Home and Family

Green Buckets

/ J. Eric Smith / 4 Comments

1. This has been our third winter/spring cycle in Northern Arizona, and it’s been something of a doozy: colder, wetter, snowier, and longer than the chilly season normally lasts, by a long-shot. One of the consequences of all the rain we’ve had here, and all the snow they’ve had a few thousand feet up and a dozen miles north of here, is that our nearby rivers and streams have been in full flood for weeks now. There are two perennial streams (Oak Creek and Wet Beaver Creek) and one intermittent stream (Dry Beaver Creek) near our house, plus boodles of normally-dry unnamed washes. We’ve seen them flood explosively during monsoon season (including the two that immediately abut our property), but those flows are short-lived. The current inundation is likely to keep running for a long time yet. It makes hiking difficult (both in terms of not being able to get across things one normally can, and in terms of how five pounds of mud caked on each boot makes your legs feel), but I do keep having to remind myself how good this is for the region in macro, after years of mega-drought. Marcia and I have rambled down to the three local creeks, and the views have been impressive. Click the photo of Oak Creek taken yesterday (where that whitewater is, there is supposed to be a trail) to see some of the other wet and wild images hereabouts these days:

2. As a follow-up to my announcement upon the release of my new book with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal, Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves, I’m happy to report that it seems to be fully and widely available now in both print and eBook versions from all of the major online retailers. Thanks very much to any and all of you who have purchased a copy. That means a lot. If you’ve actually managed to read it, and if you enjoyed it, Jim and I would also be deeply appreciative if you’d be inclined to rate/review it Amazon or any other online retailer, or on your own websites, or in print, for our working journalist friends. I guess if you read it and hated it, you could review it too, but, gosh, who are we to ask to continue to wallow in something that you didn’t enjoy? Maybe just let it go and move on instead, yeah?

3. As another follow-up to my other announcement about winning the Unleash Creatives Book Prize for Ubumembu and Other Stories, I am pleased to report that I have, in fact, signed a contract with Unleash Press to publish the book, and we are targeting an October 1, 2023 release date. So you’ve got one item for your 2023 holiday shopping set and sorted, easy peasy. I’ll be sure to pester you further about it in the months ahead, you bet. I’ve still got a full-length poetry collection and a full-length essays collection out for consideration in various locations, and our literary agent is working to negotiate placement for the next collaborative book that Jim McNeal and I are pitching, provisionally titled Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage. So there may yet be more good writing news here in the weeks and months ahead, building on what’s already been a great year for me on that front, with thanks to so many who have helped make that possible.

4. And I end today’s omnibus post with a brief memorial note on the occasion of the passing of an artist I admire: Clarence “Fuzzy” Haskins (1941-2023). Fuzzy was one of the five core members of a doo-wop barbershop quintet called The Parliaments, founded in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1956, with the group’s classic line-up cohering by 1960. The group scored their first and only hit single under their original name with 1967’s “(I Wanna) Testify,” though in keeping with industry practice at the time, the recorded version of the song only featured lead vocalist George Clinton, while session aces rounded out the rest of the sound.

Due to a series of financial and legal disputes and disasters following the success of “Testify,” Clinton and Company rebranded themselves around their core supporting musicians as Funkadelic, then some years later signed the same group of singers and musicians to a second record label under the name Parliament. The collective released albums under both names in parallel throughout the ’70s, eventually cohering into “P-Funk,” with Parliament’s records leaning toward the soul/R&B/disco side of the cultural equation, and Funkadelic’s leaning toward the psychedelic/rock side.

Fuzzy was visually and vocally front-and-center throughout P-Funk’s most seminal recording and performing era, credited with “Werewolf Vocals” and “Berserker Octave Vocals,” among other things. He was the primary featured vocalist alongside Clinton for most of the group’s early years, occasionally adding guitar and drums to various recordings and live performances. And he looked like this . . .

