At the actual sunrise time, there was almost nothing to see, but 25 minutes later, it got interesting....

5 minutes after that:

 

Meade catches me walking away from the dock:

 

And here's a little music list I call "Sketchy": 

"Whenever someone wants to play down the importance of vocal virtuosity, Bob Dylan is Exhibit A: a brilliant croaker..."

"... who makes you feel sorry for all those hacks content to simply carry a tune. But for precisely that reason, Mr. Dylan isn't really a bad singer. He's got an unconventional voice, to be sure... but he's too idiosyncratic, too rock 'n' roll. A great bad singer must never give up on goodness. Perhaps Mr. West knows how preposterous he sounds, but he's still singing the best he can. I'd propose that the father of modern bad singing is Biz Markie, the rapper best known for the classic anti-love song 'Just a Friend,' from 1989. His bellowed plea -- wildly out of tune, and totally unforgettable -- sounded like something concocted after a day of romantic disappointments and a night of heavy drinking: 'Oh baby, you/ You got what I need/ But you say he's just a friend.' With each repetition of the chorus, he sounded funnier and more unhinged."

That's from "The Sweet Sounds Of Really Bad Singing" by Kelefa Sanneh, published in the NYT on January 18, 2004. That was 4 days after this blog began, but somehow I didn't catch it and blog it at the time. I'm reading it today because it's linked in what is — I'm sad to say — an obituary: "Biz Markie, Hip-Hop’s ‘Just a Friend’ Clown Prince, Dies at 57/An innovative yet proudly goofy rapper, he had an unlikely crossover hit with a tune that led one critic to call him (favorably) 'the father of modern bad singing'" (NYT). 

This is a wonderfully catchy song, and the terrible singing is part of what make it catchy and fun. If you watched MTV back in 1989 — as I did — this will surely resonate. Skip ahead to 1:33 to get right to the singing, but start at the beginning for spoken-word cheesy comedy and a story told in slow-paced rap: 

 

From the obituary: 

Biz Markie has said he was never supposed to be the vocalist handling those notes. “I asked people to sing the part, and nobody showed up at the studio,” he explained later, “so I did it myself.”

Perfect! How beautiful when things go wrong and the end result is far superior than if everything had worked out as planned.

Am I more Jewish than Elvis?

I'm reading "Display of mother’s Star of David headstone revives talk of Elvis’s Jewish roots/60 years after her death, a new exhibition showcases the headstone of Elvis Presley’s mother, Gladys, featuring both the Jewish symbol and a cross, designed by Elvis himself" in the Times of Israel:

Stories of Elvis’s Jewish heritage have long been in circulation, but when it comes to a legend like Presley — whose death is not even considered settled fact in some quarters — it’s not always easy  to separate fact from fiction. With [his mother's] headstone now on public display and an accompanying sign proclaiming 'Gladys’ Jewish heritage,' the 'Jewish roots' of the King of Rock and Roll are a talking point again.... Angie Marchese, Graceland’s vice president of archives and exhibits, is certain of Elvis’s Jewish ancestry. Marchese says Elvis’s maternal great-great-grandmother was a Jewish woman named Nancy Burdine.

When I read that, I said out loud: "I'm as Jewish as Elvis!" But about 2 seconds later, I thought, no, but am I more Jewish than Elvis or less Jewish than Elvis. I have — as I recently figured out — not just 2 Jewish great-great-grandparents, but a Jewish great-grandparent (their son who married a Christian). That would seem to make me more Jewish than Elvis? But my Jewish great-grandparent was male, and his daughter was my father's mother, so if Jewishness is matrilineal, then I'm not Jewish at all. 

But does that make me less Jewish than Elvis?

"What is the problem with individualism?" — The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner asks Robin DiAngelo.

From an interview titled "Robin DiAngelo Wants White Progressives to Look Inward/The author of 'White Fragility' discusses her new book, 'Nice Racism'":

Your book is a critique of individualism, by which you mean, as you put it, "Our identities are not separate from the white supremacist society in which we are raised, and our patterns of cross-racial engagement are not merely a function of our unique personalities." What is the problem with individualism? 

Individualism cuts the person off from the very society that the concept of individualism is valued in. That’s the great irony, right? If we were in a more community-oriented or collective-oriented society, we wouldn’t value being an individual the way that we do. We have been conditioned to see that as the ideal, that every one of us is unique and special and different, and if you don’t know somebody specifically you can’t know anything about them. 

She's saying that individualism is not individualistic at all, but something we absorb as part of a group that deludes us into not seeing ourselves as part of the group.

"Thinking Critically about Critical Race Theory."

"As an indoor kid at heart, it took me a while to warm up to being outside all day every summer."

