Occasional Holy Man and Luthier Who Offers Stray, Provocative, and Insouciant Thoughts About Religion, Archaeology, Human Foible, Surfing, and Interesting People. Thalassophile. Nemesis of all Celebrities [except for Chuck Norris].
He Lives Vicariously Through Himself. He has a Piece of Paper That Proves He's Laird of Glencoe.
Palm Sunday: Holy Eucharist at 8am; Eucharist with the Great Procession at 10am
Maundy Thursday: 7:30pm Proper Liturgy including the Stripping of the Altar. Good Friday: The Proper Liturgy at 7:00pm. Holy Saturday: 7:00 pm The Great Vigil of Easter. Easter Sunday: Music and Celebration at both 8am and 10:00am. [In recognition of the devotional week ahead, there will be no updates to TheCoracle until Easter Sunday afternoon.]
"There is no one so uncivilized, and of such a crude disposition, that,
raising his eyes to heaven, he does not understand from the very magnitude of
the objects, from their motion, arrangement, constancy, usefulness, beauty, and
temperament, that there is some providence — though he does not know by what
god’s providence all the visible universe is governed." —Lactantius
I confess to having eclectic taste in music. A quick look at my downloaded collection will reveal that I have recently played an opera by Wagner, selections from jazz saxophonist Art Pepper, something from Brooks and Dunn's greatest hits, Beethoven's 2nd, guitarist Link Wray, Miles Davis, Iggy Pop [particularly good for the gym], and the collected cadences of the United States Marine Corps [ditto on that gym thing].
Once upon a time I could think of no better way of spending an evening than sitting in a dark and [in those days] smoky club and listening to some group that I had never heard of and would never hear of again playing music that was independent of the brutal realities of the music industry. In the late 1970's and early 80's, that music was usually loud and raucous; by the 21st century, I would much more likely find solace in places like the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel or even The Embers Lounge at the Cleveland Airport Holiday Inn, listening to someone's interpretation of American classics. Still dark, just no longer smoky.
Among my favorites are "Pick Yourself Up", "Exactly Like You", "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "I'm In The Mood For Love", "On The Sunny Side Of The Street", and, of course, "The Way You Look Tonight". Since their original composition, these songs are still performed multiple times a day around the world by a rich variety of artists, if not in shopping malls and elevators. The other thing they have in common is that they, and many others, had their lyrics penned by Dorothy Fields, one of the most successful and least known lyricists of the golden age of American music.
Although born in New Jersey in 1905, Fields grew up in New York City where her father mostly worked as a comedian on the vaudeville circuit. When that medium began to subside, he shifted to musical productions, meaning that his daughter was exposed from an early age to theatrical life behind the curtain. This became her world and would remain so until her death in 1974.
While originally a performer, with her greatest success realized in the 1920's as part of a comedy duo on the London stage, Fields started noodling around with lyrics during her idle hours backstage until she came to the attention of the composer Jimmy McHugh, with whom she collaborated on producing the music for an otherwise forgotten production known as The Blackbirds of 1928, a popular pairing of musicians and singers both black and white. As was common with musicals in those days, it began its trial period as a nightclub revue and floor show, in this case at Les Ambassaduers Club on New York's 57th Street. When it moved to Broadway, it was one of the most successful shows of that decade and Fields found herself much in demand from that point forward.
Many of her lyrics would be heard for the remainder of that decade at The Cotton Club, as Duke Ellington, then its music director, became a fan of the McHugh-Fields collaborations. The fact that they didn't mind composing for black performers expanded their potential fan base so that their songs found a broader audience than most, especially when radio transmitted their oeuvre far and wide.
As was the case with novelists like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, songwriters, too, were lured to Hollywood in the 1930's with the advent of "talkies". Being no different, Fields went west and found herself teamed with Jerome Kern to provide the soundtrack for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, Swing Time. From that film, "The Way You Look Tonight" won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1936.
Not to be limited solely to providing lyrics for stage and film scores, relying on her familiarity the theater world she teamed with her brother as a librettist, that is, the person who writes the play, or "book", around which the musical numbers are organized. Fields warmed up for this by writing three musicals for Cole Porter and then, at the high point of American stage music, worked with Irving Berlin when he provided the music and lyrics for her script for Annie, Get Your Gun. It would become the most popular musical of the late 1940's.
