Here We Go Again

Mediocrity for All!

It strikes me as ironic that in a realm like education, the lesson America’s scholastic visionaries never seem to learn is also the most simple lesson of all—that education should be about educating. Theorists persist in reinventing the wheel, sometimes with good intentions and sometimes in the service of agendas that are rather less defensible and/or wholesome than those publicly stated. Such is the case with the hottest currency to emerge from the pointy-headed precincts of pedagogical theory: social-emotional learning, or SEL.

Graeme Obree

When you're depressed, everything becomes distorted.

I have worked through the years with a great number of parishioners who have suffered or continue to suffer from various forms of what is described, too broadly and pejoratively, as "mental illness".  This has included, but has not been limited to, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and depression.  I have seen others deal with beloved family members who suffer from such.  The toll it takes is tremendous, of course, and no less so when the suffering is with someone for whom we care.

There are transient forms of these illnesses, too, that can afflict us.  I find that even I, after a six month period when I experienced the sudden and unexpected death of my father and the very gradual, painful, and debilitating death of my mother; as well as the death of a beloved roue of an uncle and of my two most important mentors, found the grim hand of depression taking hold of my soul.

My exercise and nutrition routine, which I need to follow in order to keep pace with parish and school responsibilities, fell apart.  [I may feel no older than 36, but my rational mind reminds me that I am well over a generation beyond that birthday.]  My sleep became intermittent and inadequate; my interest in work and in life in general became stale.  The fact that this state came gradually and quietly into all aspects of my life with a terrible deliberation was perhaps its most frightening aspect.  Certainly, it has increased my empathy towards those who find themselves victims of what would have once been called a form of possession.

There were two things that drove out this particular demon, or series of demons, however.  While faith was and is always present, simple and sometimes silly games with my granddaughter helped considerably, as did the ability to once again plunge deeply into ocean water and feel the exercise of the familiar muscle memory along with the sights, sounds, and smell of the surf.

There are many people who have used physical activity to pull themselves away from depression, as well as trauma and other afflictions that are often left to the cruel passivity of pharmaceuticals to address.  [If interested in this subject, I would recommend this article from the Harvard Medical School.]  Perhaps the poster person for such would be our Friday subject, who suffered not just from depression, but bipolar disorder and a chronic desire for self-slaughter.

Graeme Obree, nicknamed "The Flying Scotsman", is a legend in the world of bicycle racing, known particularly for his attempts on the world speed record twenty years ago.  He is also the inventor of one of the most unique bicycles in his sport, particularly since it was built using, among other things, parts from a washing machine.

As often happens with those vexed with mental issues, Obree's teenage and young adult years were beset by multiple failures, drug use, and at least two suicide attempts.  He failed as the owner of a bicycle shop, was alienated from his family, and purposeless until he fixed upon a Quixotic goal.  For nearly a decade, the record for the fastest speed set on a bicycle was just short of 32 miles an hour.  As such tests of speed are generally performed in a velodrome with no other riders present and the cyclist competing only against a clock, remarkable concentration is permitted.  Anyone familiar with combating mental disorder will immediately see the advantages of this circumstance.

However, breaking the 32 mph barrier would require more than a trained and focused rider.  Both Obree's technique and his medium would have to be adjusted.  Obree had taken note of the physical stance of downhill skiers who tuck their elbows close to their bodies in order to encourage a more efficient aerodynamic profile and he wished to do the same on a bicycle, something that required a redesign of the handlebars.  Rather than the standard "inverted U" style common in racing and touring bikes, Obree fabricated a straight, and very short bar across the top of the frame.  The frame was adjusted so that his knees would not come in contact with it; the chain shortened to allow the most torque.  In one particularly inspired moment, Obree noted how well the bearings in a washing machine were manufactured and had them included in the bike's design.

At a high enough speed, [I could] tuck in my arms. And, above all, get in a very forward suposition on the bike, on the peak of the saddle. The Obree position isn't advantageous simply aerodynamically, it also allows, by pushing the point of pedalling towards the rear, to benefit from greater pressure while remaining in the saddle. You soon get an impression of speed, all the greater because you've got practically nothing [deux fois rien] between your hands. Two other things I noticed after a few hundred metres: I certainly didn't have the impression of turning 53 × 13, and the Obree position is no obstruction to breathing. But I wasn't pedalling at 55kmh, 100 turns of the pedals a minute, yet my arms already hurt.