"I could easily fill an entire day reading library books, creating new outfits for my Barbie out of candy wrappers, or practicing crochet chains with the giant ball of yarn my grandma gave me. Inside was full of wonder, mystery, and the life of the mind. Outside was a hellscape of insects, rusty nails, and scraped knees.... Wildness can exist indoors, but it’s not as fun.... Indoor creativity pushes the boundaries of parental patience far quicker than outdoor wildness. In the past year, as we received the indoor-kid dream directive to stay inside, I’ve never felt lonelier, less focused, or more anxious.... I’ve started to look back on those childhood summers with more fondness, making promises to my future self that I would recapture those fleeting moments of freedom whenever possible.... I’ve watched enough true-crime documentaries to want to keep my goddaughter heavily chaperoned until she turns 50, but after the year we’ve all had, I hope there’s some room for kids to take a cue from the 1980s and explore this summer."

From "Those Were the Days of Our Lives This generation will never know the true freedom — and neglect — of being an ’80s kid" by Danielle Henderson (adapted from her memoir "The Ugly Cry: A Memoir").

Take a cue from the 1980s.... 

Now, people who grew up in the 80s are talking about it the way we Boomers have been talking — since the 80s — about growing up in the 50s.

One day the Alphas will look back on the 20s, that golden age of freedom. I hope. But they've got to get outdoors, now, before it's too late.

Sunrise.

 

BONUS: Here's a little music collection I made in Spotify: 

And a gold cloth dollar sign stitched to your clothing right over your heart.

The perception of the national media would change overnight if employees of media corporations did this: https://t.co/hjHdr2h41m

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 16, 2021

What have they done to my hula hoop?

I'm reading the "Ask a Cool Person" column at New York Magazine, and I see "100-Teen Poll: What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? We surveyed high schoolers around the country. Here, 19 takeaways about how teens shop." After seeing the cool type of "top" is a corset and something about comfortable sweatpants and favorite "loungewear" brands I get to: 

4) The only workout item mentioned multiple times was the weighted Hula-Hoop. 

A respondent named Aida bought this Hula-Hoop after seeing it on TikTok. “I like it because it’s not an intense workout and instead it’s a more relaxed one you do for a long period of time,” she says. “I watch TV while I do it sometimes.” Just don’t expect to magically get a waist like the girl in the video, Aida says: “Definitely not the realistic outcome of hula-hooping for, like, 30 mins a day.” Plus, she added, TikToks like that one “are quite triggering,” and the platform is “very toxic when it comes to body positivity.”

The hula hoop is a workout item?! I was a kid in the late 1950s, when the hula hoop became a big fad in the United States. I had a hula hoop, and I was pretty good at it.* It was all for fun — fun and some thinking about Hawaii, which was about to come in as a state (and my young head envisioned "coming into the United States" as the islands floating steadily toward California and about to connect). 

No one talked about "working out" back then, and certainly no one — no one anywhere around me — regarded the hula hoop as an exercise device. It was play and a display of skill that was amusing to watch, because it was like doing the hula, which was not treated with politically correct cultural respect in those days, but seen as an entertaining dance, like the twist, that entailed hip wiggling with accompanying arm movements. 

And, of course, no one talked about "triggering" and being "toxic" or "body positivity" back then. Here's this toy that was perfectly fun for young people in the days when Baby Boomers were kids, and now it's part of a grim agglomeration of everything but fun, where you have to work on your body, worry about it, and also worry about worrying about it. Did you watch the linked TikTok video? It's all about tape-measuring your waist over and over and earnestly attempting to reduce the number by hula hooping.

I know I'm old, and I'm even giving this post my tag "these kids today," so I'm aware that I'm speaking like a stereotypical old person, but what are we doing to our culture? The NY Magazine column purports to represent coolness, but it's only finding out what teenagers are buying and assuming that things going on with teenagers are cool. I wish they were! 

__________________________

* If you told me Wikipedia's photograph — by George Garrigues, at the top of its article "Hula hoop" — is in fact a photograph of me, I could not with 100% certainty say that it is not:

"Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a 'mentally unstable' Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council..."

"... according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents. The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present. They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them 'social turmoil' in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position. Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature. By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use 'all possible force' to ensure a Trump victory. Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin. The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking...."

From The Guardian reports, and this is quite a conundrum! If you can believe the story told in the documents, then you should also believe that it's at least as likely that there's a different plot and these documents are crafted to further that plot. If you think Moscow aims to do anything to cause social turmoil in the U.S., then why would it not, after the fact, fake evidence that it affected the election? 

The Guardian thinks it has a scoop here, and I know I'm encouraging them by linking, but the article on its face is full of skepticism-provoking phrases: "the papers suggest... the papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak...  appear to be genuine... come across as accurate... said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking...."

"Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?"

I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?" 

At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry. 

But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:

 

"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone."

ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a poem post out of this."

And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem." 

"She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.

"The spelling vendor is the standard spelling. The New Yorker, as part of its bizarre house style, uses the spelling vender. No one else does, besides those trying to emulate The New Yorker’s style."

"Of the 45 examples in COCA, only 17 were actual uses of the spelling vender outside of The New Yorker (compared with over 2000 examples of vendor, a ratio of over 100 to 1). Two were proper names, eleven were from The New Yorker, and fifteen were in foreign languages." 