She would continue to write, sometimes as a lyricist, as in Sweet Charity in the 1960's, sometimes as both the lyricist and librettist, as in 1959's Redhead, a popular vehicle for Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse that won five Tony Awards, including that of Best Musical, and earned an historical footnote for being the first musical murder mystery.
Dorothy Fields is remarkable to me for two reasons. The first, which harks to a pet peeve of mine about musicals in general, is that her songs never seem to be forced into the structure of the libretto, but are a natural part of the plot structure. The second, and greater, is that while her lyrics ranged over the course of forty years, from Jazz Age jive to the hipster slang of the mid-1960's, they never strike an odd or discordant note. For her words to suit both the differing times and the style of singers as disparate as Adelaide Hall and Ethel Merman, and dancer/choreographers like Astaire and Fosse, is remarkable. That's what translates her lyrics from talented composition into art.
As is noted in Michael Feinstein's appreciation of Fields' contributions to theater and performance music:
Unlike teachers, mothers are not required to pound their boys into a cultural and political mold. Rather than being appreciated for the future explorers, warriors and leaders they were designed to be, boys are viewed as defective little girls. Teachers want them to love reading and play nice, and no one wants to know where their hands have been. What is the real trouble with boys? Well, simply put, they are not girls.
Boys are no longer judged by their developmental standards. We have lost sight of a very basic tenet of humanity, one that our ancestors understood since the beginning of time: girls are very different from boys. Boys with uniquely masculine strengths, once prized, are no longer valued. In fact, these traits of boyhood are considered dangerous, even pathological.
When an educational institution begins to resemble less a place of learning and more a place of wanton emotional abuse, it's time to give it some scrutiny.
This is the principal. I've searched their entire website and cannot find any regulations regarding haircuts. [Update: Now no one may search for this as the website for the entireschooldistrict has been pulled offline. So much for bravely standing by one's decisions. It was inadvertent, but I suspect the students have learned an object lesson from this.]
So, according to the presiding bishop, to whom I have publicly vowed obedience and from whom seek guidance and direction, if I were to question [aka "deny", I guess] the contentious and sometimes dubious "science" that directs too much of the conversation about climate, weather, and the environment, I am figuratively blind, immoral, and rejecting of what sounds like a private knowledge of God.
Additionally, I am akin to those who resisted the civil rights movement and am threatening to the livelihood and survival of people in the developing world.
Clearly, I don't deserve to be an Episcopalian, as so, so many have also come to realize during the past fifteen years.
By all means, let's make the church's primary concern that which is of least importance to those whom we would evangelize. We can call it reverse evangelism.
Quote: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.
If I were asked, during my years within the ivy-covered walls, to define college, that's almost exactly what I would have said. Pity that what was once an intellectually stimulating forum has become a place of refuge from having to listen and to think. Then again, it's only Brown.
"It isn't? I thought surf music was just The Beach Boys."
I have had this conversation and variations of it whenever some well-meaning individual tries to understand my eccentric hobby. It's natural since most normal people understand surfing through either the music of The Beach Boys [only one of whom, the drummer, actually surfed] and the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies of the mid-1960's. [Frankie and Annette didn't surf, either.]
Also, the "surf lifestyle" has been mainstreamed in fashion and graphic arts to the point of parody. Even those of us who engage in the sport/hobby, and thus are more familiar with its reality, can fall victim to it. We sometimes bleach our hair, we use obscure slang when describing waves and technical maneuvers, we see the invisible line that exists between those who surf and those who don't, and we have a hierarchy of achievement, the highest level being that of "Waterman".
Just for fun, if one enters the term "surf lifestyle" with a popular Internet search engine, one will receive almost 37 million references [what the puzzlewitted call "hits"] in less than one second. In fact, so pervasive has the "lifestyle" become that I've dropped my long-standing subscriptions to both Surfer and Surfing magazines, as both now seem nothing other than bound, glossy, and colorful adverts with little reference to the hard science of hydrodynamics and its adherents.