With the bike, designed in his kitchen, built in a friend's workshop and now named "Old Faithful", Obree rented a velodrome in Norway for 24 hours.  His first attempt at the record was a failure.  Cramped and unsettled, Obree returned to his hotel room for a brief night of fitful sleep, and returned to the velodrome early the next morning, so early his support teammate overslept.  While it was unlikely, given his exhaustion and lack of sufficient recovery time, on July 16, 1993, he broke through the 32 mph barrier.

Obree earned the record, lost it to another cyclist shortly thereafter, and then regained it the next year.  When tedious international cycling bureaucrats, disturbed by innovation [What bureaucrat isn't?], banned Old Faithful for the usual nonsensical reasons, he designed another bike.  When that wasn't enough, they banned his riding position; he designed another.  Then they overreached by banning his already established records.  This was enough for the cycling community to begin to push back, eventually getting Obree's records restored and allowing for innovation to permit progress in the sport.

Obree would compete in a variety of bicycle competitions, winning an equal variety of medals, trophies, and championships.  He avoided the Tour de France, however, as it was understood that he would have to, like other competitors, dope himself.  [Don't be shocked; everyone knows this is done.]  Given his history, that would have been a poor choice.

His worst moment came the year after his initial victory over the speed record when his brother was killed in an automobile accident, initiating a depression spiral that resulted in his third suicide attempt.  While in the midst of hanging himself in his horse's stable, he was discovered at the very last minute by the local farmer's daughter who was happening by.

Again, he returned to the sheer physical pleasure of speed cycling, spinning his way to more records and victories and, ultimately, to his status as Scotland's champion of sport and mental health awareness.  As he noted in an interview a decade ago,

"It's all in the past....Carry on regardless. Carry on through thick and thin. Carry on until you're good enough to win." 

Marvelous advice, even if one's victory is simply over transient depression.

Thursday's Place: Rowan Oak

It was a Sunday afternoon during a very hot, late June in the Mississippi Delta.  Although, I never knew a June, or any other summer month in Mississippi, that wasn't hot and humid.  That week we would leave the air-conditioned house for the air-conditioned car to go to an air-conditioned restaurant.  Those brief moments in the un-conditioned air seemed like a stray visit to a sun.

So, with little to do that day, as Sundays are still honored in the south, we drove 150 miles or so to the northeast, meandering through the infamous crossroads of Route 49 and Highway 61, the place where Robert Johnson met the devil and was given, however temporarily, his prowess at the guitar, and through the small town of Clarksdale that has produced so many musicians, seven of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from Sam Cooke to Ike Turner to Howlin' Wolf to John Lee Hooker, that the list of their names makes up the bulk of the local chamber of commerce's webpage.

That wasn't our journey's end, however.  As much as the blues have defined the nature and reality of life in that part of the American South, there was another mecca, to be found sixty miles to the east, that delivered Southern art, grace, and aesthetics, indeed the foundation of all of those chords and laments, to the rest of the world.  As Mississippi also brought forth its share of writers, including Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Walker Percy, and Tennesee Williams, the Magnolia State also produced he who is arguably the most influential of them all, particularly on the world's stage.

Rowan Oak was for over thirty years, from 1930 until his death in 1962, the home of William Faulkner.  It was here that he would write many of his novels and stories, and from which he would receive notice that he had won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Those prizes discomfited Faulkner, however, as he preferred the peace of his tumbledown manor and its overgrown garden.

In fact, it was that garden and its maze that first attracted our attention as we parked in a gravel drive and looked along the cedar-lined path that lead to the gracious front porch.  I was glad, since our own car frequently carries with it the tools, accoutrements, and accessories necessary to maintain my wife's elaborate and demanding gardens, that we were in my father-in-law's borrowed Buick.  The first thing my wife said was, "This needs weeding".  Under ordinary circumstances, that would mean around six hours fussing with someone else's garden.  Since my father-in-law's trunk carried nothing other than a spare tire, I was in luck and could actually expect to see something of the house.

