me — from 1964, when Indiana newspaper readers were assumed not yet to have heard of skateboarding and when kids made their own skateboards by breaking up a metal roller skate and nailing the pieces to a board.

(The caption misspells Meade's first name and his last name.)

Here's Jan & Dean on "American Bandstand," singing their 1964 hit "Sidewalk Surfin'" — and calling this "the newest sport around":

Solitude and the lake.

I took my walk to work yesterday down by the lake -- Lake Mendota. That makes the walk a few blocks longer, but the lake has its mystic pull for the solitary individual, as I was and often am on my walks around Madison.

My camera took note of the other solitary figures.

The woman with a computer:



The man with a skateboard. He's feeding the ducks, which you are not supposed to do:



The man with headphones...



... and the man with a book and his foot up on the railing, the man tying his shoe, the seagull on the lamppost....

Are they -- are we -- lonely?

I think about 2 of my favorite Thoreau quotes, which I wrote down long ago on this page of my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"Why should I be lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"

UPDATE, April 4, 2013: To think that less than a year later, I would be married! How strange. I hope all the lonely people — where do they all come from? — have, since this time in September 2008, found someone to love, as I found my own dear sweet Meade.