Not Absalom
I finally let the last post end and have moved on. It's hard to wind up a post about Absalom. Not sure why, aside from the chapters being so long.
I don't recall my gym playing Christmas music at Christmas, but today, the eve of New Year's Eve, they were playing nothing but Christmas tunes. That's not quite true, I recall "Call Me Maybe" snuck in somehow, but it was mostly relatively obscure Christmas songs.
I'm at the closer of my regular pizzerias and they surprised me by having really good pizza today. Both the veggie topping and the crust were much better than normal. It's strange how inconsistent they are.
Charles Etienne
The infantilization of the not-that-young Charles Etienne as he is introduced to the cast in Chapter VI is interesting and important. What puzzles me is that they continue to refer to him as being 1/16th black (because, of course, we are not to know yet that his father was not "white" in the context of the American South at this time.)
Charles Etienne is almost the mirror image of his father, Charles. Charles negotiated a white world that didn't notice, for the most part, that he wasn't "white." Charles Etienne negotiated a black world that for the most part was blind to his non-white status. They both seemed to go out of their way to seek out trouble. You can almost imagine them -- also similar people today either here, or especially in Brazil, I understand -- as being as hyper aware of racial shades as the Baron in In Search of Lost Time was of ancestry. Blood is everything.
Further along in the story of Charles Etienne, I'm now thinking that this novel, when you consider the biographies of Sutpen, Henry, Bon, and Charles Etienne, could have been titled "The Devils." Variations on a theme; or variations on a Daemon.
p206 ...the son of the man who had bereaved her [Bon] and a hereditary negro concubine, who had not resented his black blood so much as he had denied the white, and this with a curious and outrageous exaggeration in which was inherent its own irrevocability, almost exactly as the demon [Sutpen] himself might have done it.
p208 ...'Call me Aunt Judith, Charles'... [And the joke here being that she is in fact his aunt. As is Clytie.] ...to watch him walk back down the weedy lane between the deserted collapsed cabins toward the one where his wife waited, treading the thorny and flint-paved path toward the Gethsemane which he had decreed and created for himself, where he had crucified himself and come down from his cross for a moment and now returned to it.
p209 ...who lived like a hermit in the cabin which he rebuilt and where his son was presently born, who consorted with neither white nor black...
New year's Glee
Why am I watching Glee videos on New Years Eve? Drinking plays a part here, of course, but that still leaves the question, Why Glee? A large part of this is my fondness for Pop music of the many decades I've been alive. Glee crafts excellent covers of these songs which gives me the pleasure of hearing them again (as is also the case with Sid n Susie) with the bonus of having them performed by a new generation of (admittedly attractive) performers.
Some of the music belongs to this generation or was at least popular while this generation was alive, and presumably listening to the radio. But many of the tunes they perform -- especially in the first season, I think -- were popular way before they were born. Journey's (an SF band!) "Don't Stop Believing" -- the quintessential Glee song -- came out five years before Lea Michele was born. And the Motown songs that are the trademark of the Unholy Trinity are, like, over a decade older than that. For that matter, the trademark song of Lea Michele's character (Rachel) is "Don't Rain on My Parade" from 1964.
I never really liked "West Side Story," but I'm thrilled that my online friend in Glasgow will go anywhere in the UK to see a performance -- in addition to performing it herself whenever she gets the opportunity. And Glee nails those songs, too. What percentage of the pleasure we get from the performance of older works (in particular the works of our youth, or that we loved in our youth) is from the fact that a younger generation cares enough to master those works?
Of course this doesn't explain why I love the Fun and Lady Gaga songs as much as I do.
Here's one (and an '80s song at that) I really can't explain (or why it cuts out in the middle) but I have to include it because the actor in the cape is currently playing Super Girl. There may have been an actual Cassandra reference behind the scenes somewhere.
Also, it's hilarious that most of the recent comments on the Glee videos featuring Melissa Beniost or Grant Gustin are DC Comic related.
Swifties
Yesterday someone on my Buffy forum posted a video about teenagers reacting to music from... the 2000s! I didn't play it since I find these videos annoying, but Lamey, the one who posted it, added "I feel so old" since she is in her 20s and can't believe the kids today don't know her music.
I've written about this before. I keep embracing newer music, generation after generation, only to find that the "new" music so quickly becomes "old" music. Though, OMG!, since I only a few days ago proclaimed myself a "Swifty," (my hair is almost long enough to flip) this feeling old doesn't apply to me, of course.