Except that Rowan Oak was, by our visit, under the care of the University of Mississippi as a literary landmark and its hours of operation were quixotic.  As it turned out, although I had been assured that visitors were welcome on a Sunday, that meant to the parking lot, maze, and garden; and not the actual house.  I amused myself by sitting on the front porch and remembering Faulkner's literary observation that, "Yesterday, today, tomorrow, are is indivisible, one", and thought about porches and peace and what it was to have a place apart from the world.

When I saw my wife starting to think about ways of using a tire jack for a gardening tool, I briskly escaped to the back of the house, thought "What the heck?", and tried the kitchen door.  It was unlocked.  Ah, the South.

There, for an hour, without a guide, overseer, or guard, I was on my own to wander around Rowan Oak, to see even the parts that weren't prepared for public viewing.  While my wife meandered about the garden and maze, I ghosted through the kitchen, sitting room, telephone nook [with the number "Oxford 1-8110" scribbled on the wall] and, particularly, the room in which Faulkner wrote.  The most spectacular feature is the character outline of his novel, A Fable, written into the wall.

[Really, what was it with this household?  Was there a shortage of paper in Mississippi in his day?]

For those interested in architecture, we offer the following from the official pamphlet:

It is a primitive Greek Revival house built in the 1840s by Robert Sheegog. Faulkner purchased the house when it was in disrepair in the 1930s and did many of the renovations himself. Other renovations were done in the 1950s. The house sits on 4 landscaped and twenty nine acres of largely wooded property known as Bailey's Woods. Though the "rowan oak" is a mythical tree, the grounds and surrounding woods of Rowan Oak contain hundreds of species of native Mississippi plants, most of which date back to antebellum times. The alley of cedars that lines the driveway was common in the 19th century. The studs of the house are 4"x4" square cypress, which were hand-hewn. Faulkner drew much inspiration for his treatment of multi-layered Time from Rowan Oak, where past and future seemed to inhabit the present.

In 1972, his daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, sold the house to the University of Mississippi. The University maintains the home in order to promote Faulkner's literary heritage. Tours are available. The home has been visited by such writers as John Updike, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Simic, Richard Ford, James Lee Burke, Bei Dao, Charles Wright, Charles Frazier, Alice Walker, the Coen brothers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Salman Rushdie, and others. Writer Mark Richard once repaired a faulty doorknob on the French door to Faulkner's study. 

Rowan Oak was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1968. After its most recent renovations, some of which were funded by part-time Oxford resident and Ole Miss law school alumnus, John Grisham, Rowan Oak was rededicated on May 1, 2005.

Well, that explains why my memory, while seated on that porch, was drawn back to that quotation from Faulkner about time and its nature.

Despite the heat and the drive and the sudden realization that we were in Mississippi on a Sunday, which in those days meant no place to eat or drink in Oxford, it was one of the best moments of our many visits to the deep South.  We meandered, we walked, we appreciated, and, through the hospitality of Faulkner's ghost leaving that back door unlocked, we gained a sense of that old, gracious style of life that he captured so well in his work.

A Pungent Observation

Most of the journalism I read seems to be from people who are merely reacting to some “tweet” sent out by the current occupant of The White House.  That hardly seems like work.  I guess shoe leather reporting is dead.

No, and We're the Poorer for It

Could Mr. Rogers exist today?

Reflections on Annual Convention

So, I spent a great deal of the weekend attending the annual convention of my denomination.  Really, it’s a church, not a denomination, but that's an insider's distinction these days.  When fewer and fewer of the young people with whom I work know The Lord's Prayer, the difference between a church and a denomination is obtuse.

This was my 38th convention as a working member of The Episcopal Church.  I've been attending these for so long that, at my first convention, we were still The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.  Later, we became The Episcopal Church of the United States [ECUSA, for short], until it was changed yet again to The Episcopal Church.

I’ve always found this latest self-title a little reverse-colonial, as our world-wide communion includes The Episcopal Church of Scotland, The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem, The Episcopal Church of Sudan, etc.  By dropping "of the United States", it seems as if we're saying that we're the only true Episcopal Church.  Not that it matters, I suppose, as the rest of the Anglican Communion doesn't really take us seriously any longer.