I have noted elements of surf culture before, especially with the art and car customization of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and their influence on mainstream culture, but I wonder how many realize that a sound that we commonly associate with the electric guitar as used in rock and other forms of pop music actually is from the true and original surf music. Its originator is Richard Anthony Monsour, known by the stage name of Dick Dale, who, despite rapidly approaching his 78th birthday and having twice survived cancer, is still displaying in live performances the technique that made the surf sound popular and evocative.
Oh, yes, unlike those mentioned above, he actually is a surfer.
Dale was born in Boston to a working class family that, in the great Western migration of the post-WWII period, moved to southern California when he was a teenager. Personally, I can't imagine how great it would be to transfer from the snow, ice, and grime of Massachusetts to the sunny climes of L.A. County in one's formative years, but it clearly made a difference to Dale. Already a self-taught musician, proficient in ukulele, tarabaki, oud, and drums [Dale was of Lebanese descent, which explains both some of the instruments in his repertoire and also the Arabic rhythms in his own compositions], once in California he became both a surfer and, naturally, a guitarist.
I could describe his technique, but it's much easier to display it:
Sharp-eyed viewers will note the the strings on Dale's guitar are, in effect, upside down with the higher strings on top. This was because Dale was left-handed and, as guitars favoring lefties were rare in the 1950's, he simply re-strung a right-handed guitar to favor his style. Even after left-handed guitars became more available, he was set in his technique and continued to use an upside-down right-handed set-up.
The rapid pick work and lighting fast scales that were his hallmark were in evidence from the very beginning. However, in addition to what was required in the actual playing of the instrument, another, previously passive, element was necessary for the sound. While electrically amplified guitars had been in use for over a decade, the guitar was making its pilgrimage from an ensemble to a lead instrument and the amplification equipment was becoming more and more important. Dale realized that it was not just his fingers that could shape the sound, but changes in the flow of electricity from instrument to amplifier, especially when using absurdly thick guitar strings.
When played in ensemble with an orchestra or combo, the guitar amplifier is generally set to #3 or #4 on the volume dial. Dale would turn his amp all the way to the right to the #10. While this produced the volume and some of the sound quality for which he was looking, it also ensured that the amplifier, or at least its speaker cone, would not survive too long without becoming a casualty to culture. In short, they blew up.
This was such a predicament, especially as Dale had gone from performing in small venues to being the weekly headliner at the 3000 seat Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, that it was Leo Fender himself who came to the rescue by developing what is now known as the Single Showman Amp. Thanks to this deus ex machina provided by the inventor of the guitar pickup [that's the device that translates sound into electric impulse], no one had ever played louder than Dale, to the delight of the teenagers who gathered at the Rendezvous and the horror of their parents and audiologists. Between the two of them, Dale and Fender created the "heavy metal" sound.
Thus it was here that the first, true "surf" song was heard, complete with all of the elements of style that have since become the convention of the genre.
By 1963, Dick Dale could safely label his second album The King of the Surf Guitar. That same year, the first in the series of "beach movies" made by American International Film studios, and starring the previously-mentioned Avalon and Funicello [and Donna Michelle...sorry, I got lost in thought for a moment], would be made and naturally featured some brief performances by Dale, hinting at the energy that he brought to his live shows.
Unfortunately, that same year The Beatles would arrive in the United States and behind them a vast collection of other English bands in what is known to musicologists as The British Invasion. Suddenly, instrumental based music was no longer popular and, save for The Beach Boys and their harmony-driven songs [and massive Capitol Records publicity machine], surf music was relegated to a niche within the very broad world of pop.
It refused to go away, however, much like Dick Dale himself. Surviving both cancer and an infection caused by polluted waters off of the southern California beaches, Dale would become an environmental activist and would return to the stage in the late 1970's to perform for environmental and cancer charities, revivals, and fans of his particular sound; the one created all those years ago in a grubby and under-used facility on Balboa Harbor.
Nowadays, one may hear evocations of the Dale sound offered by contemporary groups too numerous to mention, although a complete, and rather massive, list may be found at the Surf Rock Music website. [I'm partial to Los Straitjackets, myself.] Dick Dale has been and is regarded as a legend by some of the most impressive guitarists in history, including the late Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn. [Dale may be found playing with the latter in the video below. While I can't explain his hair, other than to note it was the 1980's, one can see how much of pop culture found its soundtrack through his musical style].