Fuzzy’s great run with the group finally ended in 1977, when he and fellow 1960 members of The Parliaments, Calvin Simon and Grady Thomas, bailed together, aggrieved by and tired beyond recovery over various shady behind-the-scenes financial dealings that devalued their historic and then-current contributions to the group’s recorded and live work. The founding trio made an attempt to reclaim the original Funkadelic brand as Clinton’s core Mothership was crashing into a fog-shrouded mountain of cocaine and legal acrimony, but their moment had passed, and the effort was to no commercial or critical avail. In that same transitional period, Fuzzy released two solo albums featuring a variety of P-Funk alums: A Whole ‘Nother Thang (1976) and Radio Active (1978), before moving on to a career focused on his gospel ministry. Those solo records are both highly enjoyable and funky and soulful, if woefully underappreciated, then and now. (I was glad to see this week that they seem to be available on many contemporary streaming services, if you want to check them out).

Fuzzy also contributed as a collaborating songwriter during his P-Funk days, and in a prolific group with very, very few single-name songwriting credits (most of them George Clinton’s), Fuzzy landed three wrote-it-alone songs: “Back in Our Minds,”  “I Miss My Baby,” and “I Got a Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody’s Got a Thing.” All of them are fantastic, and all of them are conceptually and creatively important in the group’s chronology and discography. I include a link to “I Got A Thing” below to wrap this post. If you’ve never heard it, you need to, along with all of the other early Funkadelic and Parliament albums in their entirety. On a historic note, “I Got A Thing” marked the P-Funk recording debut of Bernie Worrell (also RIP), who became one of the cornerstones of the collective’s sound and spirit through the ’70s, then emerged as one of the great go-to session keyboardists from the ’80s on through to his death in 2016.

RIP Fuzzy. I appreciated you.

Far Country

/ J. Eric Smith / 1 Comment

1. Marcia and I are home from a wonderful birthday visit to Las Vegas, where she and Katelin celebrated their natal date at the same moment when huge swaths of the world were marking International Women’s Day. My mother joined us, on her first ever visit to Las Vegas. We kept telling her we were going to buy her a carton of Pall Mall’s, give her twenty dollars, and leave her at one of the convenience store casinos for three days, to giver her a true, old school, hardcore Vegas experience. But that didn’t quite work out, as we opted for some tourism time on the Strip and at Fremont Street instead. As is typical for our visits to see Katelin and John in their home city, we also had some superb meals, with two new-to-us destinations being particularly pleasing: Edo Gastro Tapas and Wines, and Panevino. The former offered an exceptional ten-course tasting menu, where everything was superb and interesting, the latter was a high-quality traditional Italian restaurant in a lovely space with a great view out over the airport and Strip. Both recommended if you find yourself needing some substantial sustenance between bouts of gambling and partying. I took some snaps during the week, as I usually do, which you can see by clicking the photo below of the posse waiting for the Bellagio Fountains to do their thing:

John rented a mobility scooter for my Mom. It was easy to do, affordable, and greatly enhanced her ability to get up and down the strip and around various casinos. Recommended if you’ve got a family member or friend whose Vegas experience could benefit from having some wheels.

2. Right before we headed to Las Vegas, I was tickled to receive word that my full-length collection Ubulembu and Other Stories had won the Unleash Creatives Book Prize. I posted a screen cap of the announcement at that prior link, but then when I went to look at it again a couple of days ago, I noted that they had since added a review quote from the Final Judge of the competition. The review makes me blush on one hand, but it also deeply pleases me that someone clearly gets what I do, writing-wise, which is always a wonderful affirmation to receive. Here’s the quote, with deep thanks to Dick McPherson and all at Unleash Creatives/Lit:

3. As I wrote at length in this post, I somehow missed the great Buggy Jive‘s late 2022 album, The Ghost of Alexander, which coulda woulda shoulda been a contender for my Album of the Year last year, had I been paying better attention in real time. One of the nice things about being back on social media for book marketing purposes  is that I can now keep better tabs on current events involving the artists who move me, like Buggy Jive. And so I was very pleased to see yesterday, in real time, that Buggy has already got a new single out, called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job,” which is typically great, and which features yet another awesome video. Here ’tis, hooray!

Impetus

/ J. Eric Smith / 3 Comments

1. Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves (my new book with Rear Admiral Jim McNeal) is now available for sale at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble says they will have it next week. So you’ve got options for ordering. And options make everything better. Later this week, I should also have a stash of copies signed by both Jim and I. Hit me up by email if you’d like one of those, first come, first served. If you missed it, my prior post provides more detailed information about the book and its contents.