The Sunflower - last
Yesterday I thought there was either a good deal or nothing more to say about this book. The final commentator -- and they are in alphabetical order -- actually does the best job of expressing my take on the situation and saying what I think I would have done in Wiesenthal's place. Harry Wu was a Chinese academic imprisoned by the Communist Party from 1960, when I was in second grade, until 1979, when I was a college graduate working in a bookstore after spending time after college driving a taxi, running a copy store, being a volunteer coordinator at a social services center, and spending a year repairing and selling typewriters. So a long time.
p274 "... the society that the Communists founded was designed to drain any remnants of humanity out of a person. Like Mr. Wiesenthal, I would not have forgiven the Nazi soldier on his deathbed, but I would have been able to say to him: 'I understand why you were a part of a horrible and vicious society. You are responsible for your own actions but everyone else in this society shares the same responsibility with you.' "
Potty
This is the sequel to FUBAR from #20. a week later.
Yesterday I was anticipating some Keystone Cops potential in the alley in the morning when both the garbagemen and porta-potty service guy were both due around the same time. Last night we moved up to DEF-CON 2 (2nd highest level). And what a colorful tale it is...
I've mentioned the painting of the facade of the building next door (with the difficult scaffolding) and how lucky we are they aren't also painting the alley side. They too have a porta-potty which was sitting out on the sidewalk and kept getting shifted about. Saturday it had been moved in front of the building next door to them. Saturday morning it was flipped on its side, no doubt the act of yobs.
When I put our landfill and recycling toters out I discovered they had pushed the porta-potty up into the alley where it sits against their building but blocks a fair amount of the roadway, since there is no sidewalk. I didn't think there was enough space for the service truck to back past it to our end of the alley, where our porta-potty really needed to be pumped.
This sets the stage for this morning when, if the timing was less than perfect, the service guy would overlap with ether the garbage collectors or our contractors and slapstick would ensue.
Around 6:30am I jumped out of bed at the first notes of the rolling toter chorus, and was in the alley in time to receive the empties back from the Recology guys. After bringing our toters down the stairs and putting them back in their usual places, I took a morning pee break.
By the time I returned to the alley I could hear, and then see, our porta-potty service truck just starting to pull into the alley. I ran up and caught him and we ran through the options, deciding to push the vagrant porta-potty further back into the alley rather than out into the street where there were curbs (and scaffolding). So we pushed it back past where his truck needed to park. Then we rearranged the toters which had been placed in an awkward position in the lee of the toilet. He backed in, irritating the human vagrant sleeping behind a planter on the other side of the alley (and actually chasing him out... yay!)
I had unbolted the wood frame around the porta-potty before I went to bed -- just in case I didn't make it out there in time -- so the service guy made quick work of finally doing his job. He was going to help me return the wandering porta-potty to its previous location (now I'm thinking there might be a children's book here) but I told him I would get our contractors to do it, as they needed to park where Potty (the adventurous porta-potty) was now sitting in the middle of the alley. He, the service guy, not Potty, was happy with this plan.
I then ate my breakfast standing out in the alley waiting for the first contractor to arrive. Just as I was finishing my orange juice, the guy with the nice black ride started backing in. I used sign language and loud English to communicate the need to shift Potty precisely "here." That accomplished, I returned to my kitchen as he delicately backed his car around Potty.
It all worked perfectly. Having just read (and written) about the 2nd Commandment and sacrificing to totems, I'm considering leaving an offering of tofu out in the alley for Potty. No babies left in the building to shovel anywhere. (Thank Potty.)
Hardly an hour later and I'm sitting in the Bank Cafe and Potty has already taken yet another trip down the alley (to make way for our contractor's big truck.) I'm now thinking, and this may be related to my reading The Sunflower, that Potty might not be so much adventurous as Jewish... driven here and there by forces beyond his control. A tale of adversity and spiritual awakening perhaps. I mean, think about it, he's literally shit and pissed on! And since I'm still reading Belle Ruin, I'm thinking I might want to go beyond just the children's book to a musical. I'm now working on new lyrics to Don't Cry For Me Argentina.
UPDATE: hours later and Potty continues to be shifted back and forth in the alley. Now I'm remembering a scene in a (Ken Russell?) movie where an actress was rolling back and forth in the back of a car or carriage. Not sure if you could do that while singing. And portraying a porta-potty. (Ha! I actually found the scene. It's Glenda Jackson on the floor of a train in The Music Lovers -- where Russell subtly hints that Tchaikovsky might be just a tad gay.)