Oh, and just to reiterate an earlier point, Dale is also a surfer. In 2011, he was given his own position on the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California.
Again, the common denominator is that these are all women teachers. When will someone address the power inequity that exists in education that permits women to feel they have some sort of entitlement to abuse those in their care? If only Title IX worked for both genders. What? It's supposed to? Really?
“The wave is the signature of every experience of life. By understanding the
nature of waves and their characteristics, and applying that understanding to
our lives, we can navigate life with a little more grace.” ― Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things - Navigating Everyday Life with
Grace
“Sexism can appear very friendly and very welcoming, so in the paper we said that sexism can act like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Goh said, according to an article in the Washington Post. “We add that sexism can consciously or unconsciously cloak itself in friendliness, so in a way it’s more insidious and treacherous than hostile sexism.”
I wish that those in power who call for an "honest national conversation about race" really meant that they wanted to have an honest national conversation about race, rather than stoke tragic circumstances to gain votes, sell newspapers, encourage cable news viewers, increase their public speaking fees, and enable their "charitable" foundations. I really wish some of my ordained colleagues weren't so compliant in promoting this nonsense, but they sometimes need to burnish their own credentials as social justice warriors and this is the easiest way to do so.
Meanwhile, in the reality that is Ferguson, there are burned and destroyed businesses, toxically angry people, continued violence, and social disruption. In other words, all of the benefits of the secularized society.
[I'm also noting the irony involved with some actions by the author of this piece. Back when this story was news, he was blocking people on Twitter, including prominent and legitimate public thinkers, for even suggesting the same thing he now realizes himself.]
No kidding [says this Episcopal priest in the midst of the violet season].
It's also used by us, Lutherans, some Methodists, Copts, and others; even some Congregational churches who, according to one pastor I know, regard it as a "viable marketing tool". [I think he meant to say a "valuable devotion for evangelism", but Congregationalists...you know.]
Three things that engendered a hearty guffaw from yours truly:
1. "They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn't on TV. “Which is strange because I’m from Texas,” said Nick McCoy, wearing a T-shirt advertising his dorm and getting ready to shoot."
Right, because everyone in Texas owns, keeps, and uses guns.
2. The article's headline: "Gun industry’s helping hand triggers a surge in college shooting teams"
There has to be some logical explanation for these college students violating the carefully crafted narrative of the media. I know! It's the "gun industry" that's making them do it!
3. "And they acknowledge that many in society don’t think about firearms the way they now do — that it’s less about the gun, as one student put it, and more about who is using it."
Wow! It took the opportunity for real knowledge outside of the elite bubble, but an Ivy Leaguer actually figured out the truth behind it all. It's "more about who is using it."
I wish Connecticut politicians, who insist on passing laws that are unenforceable and directed only at law-abiding gun-owning citizens, would figure this out.
[Disclaimer: I'm an Ivy Leaguer who has shot guns. Go and hide now.]
Just about everything we thought we knew about the evils of cholesterol and fats has turned out to be wrong. The doctors, the nutritionists, the dietitians, the heart societies, the experts at Health Canada, the food pyramid that hung on the wall in school – the entire health and medical establishment, in fact, have been perpetuating a big fat fraud.
" … the world is a work of art, set before all for contemplation, so
that through it the wisdom of Him who created it should be known …"
—Basil, from Exegetical Works, On the Hexameron
"Sharks are beautiful animals, and if you're lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you're in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don't see sharks." - Sylvia Earle
I was once jammed onto an airplane in the midst of a gaggle of well-fed corporate men and women who were highly charged after attending a week long "team-work and incentive" workshop in Las Vegas. After the third pass of the liquor cart, my well-lubed cabin mates were dancing in the aisle to the dulcet tones of Shakira and Justin Timberlake, poorly navigating the various armrests and safety features of the Boeing 767, and chanting slogans inherited from their conference. Chief among them was "WE SWIM WITH SHARKS. WAHOO!!!"
