The signal achievement of contemporary American cultural life is a profound, all-encompassing ingratitude. I’m not interested. Neither was Sister Rosetta Tharpe
I play music with young men sometimes. It’s fascinating to see what they like.
They have their own musical worldview, open-minded or cranky to taste, filled with contemporary things. Rock music isn’t all that complicated, and me and my hoary old friends generally don’t have too much trouble kenning what’s going on in your typical Weezer song and bashing our way through it. There really isn’t all that much difference between any two guitars/bass/drums/two-or-three-guys singing stuff. If you can play the Dave Clark Five, you can play Radiohead.
Since I play the bass, mostly, I’m often pressed into service as there’s regularly a shortage of that. My friend’s sons are college age, and some of our co-workers and friends aren’t yet thirty. They all play better than we did, or do. It’s funny to see them pawing through crap from my high school years like we pawed through Animal House flotsam for oldies.
In pick-up situations, you have to find things that everybody knows, or can fake or figure out in a hurry. You end up playing everything they play during time-outs at football games, and you always play the Beatles.
The Beatles were my older brother’s vintage. They were gone before I was in high school. But an archaeologist could take a sample of all the layers of Beatles stuff I’ve played, and make a series of geologic Beatle eras.
1. The Beatles any song
2. Beatles raves like Twist and Shout
3. Mature pop songs like You Can’t Do That.
4. Arena rock progenitors like Back In The USSR
5. Silly stuff like Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
6. Back to Twist and Shout for bald men and women gone thick in the middle
But this is what the young fellers want to play now. Good for them. It’s lovely:
The Old Mill won the Academy Award for Best Short Subjects: Cartoons. I’d never seen it before that I can recall.
As we discussed earlier, the word “genius” gets bandied about a lot, especially in Hollywood. Walt Disney is the only one from there I can think of. Personally, I’d rather watch a Warner Brothers Daffy Duck short than any Disney offering, but that signifies nothing. I’d rather eat at Johnnie Rocket’s than have an Escoffier dinner right now, too. An opinion is not always an analysis.
Disney captured great themes, and was a visionary in a multitude of ways. He was always in my mind a Californian, a representation of the very essence of America at its leading edge. But that man understood Europe better than the people that inhabited it .
Cary Grant was born this day in 1904. He never died, really. I wonder if he ever will.
When in doubt, just point a camera at him. You can turn off the sound for a while, too; doesn’t much matter.
He’s a big favorite here at the Cottage:
[Editor’s Note: This essay needs a cake with one candle.]I delivered some millwork I fabricated to a nearby jobsite. It’s a marvelous shingle style rehab of an older house in the town I live in. A friend of mine owns it, and is his own architect. Another of my dearest friends is the general contractor. I dropped off the final piece of a railing I’d made, and the only person at the job was the general contractor’s brother, a finish carpenter. And he shouldn’t be alone.
Not because he doesn’t work when he’s alone. Not because he needs help, either. He’s managing fine. He shouldn’t be alone because it doesn’t suit him.
He’s the gregarious sort. He’s got a sunny, chatty disposition. And he’s rattling around in there by himself.
I don’t know what happened to laconism. It used to be very common in the building trades. I met dozens of men who communicated, as Calvin Coolidge’s biographer once described the president’s conversational ability, by the “ugh ugh of the Indian.” Real quiet like would be the Okie version of that. Anyway, they were not prone to running their mouths. I think they’re all dead now. I bet the undertaker pinched them all before screwing the lids down, too, just to make sure they weren’t just being real quiet like.
Most contractors used to be Henry Fonda. Now they’re all Eldon the Painter. I’m not sure what happened.
I work alone most of the time. I am, as they say, a yammering Mick. And being half Sicilian in the bargain, I’m a yammering Mick that talks with his hands. Terrifying to behold.
Anyway, as I said, I work alone a lot, and it suits me somehow. I think it has to do with the nature of your employment.
The clock and the calendar hang on the wall, glaring at me the whole time. Every day is too short, and every week is shorted a few days. There will literally never be enough time for me to accomplish what I’m trying to do. I can never make a to-do list that makes any sense; each tick mark suggests ten others.
When you work for wages, your attitude changes. You have surrendered a sort of autonomy, and gained another kind. The clock and the calendar are Newtonian, not Quantum based measurements of time. And so the day is never too short, no matter how fine an employee you make. When it’s over, it’s over. The boss signed up to worry at 2 am on Sunday. You didn’t. You just worry every once in a while if you picked the right boss.
My friend, the lonely carpenter, picked the right boss. His general contractor brother is a hardworking and determined fellow, and worries a great deal so his younger brother does not have to. But he’s overlooked one aspect of the equation. Loneliness.
I’m not lonely, when I’m alone. The frantic never are.
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