I put $150 of gogo juice in the van, cash in a coupon at the mickey dees, and note the full moon—almost. Griz on the radio cuts through the Americana acoustics normally swirling through the RV.
Jasper, annoyed at the bumps in the road, amplified by the long chassis and pounds of gear, pots and pans, circles his tail and lays down between the front seats.
Dolly Parton is dead and I’m looking for somewhere to point my wheels. I slap Dollywood into the GPS and decide eight hours ain’t too much to be there to pay tribute to an icon of icons. In an era where everything is iconic.
I punch an idea in for a sticker, Dali Parton. Maybe I can get that for sale tonight while it might score me a few more gallons of black gold.
These drives through West Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee are tales of my not so distant past. I tried to outgrow it, the bad financial decisions on vehicles, the endless pavement, hours of outlaw country on Sirius XM with Buddy and Jim and Sunny and Elizabeth. Now I’m streaming from my server, Justin Townes Earle comes on, and then Commander Cody, and I’m lost in the ozone again.
I tried to outgrow the road, the loneliness, the exhaustion (Jasper woke me up four times last night with an upset stomach). But I’m so addicted to my phone that one of the only ways I know how to get away from it is to pay attention to my windshield and mirrors. And even then: CarPlay. Text messages. A friend needs a few bucks for coffee and I’ve learned from experience that if you only have $5 to your name that coffee is a great way to spend your last dollar. If you got $20, a pack of smokes and a coffee is a solid investment.
Eight years since I touched the stuff, tobacco, but I still roll an air spliff and smoke it in my imagination every so often.
If I’m gonna be in Knoxville then I ought to hit up my old friends, deep in the domestic life, a whole crew of kids that I haven’t seen in seven years, when I drove out to DC to start the job I’m now on sabbatical from. A picture her daughter drew is on my wall in my office and I think back to the years of all of us smoking hookah or cigarettes and making out best guesses at what the future held for us. Did it meet our expectations? On paper, you get everything you dreamed of and you start to understand why you have to be careful for what you wish for.
Emmylou singing Green Rolling Hills comes on, while I’m rolling through West Virginia myself.
‘Cause the hard times everywhere Can’t find a dime to spare These are the worst times I’ve ever known
It’s true. I really can’t think of a time in my life where it’s been this bad for so many. And yet, you drive around this country, vast and open and mostly sparsely inhabited, you wouldn’t know anything was amiss in the Great American Project.
I was thinking about another trip I did to Tennessee in December 2020. Hiss Golden Messenger was doing a show at City Winery and I hadn’t seen a live act in nine months. I looked up the distance: 666 miles to the venue from the basement I was renting in Fairfax Virginia near Mount Vernon.
I threw a mattress pad in my Xterra and hit the road that night for the show the next day. It was a double header and M.C. Taylor was doing two shows… Double worth it. HGM is maybe the act I’ve seen live more than any other. Hallelujah Anyhow was a spiritual crutch throughout the pandemic, living on a new coast, transitioning from love-and-light music festivals to standing up with hope in the political arena, standing with Quakers as COVID collapsed what was left of our safety nets, Black Lives Matter exposed the rot at the core of our systems, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death revealed the generational failures in store for our intrepid democracy.
The votes were still coming in and the Biden-Trump election was on a razors edge. Proud Boys had spent the last two months terrorizing DC. I was seeing terrorist threats every day on TheDlnald and /pol/ was planning the January insurrection if thy didn’t get their way.
I made it about halfway to Nashville that night and woke up in Bristol VA, birthplace of country music and continued down the road for the show that night. Then, a few miles from Knoxville, folks started honking and screaming out the windows. I was confused at first and then I thought… maybe… I switched the radio to the news. They called Pennsylvania for Biden. There was no path left back for Trump. It was over. The long national nightmare was over. Step back Jack from the Darkness.
As I enter my username and password to the back-end of this site, I click the little ‘Remember Me’ button. If only it were so easy.
Memory is a tricky goose. It appears as if a bell curve, and certainly not binary. Our earliest memories begin years after our entrance into this world, and our final memories disappear as soon as they appear, if we are lucky enough to have what remains of a memory in our final moments and years.
A nostalgic library bookshelf filled with books and historical artifacts. Photo by Esma Nur Büyükgüçlü.
Not Dark Yet
I read recently with some sadness about writer Seth Rogovoy’s recent Parkinson’s diagnosis, a process I am all-too-familiar with having watched it melt away my brilliant grandfather over time. Pop-Pop’s sharp, acerbic wit coupled with his professional knowledge in law and engineering were his defining features. And so too, goes all the memory and knowledge with it. It seems appropriate that the Dylan song I have most been focused on this month, Not Dark Yet, captures this chapter:
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there I was born here and I’ll die here against my will I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Dylan seems torn on the idea of who is moving and who is standing still, us or time. He contains multitudes after all, as he says in the NY Times recent featurette On Being 80, “when you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”
Train Wheels Runnin’ Through the Back of My Memory
Rogovoy’s own archive is spanned across multiple websites, a sort-of treasure hunt across Substacks and WordPresses and old HTML troves. His writing and first-hand accounts of the blossoming alt-klez scene in New York and surroundings makes me feel a deep sense of anemoia, a nostalgic longing for a place I never was. That is one thing that all of these iconic writers and chroniclers of musical history have in common: the way they elicit in me a sense of placelessness in my present and a belonging to something simultaneously infinite and finite.