Such discussions are beyond consideration these days, however, as we are now inheriting from the world of higher education the latest in virtue trends: Social Justice and Identity Politics.  We always seem to be about seven years downstream of university culture, so this is about right.  It'll be the rage for the next few years until it is replaced by the next great concern and moral panic.

So, here's what I experienced along with one or two things that I noticed:

Younger clergy are remarkably condescending towards older clergy, especially the "boomers", a word that carries for them a negative connotation.  What's really splendid is they fit this naked ageism into their grand statements about acceptance, diversity, and respecting the dignity of every human being.  I suppose that it's another tragic example of why we no longer matter, but I find it amusing, anyway.

This happened only once, but the reaction was so positive that I imagine it's a harbinger of the future.  One of the clergy, who is particularly fond of being in the newspapers and getting "likes" on social media, stood at the microphone and used "frickin'" in a sentence, a borderline vulgarity that received a smattering of applause, and followed it up with "s**t".  That received more applause.  I remember the elegance of language that used to be heard at conventions, but that's just me being a boomer, I guess.  He had a very self-satisfied smile when he left the microphone.  When I noted to the person seated next to me that he had neither asked a question nor spoken in support of a resolution, and wondered what he was doing at the microphone, it was observed, "He's showing us how cool he is.  He's one of the cool kids, now."  Oh.

I used to enjoy convention when some truly educated men and women would struggle theologically with the issues of the day.  Now, my younger/newer colleagues sound like the players in junior high student government.

There was one classic "boomer" moment, though, when another colleague took to a microphone to scold the entire room about consulting what he called our "social devices" while people were taking to the microphone to speak.  It was remarkable in that he didn't seem to realize that, as we are now "paperless", all of the resolutions were on a smartphone app and that many of us were taking notes on the resolutions with our "social devices".  His castigation was taken with quiet patience, in a truly Connecticut manner.

One of the young clergy, clearly seeing this as his woke moment to #FightForFifteen, stood to lecture us on how new clergy, who are salaried, actually make less than $15 an hour.  He was ready to get frothy about it, until a boomer pointed out to him that he had forgotten to include the housing allowance that we are given, which pushes that hourly figure way past $15.  I was a little troubled by his inability to read a simple budget and, had I been his boss, I would have reduced his salary to the equivalent of $15 an hour.  Red-faced, he returned to his seat.

This was the second time this year that the powers-that-be, who remind us to practice self-care, thought that the best way for us to meet in counsel was to spend twelve hours sitting in chairs and mostly listening to people talk at us.  [Should that be twelve "frickin'" hours?  I should ask Father Woke once he comes down from his narcissism high.]  What sort of glutes exercises do these people do that enables them to sit for so long without muscle aches and body derangement?

Ah, well.  105 weeks of this left.

A Social Class This Weak Will Die

Students at Oxford University are latest to demand clapping banned because applause noise could trigger anxiety as they call for 'jazz hands' to be used instead

Surprising No One Who is Sentient

People are smoking cigarettes again amid vaping-related panic

Artificially created moral panic is generally a harmful failure.

Neat Trick, Considering There Are No Waffle Houses in Massachusetts [or Anywhere Else in New England]

Elizabeth Warren Says Her Favorite Place Is Waffle House

Liz, you didn't look authentic drinking beer from a bottle, I can't believe your favorite dish includes cheese grits and sausage gravy.

Seriously, I wonder if we haven't come to the end of the focus group-driven pandering that's marked so much of politics for the past thirty years.  It seems bizarre and obvious by contemporary standards.

Lee Konitz

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

He was a good looking guy, a little inebriated but carrying it well in his athletic frame.  He was around thirty, had Gallic features, and was wearing chinos with a slightly worse-for-wear cotton dress shirt.  He wasn't wearing a tie, none of the young men in this place did, and he hadn't shaved for a day.  Still, given he was in the company of some rather strange, and also inebriated, men, he stood out.

Mainly it was because he was standing in front of the saxophonist who was on the stage and looking at him like he had just seen the face of God and lived.

