A piece of junk mail arrived in the box this morning, from a sender “Named a World’s Most Ethical Company® by the Ethisphere Institute.” The who? So I did a little reading.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
“Don’t fucking kill yourself”
Fresca wrote about a YouTube video about not killing yourself. The video’s title: “Using a safety plan to not kill yourself when the world is a shitshow!” Here’s Fresca’s post, with Carey Callahan’s video embedded. Callahan’s message, which comes with many practical suggestions: “Take care of yourself. Don’t fucking kill yourself.”
The post and the video reminded me of a passage from Tad Friend’s 2003 New Yorker article “Jumpers,” about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge:
Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord [a thirty-two-inch-wide beam] they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.”[No thoughts of suicide here, or at Fresca’s blog. But one never knows what might be helpful to someone else, or when.]
Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ “ he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Zippy bangles
[Zippy, May 31, 2017.]
Today’s strip shows that “it isn’t easy being Zippy.” This panel shows Zippy engaged in what Bill Griffith calls “the ‘over and over.’” I was surprised to discover this morning that “stretchable diamond bangles” has real-world referents. Unlike, say, “covfefe.”
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
“He knows that he is a thinker”
Alfred Döblin, “Astralia.” 1912. Bright Magic: Stories, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).
The short stories of Bright Magic are expressionist, extravagant, and sometimes sharply funny. Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”
Another song that’s been running loose through our household: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” the subject of a Soul Music episode (BBC Radio 4). Frankie Valli himself calls this song “one of the most important songs of its time, or of all time, I should really say.” It really is an extraordinary song. This episode made me gleeful.
A related post
“Waterloo Sunset” on Soul Music
[An inspired touch: Soul Music has no announcer providing introduction or commentary. Someone begins talking, and the path to the music might be a surprising one.]
“Lamento Sertanejo”
This song is in my head and heart and shows no sign of leaving: “Lamento Sertanejo,” music by Dominguinhos, lyrics by Gilberto Gil. It’s a song of alienation and dispossession whose title might be translated as “Countryman’s Lament.” I am on shaky ground here about everything but my love of this song.
Here are the lyrics, in Portuguese and in English translation. And here are my two favorite performances of the song from YouTube. There are many, many more.
Dominguinhos, accordion; Gilberto Gil, guitar and voice. October 2010.
Mayra Andrade, voice; Yamandu Costa, seven-string guitar; Hamilton de Holanda, bandolim. Dominguinhos is the audience. August 2011.
I’m waiting on a two-CD anthology of Dominguinhos’s music. There’s no stopping.
[A sertanejo is an inhabitant of the sertão, a region in northeast Brazil. In this song the sertanejo is a long way from home. A Google Image search for sertanejo returns many cowboy hats, so perhaps “Cowboy’s Lament”? I found my way to the first performance via Richard McLeese’s Music Clip of the Day. A Flickr photograph let me date the second performance.]
Monday, May 29, 2017
Cooper-Moore on the air
From the podcast The Checkout, “The Irrepressible Ingenuity of Cooper-Moore.” Cooper-Moore is honored tonight with a Lifetime of Achievement award at the Vision 22 Festival in Manhattan. All best wishes to him.
A related post
Cooper-Moore in Illinois
Trump trumps Integritas
The New York Times reports on the Trump Organization’s “coat of arms”:
It was granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite who built the Mar-a-Lago resort that is now Mr. Trump’s cherished getaway.The Trump Organization made one change in the design it appropriated: the name Trump replaced the Latin Integritas. So now the shoe, or coat, fits.
As the Times notes, “the British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously.” The Trump Organization has to use a different coat of arms for its golf course in Scotland.
#FakeCoats!
On Independent Lens
Farmer/Veteran: “Home from three combat tours in Iraq, Alex Sutton forges a new identity as a farmer, hatching chicks and raising goats on forty-three acres in rural North Carolina.” Tonight on PBS.
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