Lunch
I just had a very interesting lunch. No, that isn't quite right. I had my usual Bun Mee crispy tofu with jalapeno (delicious, and my mouth is still tingling), but what was interesting was my reverie while sitting at the window counter looking out over Market Street and the Palace Hotel across the street.
You can't get much more "San Francisco" than this location. The Palace Hotel has been an SF tradition since way before the 1906 earthquake and fire. The stunning hall where today you can enjoy a very expensive brunch was at one time the coach entry and there are photos of actual coaches navigating the space.
This is the image I was thinking of but it is actually a previous building. But what I said could have been true if we weren't sitting on the San Andreas fault.
The building that houses Bun Mee (a great Vietnamese sandwich and salad place) sits on the hypotenuse side of this flat-iron shaped block. Directly behind us, on what would be the heated surface of the iron, is the Mechanics Institute and their interesting library. At the end of the hypotenuse on my right is the De Young Building that has been converted into the Ritz-Carlton Residences -- a very upscale condo conversion with an ugly steel and glass excrescence rising out of the restored stone grandeur of the old De Young. Right in front of that building, in a little island where Market and Kearny Streets meet, is Lotta's Fountain, one of the most famous monuments in the city.
That history, while watching the variety of people walking past me on the sidewalk, is what got me thinking about the multiverse. The "multiverse" is an interesting concept in theoretical physics that, I suspect, would be very hard to either prove or disprove. But there's another kind of multiverse that exists without a doubt. The multiverse of the people strolling that sidewalk.
But first let me add a bit more about the setting. Under Market street -- where old photos show horses pulling carriages and wagons, where really old photos show plank walks lining dirt streets -- two levels of train tracks are buried. This Bank Cafe is in the next block to the right, and a block past that is the Phelan Building, another of SF's grand old buildings (and a favorite of mine) that is now home to Medium. This area is both the past and the cutting edge of the internet economy, where start-ups come to rub real and virtual shoulders while sniffing out venture funding the way pigs sniff out truffles.
But now to the sidewalk. It's summer so there are the tourists, most obviously the family groups. There are new economy workers going someplace trendy (like Bun Mee) for lunch, but also the people who work all the back-of-the-house jobs that keep everything moving. There are a few older people still dressed for when this was the edge of the Financial District and "The Wall Street of the West." All these people inhabit different universes and see the place and the other people a little differently. But we're only getting started.
What really got me thinking were the feral people, mostly individuals, who seem to wander past every few moments... or less. For a while there was almost always at least one of them in sight. One was bare chested and walking not on the sidewalk but in the street (that phenomena again.) Most were poorly -- and filthily -- dressed. One was in his socks. (Something else I notice frequently.) The universe these people inhabit has so little in common with the others they may as well also have different laws of physics.
I will grant you that many people would question my own sartorial choices (and, while in many cases I would question their's as well, in at least some cases I could only respond with mea culpa.) But given the state of our sidewalks and streets, even Diogenes the Cynic would have somehow kept sandals on his feet.
"...anymore"
I've written about my fondness for Popular music before. I wonder if there's an AA type group for this. Now it's gotten even worse. My iPod is still free of the Big 4 (Lady Gaga, Adele, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift) but that's just because the radio plays so much of them. What, specifically, I've stopped fighting is my resistance to Taylor Swift. Every time the radio starts playing yet another of her new songs I think, "OK, now this one is a dud." And then a week or two later I'm turning up the volume every time that song comes on. Suddenly I'm thinking, "Well, it isn't 'Style,' but it does have its moments." This has happened now with her latest three hits.
I can't even confess this to my online Buffy the Vampire Slayer community and they are mostly in their twenties. I'm living a lie!
The Sunflower
I'm still working through the various commentators. This is more like my previous blogs and it takes me more than a day to put something together. I'm still really enjoying the process, though. This is what I missed when seismic retrofitting took over my life.
I suspect I only have about another week of that process. (There is some denial there as I'm ignoring the painters and work on the back "yard" that needs to be arranged as soon as the retrofitters are finished. Also, I need to reorganize our stuff and put the laundry room back together.) I may actually be finished with The Sunflower by the time I'm finished with our retrofitting. I could live with a week or two to catch up on my Medium reading and the like.