Yes, it was a long flight. One of the few things that lightened the ordeal was that I was traveling with my surf buddy, BoonieJackson, and we had just spent the week driving up and down the Pacific Coast Highway surfing every beach that looked worthy of the stoke. After the fourth or fifth "WAHOO!!!", we traded a bemused look.
See, we had spent seven days literally swimming with sharks, and not as a corporate metaphor, and knew that it was hardly the pinnacle of physical or moral courage. All it meant was that we had been in the water.
Now it's true that there have been injuries and fatalities associated with shark attacks on surfers, especially with that of friend-of-The Coracle, Bethany Hamilton. However, more surfers have drowned or suffered significant head trauma on submerged coral than have ever encountered a shark. This writer has surfed for forty-six years in various world waters and, while he has seen his share of the genus Carcharodon, he has never been menaced by them. This is also true of the sharks encountered while bonefishing in the flats of the Florida Keys, sailing off of Cape Cod, and scuba diving the Palancar Reef. They are always there, but they tend to keep their own counsel.
However, it goes without saying that sharks have a reputation. There was a time when it was common for ocean-going pleasure craft to carry "shark guns" on board. These were usually salt-water resistant shotguns or rifles used for deer hunting. Ernest Hemingway famously employed a Thompson Sub-Machine Gun on board his fishing boat, Pilar, and once, while attempting to kill a shark that had been hauled aboard while sail-fishing, shot himself in both legs with a .45 Colt.
There are also shark fishing competitions, specially designed shark spear guns and pneumatic knives, and multiple recipes for shark parts, popular in the Pacific Rim countries, that require an alarming level of slaughter. There have been many, many movies and even a few novels that present sharks as a rapacious predator that will automatically attack any human in the water.
A few years back, a couple of Hawaiian surfers, tired of the waves being crowded by amateurs, took some old, broken surfboards, cut what looked like shark bites out of them, and liberally distributed them about the beaches of the North Shore. Suddenly, the surf wasn't as crowded any more. Hence, as with my plane cabin mates, the employment of the shark as a metaphor for danger even among those who work in some of the safest jobs ever known in human history.
It would take quite a novel thinker to work against that current of common thinking about sharks to truly study them and present their much more complicated role in the aquatic eco-system. A pioneer, of sorts. Fortunately, a couple of New York City parents created such a pioneer when they decided in the early part of the 20th century to do something that nowadays would get them arrested and publicly shamed on a variety of news shows and on social media. They would, on a near-daily basis, drop off their nine-year-old daughter at the New York Aquarium for her to spend the day, alone and un-escorted; a true "free-range" kid.
Instead of giving her a life's worth of trauma, as would be the case with some of the often soft, coddled children of the current age, it created in Eugenie Clark a robust curiosity about ocean life and eco-systems. She would, because of her parents so "endangering" her, become the pre-eminent expert on sharks and a pioneer for women in the field of marine biology.
Born in 1922, Clark's father died when she was still a toddler and her Japanese-American mother married the famous restaurateur, Nobu, which granted Clark the wherewithal necessary to pursue the considerable academic degrees necessary for her field. These included degrees in zoology from Hunter College and New York University and considerable research work done with Scripps Institutions of Oceanography in California, its eastern counterpart, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute of Massachusetts, and the American Museum of Natural History. Some of her most significant work was done with the U.S. Office of Naval Research, which had both an astronomical budget and the absolute best in post-WWII technology for the study of the ocean.
Most of Clark's studies would take place among the atolls and islands of the South Pacific, including Micronesia, Melanesia, and the Marshall, Palau, and Marianas Islands. To further her research, it was necessary for her to be a proficient swimmer, certified scuba diver [I would remind the reader that this was before scuba diving was made popular by the TV show, "Sea Hunt"], cave diver, and technologically able. Again, she did this, too, at a time when it was so rare for a woman to be involved in these particular sciences that she gained the respectful sobriquet of "The Shark Lady".
While she studied a great many types of fish, it was her work with sharks that gained her most notoriety, as her research reversed many of the assumptions about sharks that were and are common. She wrote numerous articles, both scholarly and popular, on the subject of sharks and published several books, including Lady With A Spear and The Lady With The Sharks [I always thought both sounded as if they were fiction written by John D. MacDonald or some such mid-century pulp writer], and served as a mentor to numerous women in the biological sciences. She was also the founding director of what is now known as the Mote Marine Laboratory.