As the dumb-struck man was a writer and in the midst of a colossal block that had prevented him from progressing on a novel that was, at that point, rather prosaic in its narrative style, he had gone with friends to Birdland, the famous jazz club, to forget about sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, and character development for a night of music, wine, mad dancing and wildness.  While not specifically looking for inspiration, the writer found it while listening to this week's person and, in so doing, would make literary history.

Lee Konitz is a jazz saxophonist; he plays the soprano, alto, and tenor saxes, although generally prefers the alto when he still performs, now at the age of 87.  While there are other musicians who have tragic childhood tales of daunting, even terrifying, experiences, Konitz was born in Chicago in 1927 to middle-class Austro/Russian emigres and raised to respect learning and labor.  Again, unlike a surprising number of other musicians, he could read music and transpose in his head, and was trained in composition and music theory.  He enjoyed the music of the big bands that he would hear on the radio, wanting nothing other than to compose and play with such organizations.  Because his favorite was Benny Goodman, he requested the gift of a clarinet from his parents.  Shortly afterwards, he would switch to the other woodwind and prove so adept that he was able to improvise even before he learned to match the fingering to the printed notes.

At the immediate conclusion of the Second World War, the teenage Konitz found himself performing with a variety of standard jazz bands, although he was becoming very attracted to the newness and freedom of the jumpier, improvisation-based jazz known as bebop that was being pioneered by many of the younger musicians, especially Charlie "Bird" Parker.  By 1947, he was playing compositions by the jazz great Gerry Mulligan and arrangements by Gil Evans.  After proving his chops with this formidable group, Konitz was asked by Miles Davis to sit in with his combo and attempt something radically new. 

From 1949 to 1950, Konitz, along with Mulligan, worked with Davis to record the songs that would eventually be included in 1957's Birth of the Cool, one of those albums that is always on the list of essentials.  As jazz, like sermons, is a form of proclamation, its product is best honed when played live before an audience, so both musician and listener form a moment of artistic Gestalt.  So, Davis, Konitz and their compatriots made the rounds of jazz clubs, becoming popular especially at New York's Village Vanguard, Blue Note, and, of course, Birdland.

Which brings us to that moment of wonder for the novelist and the saxophonist, where the interplay of horn and woodwinds brought him his moment of epiphany.

The novelist was Jack Kerouac and the manuscript which had been so vexing him would one day be entitled On The Road.  Of that moment in October of 1951, Kerouac would later write, "The tune they were playing was All the Things You Are . . . they slowed it down and dragged behind it at half tempo dinosaur proportions-changed the placing of the note in the middle of the harmony to an outer more precarious position where also its sense of not belonging was enhanced by the general atonality produced with everyone exteriorizing the tune's harmony."

Well, it meant something to him, anyway.

While Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman are all better-known, Konitz played with and outlasted them all; he was playing at the Blue Note just a couple of years ago.  Beyond his influence on Kerouac, Konitz also influenced three generations of musicians with his original compositions and imaginative takes on American standards.  In fact, he is now so well-regarded that a couple of young saxophonists recently told me that they no longer wish to play like Parker, but like Lee.  In fact, what they said to me was, "Charlie who?"

Here, enjoy some more, won't you?

Thursday's Place: The Insomniac

A former student of mine moved to New York City about fifteen years ago, determined to be a professional singer.  She was not a rocker nor a rapper, her appearance was zaftig with big hair,  like someone who would have appeared on a Bob Hope special in the mid-sixties, and she had a preference for torch songs.

Naturally, the few places that liked that type of entertainment were booked with the high-end performers, and the smaller clubs preferred a contemporary sound.  So, after she realized that traipsing all over Manhattan and Brooklyn looking for a venue was futile, on one of her stops she noticed that the club was advertising for a bartender and she applied and was hired.

For a year, she tended bar and did whatever else was necessary to keep the business solvent and operational.  After hours, during the clean-up, she would take a seat at the piano and entertain the other workers, including the club's owner/manager.  Inevitably, one night a performer didn't arrive and he asked her to fill in.  She was a hit and, to this day, still regularly performs there and elsewhere, and has recorded three albums.  [Are they still called albums?  I don't know.]

She may not have realized it, but she had just engaged in a very traditional manner of finding an entrance to the oft-closed world of entertainment.  It brought to mind another singer I was listening to the other day.