If you do score a copy, Jim and I are very interested in your thoughts and reactions, especially on which of the various chapters and topics we covered worked best for you. As we’re shaping our next book, nominally titled Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage and constructed around a similar omnibus history narrative approach, it will be helpful to know which of our prior pieces hit the hardest with our readers. Also, if you’ve got any pull with libraries or local booksellers in your market, if you’re looking for a Book Club idea, or if you see an opportunity for Jim and/or I to speak or sign somewhere, do please advise. We’re ready for full-court press marketing at this point, and appreciate any and all help on that front.

Got my autographin’ pen out . . .

2. I’ve been enjoying fiddling about the colorization applications at Palette, applying them to a bunch of old black and white family photos. It’s surprisingly naturalistic looking, and I’ve produced an album of the photos I’ve reinterpreted, here: Fiat Colorum. I post a sample pair below, of my father (first picture) and my mother (second picture) when they were young children. These and others do a good job, I think, of powerfully capturing what the rural American South looked like, once upon a time. And still does, if you get away from the coastal, golf or mountain places where most Northerners retire to, or the ever-sprawling cities and their endless suburbs that have transformed the region during my lifetime.

My dad with Rose, who essentially raised him on a day-to-day basis while his mother worked as a teacher, and an unknown-to-me neighbor girl.

My mother with her dog, Lorna, and Lorna’s puppies. Love the debris pile in the background, classic Southern style. Why dispose of anything when you’ve got a perfectly good field to store it in? Who knows when you might need some of it again for something?

3. While 35+ years of living in the frigid climes of Idaho, Upstate New York, Chicago and Iowa certainly raised my non-native tolerance for foul weather, one of our primary motivations in moving to Arizona was to get away from all that. And, in relative terms, we certainly have, though long-time locals hereabouts concur that the winter of 2022-2023 has been, thus far, the worst in local memory. I woke up Monday morning to this view out of our kitchen window:

I do not approve. Nope. Not one bit.

Uggghhh!!! The one nice thing about this type of weather here, though, is that it generally all melts quickly, except in shaded areas at higher elevations. The day after I took that snow shot, I did a short-but-steep hike up the nearest major rock face to our house, and the view from on-high at that point looked like this, with the white stuff mostly gone from view:

Watch that first step. It’s a doozy . . .

Then yesterday, I went and climbed the snow-flecked mesa at the top center of this photo, looking back across our village at the red-rock face I’m standing atop in the photo above. You’d have never known we’d had any snow:

The formation in the center with the pointed green caps is where I do more hiking and climbing that anywhere else. Our house is at the base of that formation, at its left-hand side in this view.

I post these pictures and thoughts now, as we await the next forecast wave of snow, three to five inches expected through the afternoon and evening today. UGGGGHHH!! We will be driving to Las Vegas on Saturday to celebrate Marcia and Katelin’s shared birthday at Katelin and John’s house, so I’m hoping that this snow event also disappears quickly, as we need to climb up a few thousand feet en route from here to there.

4. I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve reactivated a Facebook account to help with promotion on Side by Side in Eternity. I’m here, if you’re there, and you care. I’ve been posting information about the book and various hiking and other outdoor adventures in Arizona. But, somewhat predictably I suppose, the most popular things I’ve posted are photos of the charismatic (?) mega-fauna (??) that hang out in our yard:

I’m here to eat the bird food. Please spill some more here for me. Do it now. Snort.

Home From Hawai’i (With Representation)

/ J. Eric Smith / 4 Comments

Marcia and I made it home from Hawai’i late this morning after a classic red-eye flight from Kailua-Kona (depart 11:30 PM) to Phoenix (arrive 7:30 AM). I pounded some melatonin and tried to sleep, but it was fitful at best, so I’m definitely in the logy zone this afternoon.

The trip was a great one. The first week was spent, as reported in Item #1 here, at The Writing Workshops Hawai’i program, held at a lovely, isolated retreat center on the far northern corner of the Big Island. We met some wonderful and talented folks, read, discussed, and listened to a variety of great stories (fiction and otherwise), ate outstanding food and had spare time to explore some of the more accessible sites on that side of the island. Good times with good people, doing things we love to do. Can’t go wrong with that sort of situation.

For our second week, we shifted over to Kona Town, renting a condo where Katelin and John joined us. In a fortuitous turn of events, Marcia’s sister Evelyn was also in the Kona area for the week, so we spent enjoyable family time with her, and benefited from her deeper knowledge of the island. Over the week, we pretty much circumnavigated the entirely of the Big Island, which deserves its name, because it takes a lot of car time to see that much of it. But the sights you see, oh my, they are glorious and unique, and well worth the effort.

