Friday Grab Bag: The Value of Nothingness

It's Friday, which means it's Grab Bag time again.  Today's Bag is filled with nothing in particular and certainly nothing of value, just the random threads of the week, threads not long enough to weave into any kind of a pattern, much less into a real cloth. It's all just dime store philosophy stuff with a couple of cars thrown in for good measure.

Here we go ...

Human specialization is often seen as one of the failings of modern society, but it's actually one of our greatest accomplishments. I mean, when I have a plumbing problem, I want to call a plumber. And when I have a hermeneutics problem, I want to call a hermeneutician. It's that simple. (What the hell is hermeneutics anyway?)

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The greatest spectator sport in this country isn't football or baseball or NASCAR. The greatest spectator sport in this country is legal disputes. 

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There is nothing so terrifying as the fervor of the righteous. 

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The thing with writing, at least with writing prose, is to be such a good writer that no one remembers what you wrote. Or be such a good writer that no one can forget what you wrote. Another way of saying it, be such a good writer that your reader thinks they wrote it themselves. Or be such a good writer that they know they never could have written it themselves.

And to close out, more cars from the streets of Cambridge, with a plea - help me identify these two cars spotted within half a block of each other on Hampshire Street last week.

This one is obviously a Maserati, but beyond that, I haven't a clue ...

And this one, I simply haven't any clue whatsoever except that I'm certain it is an American car, and I'm guessing vintage 1975-1980. Markings include "SS" on the front grill and "454" on the side panel.

Thoughts While Shaving - The Pen, the Sword and the Camera

Reflecting on Cpl. Eric Casebolt, the now-retired out of control McKinney, TX police officer who inappropriately pulled his service weapon on teenagers at a pool party (or as one Facebooker intimated, the only thug in this photo is the cop with the gun), a thought surfaced:

In the 21st century, the phrase "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword" has been updated to "The Video Camera Is Mightier than the (Police-Issue 9mm) Handgun".

It is actually almost directly analogous. If the question is: how does a lowly citizen combat the officially-sanctioned power of the state? Then the answer must be: with a pen; or more commonly today, with an iPhone cam set on 'video'.

Femi Kuti plays the Paradise

Femi Kuti played the Paradise in Boston last night, and he hit all the right notes. Not a man to hide his passions, he wore a jacket straight out of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

He also came with a full compliment next to him — two drummers, four horn men, a bassist and a rhythm guitarist, three dancers, and of course himself, Femi Kuti — Femi on sax, Femi on clarinet, Femi on keyboards, Femi on vocals; you name it, he was up there doing it.

With that many people on the stage in a small club like the Paradise, the performers fill the room. But that’s why you go to the Paradise, music and people in small spaces with loud sounds, performers and audience communicate. It’s direct and it’s only a handshake from the pit to the players and Kuti obliged with some audience handshakes of his own.

In afrobeat, no song ever really begins or ends. It just merges in or fades out. Or in Kuti's case, it clangs in or bangs out. Any song could have continued if it wanted to. Nothing has to finish, it just does so because there’s another song in the queue. The music is part of the continuous stream of rhythms and beats in our bodies and in our brains. It just takes a brass section to make it audible.

Kuti built the crowd from the start. The opening numbers reached back into the archives. They were softer, more hopeful, with hints of a lilting beauty reminiscent of reggae. That allowed him to hit the audience with newer starker stuff later on. Still, it took a while to get energy in the room.  The start was tuneful but flat.

A man of great energy and talent himself, the 52-year-old Femi Kuti wears the heavy mantle of being the son of a famous father, Fela Kuti, a musician with his own fascinating story and international importance. Fela's story is many times told, including in a 2009 Broadway production of great energy and power, and like father like son, politics is never far from anything Femi Kuti is doing. The country of his youth and the history of colonial Africa are all part of his message. Kuti’s version is that Nigeria was never cowed by the British imperialist in the way its neighbor Ghana suffered. Pestilence, inhospitality and the end of the slave trade insulated Nigerians in a fundamentally different way than what their neighbors experienced.