The website English Language & Usage gave me answered the spelling question that I had as I wrote the previous post. I'd thought "vendor" seems right, but maybe it's like "advisor," and it's wrong in that pretentious way that is most important to avoid. 

"Vender" looks wrong, but it has the virtue of adherence to the general rule of adding "-er" to verbs to make them into a noun doing whatever the verb has them doing — "paint" become "painter," not "paintor," and "blog" becomes "blogger," not "bloggor."

"The restoration work not only reveals the rogue addition of an upturned smile, but also a jarring strip of dirty sky added to make the canvas square rather than rectangular."

From "Restoration work wipes smile off the face of Dutch vegetable seller/Painting reclaims former glory as English Heritage rights the wrongs of 19th-century additions" (The Guardian).

What I find so interesting here is not the outrage of painting changes onto a valuable work of art, but that the changes are so discordant. Assuming the changes were done at the same time — and there you see an easy off ramp from the conundrum — I wonder: Who would think both that a resting-bitch-face woman ought to give us a smile and that a luscious display of fresh food needs to be offset by a glum, grimy sky? 

I can see thinking the original painting was too cheerful...

... and needed a depressing sky to remind us that the pleasures of life are transitory and geographically limited, but then why not leave the woman's face alone, hinting of her awareness that all this food is about to rot?

I see the food display is also darker and sadder. Perhaps the darker aesthetic was thought to be more serious and elevated, but then why not leave the woman with her original expression. Why make her smile? 

Explanation #1: The original expression makes the woman seem like an ordinary worker, more suspicious of customers than aware of the beauty of the vegetables. A little smile, along with less beautiful vegetables, makes her seem — or so it was hoped — like a full human being aware of the meaning of life and able to convey her knowledge if you, the viewer, stop long enough and gaze into her face. You know, like with the Mona Lisa.

Explanation #2: The owner of the original painting found the expression unsettling. She looks uneasy and even hostile. An artist fixed the expression, but then the rest of the painting made the whole thing look too cheesy, like an ad — did they have ads then? — for a vegetable stand, and to pump up the high-art vibe, everything else was toned way the hell down.

Explanation #3: It all started with a big square frame that needed using. A strip of canvas was added, and somebody painted that gloomy sky and other dark stuff to fill the space. To integrate this material with the rest of it, shadows were painted down into the vegetables. The artist probably thought something like, I am really maximizing the chiaroscuro, like the big-shot artists do. When the owner of the painting saw what had been done, he just said one thing: Well, can the lady at least be smiling?

Explanation #4: The woman never looked right, never looked like a street vendor, and she was probably the daughter of the rich person who commissioned the painting. In the original painting, she looks like who she was, a wilful young girl, forced into stupid clothes and an awkward position. She hates the artist. All that work painting all those vegetables, and the main point of interest is still the human face, and it's a human face radiating ill will. When the painting was redone, toned down, and made more suitable to a posh, somber environment, the face was also toned down, softened into a gentle smile.

"Los Angeles will return to mandatory mask-wearing indoors, even for people who have been vaccinated...

"... amid a rapid and sustained increase in Covid-19 cases in the nation’s largest county. Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, LA county’s public health officer, Dr Muntu Davis... said the county had been recording more than 1,000 new cases each day for a week and that there is now 'substantial community transmission.' Nearly 400 people hospitalized with Covid-19 as of Wednesday, up 275 from the week before. Nine new Covid-19 deaths were reported on Wednesday. 'This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,' he said."

The Guardian reports.

Contrary to my initial reaction, upon reading the article, I think this is an appropriate precaution, based on the numbers. You don't want to backslide into over-cautious mask-wearing, but you don't want to backslide into a new spike. 

But I'd like to know what percentage of the new cases, new hospitalizations, and new deaths involved fully vaccinated persons. If the problem is with the unvaccinated, publicize this information and show them what they need to do. Don't deprive the vaccinated people of a key benefit — taking off the mask.

Sunrise with cattails.

"One thing that the school board mentioned in their decision to dismiss Hawn was the 'inappropriate' language in your poem. What was your reaction upon hearing that? Did that strike you as being the real reason why?"

"I know it’s not the real reason why. I have their required reading list. And in the books that they are required to read, there’s sexual assault, murder, a lot of cursing. So I know that it was just a terrible excuse for their discomfort. And this is coming from somebody who was 16 years old having to, who grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, in my latter childhood, reading Mark Twain and reading the word 'n***er' over 200 times in a book. Huck Finn was bad. That’s classic literature, but the fact that I say, 'You’re not racist because you don’t use the N word, but y’all use n***as every day,' now it’s too much? Now, it’s superfluous? Fuck out of here."

From "What the Author of the Poem 'White Privilege' Thinks of a Teacher Getting Fired For Showing It to His Class/'I know that it was just a terrible excuse for their discomfort,' said Kyla Jenee Lacey." (Slate). 

Here's the video of the poem the teacher played for the students. I recommend using headphones. I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic, but the "n-word" is said out loud. 

 

As for the firing, I don't like seeing teachers fired, but I don't understand how a teacher could think that could be played out loud in class.