Between this trip and our recent Spanish adventure, we were away from home for a longer period of time than I think we’ve ever experienced before over a five week period. It was all wonderful to be away in such great places, of course, but then it feels especially wonderful to be home after such travels.

And not to bury the lede here, but that bit about “with representation” in the title of this post refers to a most delightful happening from this working vacation. With apologies to those of you who are my e-mail lists and have already heard this, here’s the message on this topic which I sent out earlier this week . . .

Hello, friends,

With apologies, as always, for my occasional mass emails, I wanted to let you all know that I have a new book coming out this month in collaboration with my writing partner, Jim McNeal. For the non-Navy folks: Jim and I were classmates at Annapolis and Supply Corps Corps school, so have known each other for 40+ years at this point, and it was a joy to work together on this fun and interesting project.

Here is the publisher’s link to the book, titled Side by Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves. It is currently available for pre-order from the publisher, and also from all of the major book-selling platforms, if you prefer to order from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or elsewhere.

For my friends in the working media, if you would like to acquire a review copy, please let me know directly and I will provide your information to the publisher’s marketing folks. Jim and I would be deeply appreciative of such support, just as we’d be deeply appreciative if any of you are able and willing to pre-order Side by Side in Eternity to help generate buzz around its actual release.

Finally, I am also most pleased to announce that Jim and I recently contracted for representation on our next book project with highly-esteemed literary agent Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group. I had the opportunity to spend a week in Hawai’i at a writers’ workshop with Mark and was most impressed by him and his work. Jim and I are truly delighted to have him as our agent. Our working title for the next book is Crucibles: History’s Most Formidable Rites of Passage. Watch my website over the months ahead for updates on that project.

Again, with apologies for mass mailing, thanks so much for all of your ongoing support for my creative endeavors. It means a lot to me.

All best,

Eric

And with that wonderful piece of news out there, I now turn to the obligatory post-travel photo album, as I always do. You can click on the photo of Marcia and I illuminated by Kilauea’s lava glow, just after sunset. There are some “wow” pictures in the album of what you see when you look over that volcano rim, too, along with all sorts of sights from all sorts of other places around and about the island. Pretty darned impressive, I tell you. Pretty darned impressive, indeed.

2022: Year In Review

/ J. Eric Smith / 7 Comments

Marcia and I will be heading to Spain (our first international trip since COVID) a couple of days after Christmas, so today seems like a good point to sit and settle up the scores for 2022 here at my website, as I normally do at this time each year, plus or minus a few days. Unless I get ambitious, or someone I care about deeply passes away soon, this will likely be the final post of the year, for better and/or for worse.

ON THE BLOG:

In 2020, I surprised myself by publishing 147 posts, the most I’d done since the Poem-A-Day Project in 2004. Retiring from full-time work certainly gave me more time to write, as did COVID-driven cancellations of planned travel, and the need to fill socially isolated time in some satisfying and/or productive fashions. I followed that high-water mark with another 120 posts in 2021. Even with that smaller number of entries, the overall site readership trend remained positive, as I think the coronablogus effect was still in full play throughout that year. But I did seem to hit a wall at the end of 2021, tiring of some of my then-ongoing features, and noting in January of this year that I might be w(h)ithering a bit hereabouts. That did indeed prove to be the case, as this post is number 54 for the year, more than a 50% reduction in my recent annual output. But, thankfully, readership numbers didn’t decline anywhere near that level, so my per-post hits were actually higher than ever, per the chart below. I’ve operated this site and domain since 1995, but prior to 2015, I split my writing between a variety of sites with a variety of hosts, so there’s no easily meaningful visual comparison to make from those times. (Actual numbers are  edited out, as it’s tacky to share them, and the trend line is what matters to me; the light-blue pipes are total unique page visits, the dark-blue pipes are total unique visitors):

As I report each year, here are the baker’s dozen most-read articles among the new posts here over the past twelve months. So if you’re new-ish to my site, or just finding it via this post, then these are the things that readers thought were the best in the vote-by-numbers, and therefore might be the best things to explore further. There’s a bit of everything in the mix, tone-wise, which I suppose is just fine and dandy:

And then here are the baker’s dozen posts written in prior years that received the most reads in 2022, shared to the same recommended pointing reason. It always fascinates me which of the 1,200+ articles on my website interest people (or search engines) the most, all these years on since the first 1995 post on the earliest version of this website. (Note that I exclude things like the “About Me” page or the generic front page from the list, even though they generate a lot of my traffic). “The Worst Rock Band Ever” tops the leader board, as it does most every year. And once again, here’s hoping that people realize that the perennially-popular “Iowa Pick-Up Lines” post is a joke, and also, once again, it continues to befuddle me why my 1999 interview with relatively-obscure guitarist Dave Boquist appears on this “most-read” chart almost every year, receiving far more hits, continually, than my many other interviews with many other far more famous artists. Go figger . . .

ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB:

See this earlier post: Best of My Web 2022

TRAVEL:

We will see 2022 off, God willing and the creek don’t rise, in the Puerto del Sol, Madrid, Spain. We leave on Tuesday, but I’ve gone ahead and penned that trip onto my annual travel map, below. While this isn’t as heavy a travel load as we once did, it’s certainly nice to see it being populated with more red lines than were possible during peak COVID years:

RECORDINGS:

See these two earlier posts:

BOOKS:

See this earlier post: Best Books of 2022

FILM AND TELEVISION:

See these three earlier posts:

AND  THEN . . . .

. . . onward into 2023, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. I don’t know whether I’ll continue to churn out the piffle and tripe at recent levels, or do more, or so less, or what direction your collective engagement with this site will take. (One of the nice things about doing this as a labor of love, and not a labor of commerce, is that the thought of less content and/or less traffic in the year ahead does not cause me any agita). But regardless of how all of those things turn out, I will forever be grateful to those of you who care enough to continue supporting my creative endeavors, right here and right now, and I wish all of you and all of yours the very best over the days and months and years to come!

P.S. As a final tease on the final post of the year, here’s one thing that I know 2023 will be bringing, if you’d like to stake your claim to a copy:

Side By Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves

Gimme The Keys

/ J. Eric Smith / 1 Comment

1. I’m down to my last dose of Paxlovid this afternoon, hoping that the COVID Crud will lift in full around the same time that I stop taking these large and awful-tasting pills. I certainly feel better today than I have for most of the past week, and remain thankful that whatever combination of natural immunity, vaccination, medication, prior exposure and/or dumb luck meant that it never felt like anything more than a severe and tenacious cold with some really heinous body aches thrown in as a bonus.

2. It’s a good thing that those body aches abated a bit over the past 24 hours or so, as I had to use them muscles today to do some (gasp!) snow removal work. We woke up yesterday morning to a dusting of the white stuff, but it didn’t take anymore than a broom to get it off the ramps and walks into and out of our house. Then last night, we had a crazy spot of weather for about a half hour, a true thunder-blizzard, with frequent lightning, little hail stones, wind, rain, ice, snow, frogs, locusts, and God knows what else falling out of the sky. Even the weather map wasn’t quite sure how to label the storm path, so it just put two storm paths one on top of the other (click to enlarge):

Is it hail? Is it a thunderstorm? Is there water, or ice, or rain? Yes, on all counts.

When I got up this morning, I was surprised to see that we had probably three or four inches of accumulation. I was also surprised to see that sometime during the night, conditions must have adjusted to create a perfect flocking scenario, with every branch on every visible tree looking like the white stuff had been professionally laid on by an ambitious interior decorator hoping to create the perfect Christmas scene. Just a bit early there, son. But don’t bother trying again later, please and thanks. Here are some photos I took from inside the house, while the stuff was still fresh, and before I had to go out in it:

And here’s one more, taken yesterday morning. The flocking isn’t quite as good, but it does capture the holiday spirit nicely, I think:

3. Speaking of holiday spirit, a friend of ours asked me last week to create a fun and festive Christmas playlist for a party, which we were supposed to attend, before the plague caught and hamstrung me. I agreed to undertake the task, in part because it was a favor to a friend and I am altruistic like that, and in part because I’m a selfish pig, and I absolutely hate most of the Christmas music pap that gets shoved down our throats every year, so if I could do my part to control my audio field at an event, then Hey Nonny Nonny, I’m on it. (See here for more on my issues with modern American Christmas music. Spoiler: The title of the post is “Grinching“).