Not only did she, in the midst of researching the biology of a rather dull flatfish, indirectly discover the most effective shark repellent yet produced, made from the secretions of a Pardachirus marmoratus [or Moses sole, a Red Sea dweller], but she also highlighted what was realistic in the feeding habits of sharks.
As an editorial note, when I first compiled the list of the fifty people to be remembered on Fridays over the course of a year, Dr. Clark was included and, at the time, still alive. My concern was that her scientific and social contributions had been forgotten and her inclusion was to be an attempt to redress that possibility. However, three weeks ago at the age of 92, Dr. Clark died and has since been memorialized in all of the major media. There is much about her to be read on line, so the original reason for posting is no longer as necessary as I once thought.
[Although a non-smoker, she died of lung cancer. Many of those early scuba enthusiasts developed the disease and it is thought to be related to the gas mixtures and the equipment used in diving in those days.]
The handy thing about weblogs, though, is that they can be wonderfully personal. As such, it might be appropriate to note one of her contributions that was left unmentioned in the canned obituaries and vague remembrances in scientific journals. Namely, Clark taught watermen the real nature of sharks.
She was never attacked in any of her nearly 75 years literally swimming with sharks, and only once suffered a wound from one when a sample of a shark's jaws fell against her arm while she was driving in her car to a lecture.
Her learned perspective and positive attitude towards even the most feared of sharks is one that injects a necessary note of reality into any experience in the water. While care always needs to be taken in the open and untamed sea, it is a care born of common sense and a full understanding of one's surroundings.
This portrait of the delicate female bears a striking resemblance to that 50's ideal my mother and other women of her generation fought so hard to leave behind. They didn't like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn't like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn't like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social and intellectual possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her.
Next week in the Lenten Series: Gyno-centric ascetisim, as hosted by our priest associate. In two weeks, feel free to read up on Fr. Thomas Berry, Edith Stein, Brother Roger, Dorothee Soelle, Henri Nouwen, and one or two others if we have time.
...mainly because I went to the YMCA when I was a kid and the Rocky Marciano gym when I was a young adult. That place was no Planet Fitness, that's for sure.
Save for one, the executed were all baptized Christians, most of them Episcopalians.
Then-bishop of Minnesota, The Rt. Rev. Henry Benjamin Whipple, had intervened in the proposed action and convinced Lincoln to execute the 38 instead of the over-300 who were originally to be hanged. Although his actions are generally regarded as heroic, there are some in the aboriginal community who fault him for not successfully saving all of the prisoners. This is a rather raw controversy in parts of the greater Church, as the reader may imagine.
The Rev. Robert Two Bulls, a contemporary Episcopal priest, is attempting to have the slain Episcopalians named as official martyrs with their own date on our calendar. My opinion in this matter is, for now, my own, although I'm rankled when some of the more conservative laity and clergy of the church are dismissive of this initiative as they think it mere political correctness or an example of tedious Episcopal trendiness.
The history of American Indian Episcopalians is largely unknown and rarely taught in any of the Church's seminaries. While a small body of scholars is attempting to address that curricular shortcoming, as we commonly open our regard to many, many of the marginalized groups within our communion, perhaps some consideration could be granted to a collection of people of color who have remained faithful, sometimes in the midst of great hardship and persecution.
As they walked to the gallows on their final day, the contemporary newspaper accounts reported that the condemned sang their tribal "death song". In reality, the Martyrs of Mankato were singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in the Dakota language of their tribe.
Mine is the TV generation, or so I'm told. The truth is more complicated, as is often the case with truth.
Perhaps it was because I achieved my teenage years around the same time that FM was developed, or because cable TV sports had not reached its current ubiquity and, thus, a more traditional medium for listening to baseball and basketball was still required, but I recall most of my best memories of growing up involved listening to the radio. Whether it was the stately tube radio on which my grandfather and I listened to Cleveland Indians games, or the clock radio on my nightstand in our house on East 213th St. from which I cheered the Cleveland Cavaliers onto rare victories during their expansion year, or the rather nice Pioneer receiver in my college dorm, purchased with money made from a summer job, on which I heard the alternative rock music of my generation from stations like the late, lamented WNCR and the now-lamentable WMMS, it was voices on the radio rather than images on a TV screen that brought me a world that was vivid and immediate.