Perhaps also like father like son, Femi Kuti seems the lady’s man too. As a humorous end note both to the concert and to this very short review, he closed out his encore with a speech about the need for men to control themselves during intercourse (notice the slightly Victorian phrasing here). To paraphrase him, men should, "reverse back" when they feel themselves losing control. He urges, make it last longer than five minutes. Don’t shame yourself and all men by a lack of control.  “Reverse back” and add a couple of minutes. Pretty soon, it’ll be eight minutes, and then ten, and before long, it’ll be thirty minutes!

At this point, two very white, very middle-aged very middle class women decided they had to depart the Paradise building. Obviously, they had become suddenly very very tired. Or maybe their ankles were starting to hurt. Still, their departure seemed, well, not very international.

Femi Kuti's short American tour goes to Brooklyn next and onto D.C. before shows in the U.K. In our global world, there are few better global ambassadors than he. It’s worth going to hear him and his afrobeat.

Tragedy befalls us all

Runcible Greevey found himself drinking beers in a pub talking politics.

A woman couldn't quite swallow that in politics there is a time and a place and a moment to everything, and just like Shakespeare said ...

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts

“Are you trying to tell me that Jimmy Carter is a discredited politician?” her pleading face scarcely masked a swelling anger in her voice. Runcible thought he was about to be witness to an awful moment when a bubble still intact was undeniably about to burst.

“Yes, without question," so Runcible. Too obvious for even such a simple man as he, Runny resisted plunging the knife in deeper: Jimmy Carter may be many good things, but a good pol, this he cannot claim. And one man in his time plays many parts.

“No! No!” she shrieked, a sinking look on her face that would have extracted sadness from a stone if it had been given the chance, the proverbial high tragedian’s frown, except this was low comedy.

A good writer, Runcible thought, should turn it into a Saturday Night Live skit: Act III, When Jimmy Carter’s Failings Are Laid Bare to an Unsuspecting Fan.  Innocence cruelly aborted. The harshness of the world, like a cold winter wind, enters a door left foolishly too wide open.

Runcible Greevey

I hereby present to you Runcible Greevey, a nonsense character, who simply makes no sense.

What he'll get up to, we'll just have to see.

Lesson 3: Definitions

"Terror" is the realization that you're going to die someday.

"Sheer terror" is the thought that it might happen tomorrow.

Growing old

You can’t think about life without thinking about growing old. Not everyone grows old. Some never get that far. But for the rest, it’s real.

The old woman sat peacefully in the corner of the Star Market, near a pyramid of electric blue windshield washer fluid and prepackaged bundles of fire wood.

It’s unusual to see someone seated in a Star Market. They aren’t like Whole Foods with benches and community space. Typically there is no place to sit at all.

She sprawled slightly and slumped, begging the question if she was even awake. But her hand moved and with a Bic ballpoint pen, she circled letters of an acrostic in a cheap book filled with acrostics. The florescent lights lit the store completely.

Sitting in Star must have been better than the alternative. Better to be among the straggling shoppers floating in the flat brightness of the check-out aisles, better to be close to the half-emptied ranks of cashiers closing out their last shifts, better to ring out the night’s final purchases with the night's final purchasers, better to be there than to be home alone. It's an oft-told tale. It is called growing old.

And while I'm at it ... yet more cars.

It's Memorial Day in the People's Republic and the air is heavy with the first hint of summer. On the quiet streets the wide-brimmed hats are making their first appearances, a bellwether of the approaching season.

While today is about remembering our nation's war dead, I nevertheless had my eyes peeled for interesting cars around Cambridge and I took the opportunity to snap a couple of photos on my way over to this morning's parade.

Here's what I saw ...

1. Mercedes SLK 280

This car has an almost identical model designation as the 1970 280 SL of yesterday's post, but a lot changes in 30 years. This car was built between 2004 and 2008 and comes with a 3 liter V6 engine.

2. 1966 Ford Mustang convertible

This car belongs to Cambridge Vice Mayor Dennis Benzan and it makes an appearance at the annual Memorial Day parade. The baby blue soft top came off the factory line two years after inaugural run of Mustangs in 1964, and it houses a 3 speed manual gearbox attached to an inline 6-cylinder motor. It's in mint condition but that doesn't stop it from having the evocative engine smells and some of the body squeaks that Fords of that era inevitably had. It's a lovely car both to behold and to drive in. A real pleasure.