Since it was a party, I figured I couldn’t go hard into the sorts of historically accurate symphonic and choral works that are more in tune (ha ha) with the liturgical meaning of the season, so instead I went for a diverse collection of quirky subjects and styles, while hewing to the mission statement that it have something to do with the December holiday season. Sure, some of the usual suspect songs ended up in my mix, but I tried to make sure they were offered in versions that everybody’s not heard 7,000 times already since American Christmas Consumer Season began, in early October.

Because I have caved to streaming, I can now share that mix with you, dear readers, so that perhaps you will also be able to also curtail the usual crap in your own sonic spaces, ho ho ho. Here ’tis:

Small Upsetters

/ J. Eric Smith / 5 Comments

1. A few days back, I noticed that my shoulders, neck and arms were really sore, even though I couldn’t think of anything that could or should have caused that to be the case. Last night, while we were watching a movie (I’m Totally Fine, featuring a bunch of Workaholics alums), I started to get a sore throat, which had gotten a lot worse when I woke up around 3am last night. I got up this morning, still feeling crummy, and, well, probably obvious where this is going . . .

Dadgummit!! To the best of our knowledge, Marcia and I have both dodged the myriad coronaviruses swirling about the world over the past couple of years, and we’re both fully vaccinated and boosted on top of that. I suspect that the teeming broth of wheezing humanity that we were exposed to while staying in a hotel in Las Vegas 10ish days ago exposed us to enough crud that whatever resistance we had to the bug was futile. We had three Christmas-type party events on the social calendar over the next five days, so those are all obviously off. Here’s hoping that by that five-day post-positive-test point that we’re both symptom free and (ideally) testing negative. Fingers crossed.

2. It’s been a rough week for drummers in the musical spheres in which I orbit. New Zealand legend Hamish Kilgour of The Clean went missing a week or so ago, and his body was found on Tuesday in Christchurch. The Clean (which Hamish founded in 1978 with his brother, David) provided the motive force behind New Zealand’s hugely influential Flying Nun Records scene, and served as a hub around which a variety of deeply-talented players revolved in the decades since. Hamish also provided a key component of the label’s visual identity, providing cover art for a variety of very important singles and albums. He was 65 years old, and no cause of death has been reported. Here’s a favorite song of mine by The Clean, culled from their last studio album, 2009’s Mister Pop:

Then today, I learned that The Stranglers’ Jet Black (born Brian Duffy) had died at the age of 84, a year older than my father would have been, were he still with us. Black had been an accomplished jazz drummer and successful businessman in the ’60s and early ’70s, before founding The Stranglers with a trio of players some dozen years younger than him. He kept the beat going through a variety of lineups and incarnations until 2015, when his health finally forced him from the road. The Stranglers had many hits in many styles over the years, and while they were marketed as a punk or punk-adjacent band early in their career, they never really were. The Stranglers’ music was typically far more sophisticated (musically and lyrically) than the usual three-chord shouty oi-oi-oi trebly thunder offered by many of their late ’70s peers; Black’s deft touch on the skins and the wonderfully widdly keyboard stylings of Dave Greenfield (also deceased) were key to that difference. It’s hard to pick a fave Stranglers song, but right now, thinking about the drummer, I’d go with this one, anchored as it with such a monolithic and massive Jet Black groove:

3. I wrote elsewhere today how I’ve long found it vaguely funny how older dudes like Jet Black were marketed as nihilistic kids in the early punk era, with their interesting back stories mostly erased, lest they not appeal to the coveted English youth market of the time. I was thinking about this already recently, when I was listening to the very psychedelic ’60s Dantalion’s Chariot this week, featuring Andy Summers in his pre-Police days, wearing a white kaftan and playing a lot of sitar. (Summers also later played with decidedly non-punk/post-punk Soft Machine and The Animals). When the Police first hit as a hip and hot “young band,” I can’t recall any mention of his prior experience, nor of Stewart Copeland’s time in the very proggy Curved Air. “Let’s just dye their hair blonde and spike it,” shouted the marketeers. “Hey nonny, look, they’re young punks!” I watched the excellent Dio: Dreamers Never Die documentary this week, and he was sort of in the same boat: he started as a soul/R&B crooner, trumpeter and bass player in the late ’50s before founding Elf in the late ’60s. That history meant that he was older than the other members of bands he later fronted to great acclaim (Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio), with his back catalog rarely if ever mentioned among the metal-heads in pre-Internet-research days. I suppose that’s one thing that’s nicer (maybe?) about living in a world where you can have all of the information you want about all of the music you like, right here, right now. It’s harder for marketeers to gloss over inconvenient truths in pursuit of false narratives, for sure.