There was a great tradition of radio in Cleveland, especially in regards to the music that would first be labeled "rock and roll" by a metro disk jockey named AlanFreed. In the early 1950's, Freed realized, despite what the commercial interests who underwrote the expenses of his radio station thought, that a new sound was being heard in the small clubs and road houses. As his friend was Leo Mintz, the owner of RecordRendezvous, the most popular record store in northeastern Ohio [and even where, from 1968 until 1982, I bought every album of popular music I owned], Freed knew that young people, flush with 1950's affluence, were buying rhythm and blues songs marked by a torrid beat and incomprehensible lyrics. As these songs were mostly performed by black artists, they were relegated to the "ethnic" stations on the low end of the dial and given their own separate listing on the Billboard charts. Freed felt it was time they were mainstreamed.
This was met with the usual resistance, of course, as smart choices are usually the ones that require some courage, and courage is a rare word in corporations. However, using the leverage that was enabled by RecordRendezous' support of Freed's radio show, and the guarantee of about 250,000 rabid potential listeners, he branded himself the "King of the Moondoggers" and played, late night after late night, this new form of music on "The Moondog Show".
Any sentient human being knows the rest of the story. Rock and Roll became the standard of popular music, shoving big band, jazz, choral, and even true rhythm and blues into their own musical sidestream, and becoming the soundtrack for the remainder of The American Century. Freed would move to New York City in the early sixties and, thus, spread the sound that originated on the shores of Lake Erie.
Although he would die a couple of years before the Summer of Love [which, in Cleveland, was the year after the Summer of Violence], and thus before I began earnestly to listen to the radio, Freed's style and passion would continue to be copied and presented through all of the popular radio markets in the United States. As testimony to his influence, when it was time to choose a city in which to locate the RockandRollHallofFame, there really were no other serious candidates.
It wasn't just in music, however, that new ideas were being presented through Cleveland radio. In the early 1970's, a mundane local sportscaster was given his own radio show and ordered to "make it interesting". If any of the readers are old enough to remember sports radio in the 1960's, that might seem to have been an impossible assignment. However, Pete Franklin, armed with this commission from his bosses, began to seek on-air phone calls from particularly opinionated and abrasive listeners [no shortage of those in Northeastern Ohio], issue forth with pungent observations on the mediocrity that is, by tradition, Cleveland professional sports, openly and loudly question the intelligence and sanity of team owners, and quickly become the only sports radio show to which anyone would listen.
My favorite moment was when he would introduce the nightly report on the Cleveland Indians by playing a funeral dirge.
Like Freed and many others who pushed the envelop of "acceptable" behavior [what a quaint notion, especially in regards to radio], Franklin would be hired and fired in a funicular of employment. Still, his radio persona was so successful that he has been copied again and again, even into the television market through ESPN and similar cable channels so that, if you have never heard of Franklin, you've "heard" him through the heirs of his style. Also like Freed, Franklin would take his act to New York, for better or worse.
It's difficult to characterize Gary D. Gilbert, whose radio name was Gary Dee. When I was in high school, my father, whose office was next door, would drive me to school. It wasn't a very long drive, but I would listen to Gary Dee on the car radio on the way, much to my father's lament, as he found Dee common, unnecessarily hostile, and too loud. This is what made Dee perfect for older teenagers, though, as the conversation in homeroom would always be about whom Dee had verbally abused on the radio that morning and to what extent.
Contemporary "shock jocks" are ubiquitous these days, but Dee was the originator of that manner of attracting listeners. Although he was working on what was supposedly a country music station, he would maybe play, during the course of a four hour show in morning drive time, one song by George Jones or...well, Jones is the only one I remember. The rest of the 240 minutes not claimed by some surprisingly high-end advertisers would be spent encouraging phone calls from the rich crop of eccentrics who lived in the greater metro area. Dee referred to them as "egg-suckin' dogs".