When she was sixteen, Linda Ronstadt, a machine parts dealer's daughter from Tuscon, ran away from home re-located to the Los Angeles area to become a singer.  As with my former student, she didn't have much luck and was a bit young, anyway, so she applied for and was awarded a waitress position at a funky coffeehouse and art gallery in Hermosa Beach.  It was here that she invited to perform by the owner.  The rest of her story we pretty well know.

She wasn't the only one, however, although she may have been the most famous to have come out of The Insomniac Cafe, a place that was popular with the counter-culture performers of the era, if a bit notorious to the local police and politicians.  Well, what else is new?

In 1958, an entrepreneur named Bob Hare saw an empty storefront, something that is anathema to any entrepreneur, and decided to imitate the coffeehouses that were becoming common in San Francisco and were beginning to enter Southern California culture.  [Please read of Cafe Frankenstein, a surfer/beatnik place that was a contemporary of The Insomniac's, elsewhere in The Coracle.]

So, Hare borrowed $2000 [around $18,000 in 2019] and turned what had been a shoe store into a modest place to have a cup of coffee late into the night.  As he didn't serve liquor, he could stay open until 3am, a full hour after the Lighthouse jazz club, which was across the street, closed.  That meant the adrenalized musicians and their fans still had somewhere to go after every other venue had shuttered.

Naturally, once musicians are invited into any place with a roof, be it a nightclub, coffeehouse, church, or barn, they have to play.  Thus, music began to be offered at The Insomniac and, in keeping with SoCal culture, it was eclectic and fun.  Not just jazz or the teenage Ronstadt singing her off-key songs of daunted love, but folk trios, blues warblers, and even Gospel music.  At the end of his first year in business, The Insomniac was earning $100,000 annually [about $850,000 today].

Hare's vision was to recreate a Greenwich Village vibe in suburban L.A., an area primarily known for beach volleyball.  In order to encourage that vision, he bought the store next door and turned it into The Insomniac Book and Art Fair, where the beat writers and poets who were so popular up north could sell their works and read from them to adoring beach kids, and artists such as Earl Newman, who is mostly famous for his Newport Jazz Festival poster designs, and Frank Holmes would get their start.  Allan Ginsburg even showed up one evening and read from "Howl", still one of the best-selling books of poetry in the 20th century.

[See above for Newman's vision of The Insomniac, and below for Holmes work as a record album artist.]

In addition to music, books, and art, The Insomniac also became a place for outer orbital comedians to perform, including the scandalous Lenny Bruce and the truly original, if remarkably wacky, beatnik Lord Buckley.

Sounds ideal, doesn't it?  Well, yes, if you're a musician, artist, writer, poet, comedian, coffee addict, or fan of any of the above.  Apparently, the city fathers of Hermosa Beach were none of those things and, in a story that's eerily similar to the fate of Cafe Frankenstein down in Laguna Beach, saw The Insomniac not as the sentinel of Greenwich Village culture, but as an impediment to a planned walkway that would connect the beach to the more savory shops in the main part of town.  So, the Hermosa Beach police would visit The Insomniac with brutal regularity until [surprise!] they found some drugs.  Hare and some others would be arrested, the charges eventually dismissed.

With the subsequent loss of its entertainment license, The Insomniac could no longer be what it had been and the city, through the process of eminent domain, seized the property and turned it into a charmless walkway and parking area in 1965.  [I've been there in this century and noted it as an area mostly for the homeless, along with some used syringes and human waste; good thing they got rid of a coffeehouse, eh?]

Hare would later become a counselor and  member of the Lutheran Church, serving troubled youth with wisdom and sacrament, if not caffeine and tunes.

Recently, as the city of Hermosa Beach is now desirous of marketing their facile history, a series of murals have been commissioned, including one entitled "Beatnik Alley", that captures some of the performers and the cultural vibe of those seven brief years.  Depictions of Ronstadt, folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who came over for coffee after The Lighthouse would close for the evening, may be found along the wall of a Brazilian BBQ restaurant.

We guess The Insomniac, now that it has been closed for over fifty years and its owner dead for eight, has achieved the status of elderly politicians, ugly buildings, and over-the-hill prostitutes and has become respectable.

For the counter-culture, this is the circle of life.