4. We’ve been having damp and foggy weather here of late, which isn’t all that nice, but which does serve to remind me of just how grateful I am to not be living in the snow and ice belt anymore. A couple of mornings ago, I was up well before dawn (as I normally am), and went to the grocery store when it opened (as I often do), to get my shopping done before the tourist crowds wake up from their hangovers. The fog was as thick as I’ve ever seen it here while driving at a crawl to and from the store, and when the sun began to peek up over the mesas east of us, the world turned a series of most bizarre colors and textures. Photos don’t really do it justice, but I tried:

5. Yesterday, after the rain abated a bit, I went out for a quick hike up to a summit near our house that I have done many times. I got to a ledge point about two-thirds of the way up, after which the balance of the trip is pretty strenuously steep with a lot of hand work, and I was feeling far more fatigued than I normally am at that point, which I know know was likely because of the stupid virus doing its thing. So I decided to go down a back way that was longer, but easier. As I turned away from the edge, I snapped a photo with my phone, and stuffed it in my pocket. When I got home, I realized that I had several apps and windows opened, apparently having pocket dialed and posted and touched the phone’s screen while I was scrambling, and before it had locked. As I was closing everything out, I got to the photo app last, and somehow without meaning to, I had done this to the last picture I had taken . . .

I think that might be one of the coolest looking photos I’ve taken here, even though I have no idea what filters or effects produced it. So let’s hear it for the happy, pleasing accidents that happen when things aren’t going quite the way we want them to go!

Thanksgiving Rules of Decorum

/ J. Eric Smith / 4 Comments

Marcia and I will be traveling to Las Vegas tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, where on Thursday, we will give thanks and then eat ourselves into food comas. Katelin and John are handling the cooking this year, so I will not be preparing my most excellent (if I say so myself) Thanksgiving Casserole this time around. But dropping that densely compacted white trash lasagna dish just adds to the consumptively celebratory nature of the family affair, with full-on turkey parts flying and loads of side dishes on decadent display, the better to sate every hunger that has ever been, ever. John’s mother and her husband will also be joining us and adding their family’s traditional holiday dish of home-made buttered egg noodles, which are utterly scrumptious and decadent and drool-worthy. Perfect for the day!

It seems a good time this afternoon, in advance of our trip, to review and re-share our family’s “Thanksgiving Rules of Decorum” for this most gluttonous of gatherings. It’s always good form to govern group gatherings with strict constraints, even among beloved family members. Here’s hoping your own family traditions have their own rules of decorum, and that they result in spectacularly successful holiday results.

1. Gristle may be sucked off bones at the table, but cracking bones to remove the marrow must be done in the kitchen.

2. If there are no pets in the room to blame, all flatulence must be held until such time as a particularly funny joke is told, and the accidental emission adds to the mirth.

3. The tube of cranberry sauce is a decoration, not a food. No touching!

4. You must clear your plate of all objects put upon it before beginning round two. Even stuffed tomatoes.

5. You may only hide unwanted peas within a bread roll if there are enough rolls to ensure that everyone else gets as many as they want. If rolls run out, you must eat your pea filled roll before you leave the table.

6. No matter how you hold the fork, it is wrong. If anyone chooses to notice this fact, you must skip a round and look contrite while others eat.

7. Discussion of bodily functions should be reserved for the pause between main course and desert. Comparisons of bodily functions to objects on the table may result in a fork mishandling penalty and forfeiture of dessert rights.

8. If someone disappears for more than 90 seconds, everyone at the table must loudly inquire as to their whereabouts, and ask at loud volume whether everything is okay in there.

9. No additional butter is required on the Stouffers Mac and Cheese, unless it touches anything green and you need to offset the effect of the vitamins and minerals.

10. You may not take the ham-bone out of the green beans and pass them on without taking at least six beans, and not hiding them in your roll. You may elect to butter them before eating.

I aspire to HEFTYCHONK status on Thanksgiving. (Click to enlarge).