He was cruel to fools, abrasive to political figures, intolerant of authority, and generally representative of every exaggerated quality of the classic American crank. Having said that, he would also frequently host the president of Cleveland's city council, a formidable figure widely recognized as the true boss of the city, and engage in such playfully hostile banter with him that both would be de-articulated with laughter.
There's something to be said about being able to attract the largest radio audience in the Midwestern United States to listen to two grown men laugh like children into a couple of microphones. Well, in radio, it's whatever works.
Dee lived a life similar to the most dissolute of the country artists whose music he was supposed to play on his show. He battled the demon of addiction, would sometimes be in trouble with the police, would make the daily papers with a scandalous divorce, and would also watch his Arbitron ratings soar with every occasion of negative attention.
One Saturday night, my best friend and I, coming back from a baseball game or concert or something, decided, as we knew we were driving through the "mansion section" of the city, to cruise by Dee's home along the lake shore. As we approached his house we saw police lights, several cars parked hither and yon, and a lot of people milling about the front yard. Thinking we were about to approach a crime scene, my friend and I were preparing for a marvelous story to be told in homeroom.
As we got closer to the house, we saw a mad party in progress with Dee standing in his front yard with his left hand around the neck of a whiskey bottle, his right arm around a zaftig, bleached blonde who really didn't look like she was from Cleveland, posing for photographs with about half of the Cleveland Police Department. Everyone present looked like they were completely, in Dee's words, "wrapped around the axle".
My friend, who was prepping to enter pre-med at Case Western Reserve University [and is now a senior surgeon with the University Hospital system in Cleveland] said, "Maybe I should study broadcasting."
I could speak at length about Dee's influence in this particular corner of the medium, but I will simply note that the fellow who hosted the afternoon drive time show on the same station copied Dee's style. His name was Don Imus. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?
All of these memories were brought to mind the other day when one of my students told me that she was working on a study of the influence of radio on culture. Since broadcast, commercial radio has mostly surrendered to satellite stations and MP3 players, it amazed her that once upon a time there was a free, open forum for the expression of opinion and art that pre-dated the Internet and social media. "It wasn't as backwards as I thought," she noted.
No, and in many ways, it was even broader and more accepting of new ideas than is the tightly constrained and politically sensitive Internet. While TV brought us images of the world, radio brought us a far greater range of ideas and expression in a rapid and nimble format.
Or, as a program director for whom I worked in my radio days once said, "It's amazing how much you can see with your ears."
Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it. They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as teachers used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. “There are different pressures on boys,” says Mr Yip. “Unfortunately there’s a tendency where they try to live up to certain expectations in terms of [bad] behaviour.”
There is little for boys or young men in education these days as the institutions are female-oriented in their concerns, style, and structure. This should hardly be news to anyone who has observed educational trends over the last 25 years. Couple that with bizarre dictates on the part of college and university administrations using orientation workshops that identify college-age men as potential predators and rapists and what is created is a remarkably unwelcoming, even hostile, environment for boys and men.
Give me $10,000 a year per male student and I could turn them into scholar-gentlemen who could quote Shakespeare, solve for x, construct a house, speak in public [and in two languages, at least], enjoy learning and excel in most any situation in which they would find themselves. Unfortunately, since my program would not satisfy educational nannies and Title IX bureaucrats, it would have no use in the current century.
At @emilyslist event, Sen. Mikulski gives thanks for "little bundles of joy." She's talking about campaign checks.
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) March 4, 2015
"Science" has become a word often employed by liberal arts majors to silence disagreement, I suppose that's due to the lucrative and eschatological environmental movement.
So, if I understand this correctly, a Caucasian woman at a magazine just told me, a half-breed, that I was a racist against my own people because I eat as I want. I'll enjoy informing the other members of the tribe about this at the August pow-wow.
[A cultural note: "Native American" is a term invented by predominantly Caucasian academics in order to appear not to give offence to a racial group. I've sat in faculty lounges where those present studiously use "N.A." while, at the same time, making jokes about casinos. So much for racial sensitivity.
What is preferred is that one is identified by tribe. If the tribal affiliation is unknown, then it is acceptable to use the generic identifier of "American Indian". Yes, that's right.]
A long article, but worth it if you're interested in philosophy and science, how they were once related, and what science has become in this mercenary age.
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