For fun, here's Lord Buckley's take on Jesus of Nazareth.  No, really.

We Need to Get On That

America’s supply of uneaten bacon is biggest in 48 years

Decline of the West

Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude

Thank You, Gramps, for Leaving the U.K. and Coming to the U.S.

The Duke and Duchess of Woke continue to make friends.

Blimey. What are all those servants being paid for if they can’t even get their act together to enquire after Meghan’s state of mind? Us ignorant folk may all blithely assume that the cleaners and gardeners and caterers and nutritionists and nannies and private doctors and midwives and stylists and chauffeurs as well as the private jet and the foreign holidays and the £2.4million house renovation might make being a wife and a mum who has to turn out to smile and wave every now and again just a little bit easier. But it turns out we’d be wrong: poor Megs is merely ‘existing not living’.

I tried to feel sympathetic towards Meghan’s new-mum-with-a-new-job schtick. Honestly. But what rubs is the context. Harry and Meghan ask us to feel sorry for them moments after ITV’s intrepid Tom Bradby announces they are in Malawi, the fith poorest country on Earth. Over the course of his hour-long syco-fest, Bradby records the couple in the townships of South Africa, at a school (little more than a shed) in Malawi, and in a hospital in Angola. We learn of dire poverty, the legacy of Apartheid and war. And yet, at the end of the show, our sympathies are supposed to lie with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Yes, the cute little Angolan boy might have lost his leg, but he doesn’t have to put up with people writing stuff about him in tabloid newspapers.

Not Exactly an Emergency, Is It?

Study Finds the Wealthy & Celebrities Aren’t Changing Their Flying Habits to Reduce CO2 Emissions

"Better Known for Other Work" is a Bit of an Understatement

Direct Action Beats Legislation

The [Church of Rome's] Amazon Synod has been full of scandal. It started when the opening ceremony in the Vatican garden was full of earth worship and what appeared to be idol worship happening right in front of the pope with his blessing. One doesn't have to be an art major to recognize ancient fertility goddesses. 

The ensuing outrage that occurred among traditional Catholics went unanswered by Rome. In the face of this silence, unidentified Catholics took matters into their own hands and walked into the church next to St. Peter's where the images were displayed and removed them and threw them into the Tiber.

You know, you would have thought, after all of the scandal, that they had learned their lesson about giving their parishioners the silent treatment.

The List of Thursday's Places, Thus Far

Cafe Frankenstein - The proto-surfer, beat hang-out that was a headache to the cops, man.
The Elbo Room - The inadvertent magnet of Florida spring break crazy
The White Horse Tavern - "Jack, go home"
Don the Beachcomber's - Wacky tiki in old California
The House of Swing - Where jazz is king
The Mermaid Cafe - Greeks, geeks, hippies, and Joni Mitchell
The Oxford Bar - Remember to wear your old school tie and be prepared for murder
Musso and Frank Grill - Stick to the martinis and chicken pot pie
Charlie's - At the shore since '44
Cornelia Street Cafe - A moment in fading New York
La Cave - A lot can happen around used church furniture
The University of Leeds Refectory - Mushy peas and 98 decibel rock
Harry's New York Bar of Paris - Have the $40 Bloody Mary and pretend you're drinking with Hemingway
The Campbell Apartment - Hidden elegance on Vanderbilt Avenue
The Majestic Grill - Dogs
Coventry Road - Beats, Hippies, and a kid English teacher
The Algonquin Hotel - Cats and critics favorite
The Eagle and Child - Hobbits, Narnia, and the Golden Dawn
CBGB - "Why are these walls...wet?"
The Kite - Only in the islands
Caffe Trieste - Italy meets boho in Frisco
The Cleveland Museum of Art - The best museum in the United States, that's all
The Souks of Marrakesh - "For five dirham, you can step on the cobra."
Christian's Hut - The movable movie set
Shakespeare and Company - The bookstore that gave us our high school reading list
The Smiling Dog Saloon - Even better than a bowling alley
Margaritaville - A tiny burger shack that became an industry
Tintamarre - A desert island, a makeshift bar, and Whiskey Pete
The Dune Shacks of Provincetown - Rustic living for the artistic class
The Checkerboard Lounge - Chicago's gift to music

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