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett recently posted on Facebook that she was conducting an interview with Mark Slobin for an upcoming Festschrift. And as I continue my research, so many luminaries reaching retirement, folks I admire and look up to, now emerita…
Just a few that come to mind, and many others… Jeffrey Summit, who recorded and wrote liner notes for the album on Abayudaya music for Smithsonian Folklife. Kay Shelamay at Harvard. Benjamin Brinner at Berkeley. I don’t know if Philip Bohlman is retiring, but University of Chicago is winding down many humanities programs, including their ethnomusicology department. Dr. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, herself, of course, from NYU.
Sunrises and sunsets, but with them, deep encyclopedias of inherited and hard-earned knowledges. And though much of their research is contained in books, how am I supposed to read and acquire all of that knowledge in just one lifetime, while balancing my jobs and responsibilities, especially to Jasper, my dog, who looks annoyingly at me when I’m in a deep-think and should be walking him instead.
It may be that their writings open up to me the vast trove of songs almost forgotten. And with that near-involvement of musical memory, it becomes my prerogative, my responsibility, my burden to remember, lest the song be lost and forgotten, a prayer never to be uttered again.
I wrote recently, well, spoke into my notes app, some thoughts as I am reading and encountering Josh Kun‘s Audiotopia on many levels of interest and understanding. Those audiotopias, “of music as an enacted, lived utopia that struggles against the constraints of racialization and nation-building in order to configure an alternate world of survival” have been deep on my mind.
“Music is a codex of memory,” I thought. “It is a living, dynamic poem, written at some point and yet belonging to the present. A song cannot be owned once birthed. It lives an eternal life until it is forgotten. It is more an instrument for keeping time than it is bound by it.”
If I seem pre-occupied by death and memory lately, it perhaps is because I am more deeply diving into studies of memory, collective, in particular. If a critical function of fascism is the erasure of history, then time, I suppose is Mussolini in disguise. Hey Siri, play Lowell’s “G!d is a Fascist”.
The sun seems to shine here forever I’ve learned to crave shitty weather Something to make me feel human Like LA ain’t one big illusion, yeah
Every Grain of Sand
In hopes of better understanding and resisting the erosion, I just had the first workshop in a summer-long metadata training from UCLA’s Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP). And while I am not yet custodial over any specific archive, I find myself regularly moving around terabytes of data and digitizing records and printed material that I cannot find anywhere else on the internet. Last week, three new records acquired of Jewish music produced in summer camps in the 1970s. Two of them are not on Discogs or MusicBrainz.
Geeking out on metadata is a longtime special interest. One of my music mentors at the Academy for the Performing Arts, the great Mike Simmons, once gifted me with a massive library of meticulously organized mp3s. Somewhere along the line, those files died out on an external drive that got too shaken and not stirred. Those old external HDD enclosures on FAT32 file systems moving around from dorm room to dorm room, those files never stood a chance. But it instilled in me a respect for ID3 and I remember how often I would organize my iTunes playlist to find any file missing Artist tags. That practice continues today, with complex file management systems utilizing MusicBrainz Picard, Mp3tag, Lidarr, VinylStudio, and custom scripts that source and match lyric files to all of my music.
A view of one of my music folders
My current efforts are more resilient, time-intensive, and expensive. I am currently in flow on setting up my secondary back-up NAS which will be stored in California, the most secure spot I have outside of Baltimore. Inconvenient if I need to do an actual restoration but at least completely protected from regional natural disasters.
Buying two new 14TB drives has become financially repressive in the current storage war we are in as AI influxes the cost of storage to nearing double what it was just a few years ago. So, two used drives from eBay with 35,000 hours are now sitting in a two-bay NAS as I set up my mirror and seed. They appear to be healthy enough per the S.M.A.R.T tests. Just between my two NAS set-ups, we are totaling near 70TB of base storage (split up into a variety of RAID components). It has been thousands of dollars and thousands of hours just to break up with Cloud services.
For me, it has been worth every penny and minute, for everything I’ve learned along the way. Perhaps this tension between the cloud and physical media is a metaphor for my own discomfort with my own mortality. One day, all that I have experienced will move into the great cloud in the sky. I remember when we brought Natalia Lafourcade to the Musco Center for the Arts. Her version of “Remember Me” from Coco…
I don’t know if I struggle more than others with this idea of personally and collectively losing knowledge and losing mentors and losing the depths of experience. Or maybe everyone feels this way and we don’t talk about it as much as I think we should. Or maybe everyone’s talking about it and I’m just one voice in the chorus of those furious with G!d about the unfair deal we’ve been dealt: to experience the divine for such a short time.
And I suppose I should wrap this post up, but first I gotta link to a great new release from the incredible Swamp Dogg, whose new record Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife is, in his typically too-honest, too-real, a Final Approach to the one damn thing we surely all have in common.
I said goodbye to the runaway me Opened the door and set the captive free Marked every storm that I made it through Kept every scrap that the fire grew My name is in the logbook, signed in grace Worn out, the doubts have shattered my faith If mercy is fuel, then I’ve got enough I’m taxiin’ home, smooth on the run
Sidewalks, Fences, and Walls: An Addendum
Writing this made me wonder whether Swamp Dogg and Bob Dylan ever had any connection. Sure enough, there is a great one, thanks to Dylanoligist Tony Attwood. Dylan recorded a version of “Sidewalk, Fences, and Walls” in 1986/7, available in the outtakes for Down in the Groove. Dylan would have heard the version by Solomon Burke, who he shared a mutual admiration for. The song was originally written by the “Southern soul music maverick Jerry (Swamp Dogg) Williams, Jr.”
Like it’s the last night of our lives We’ll keep dancin’ till we die
The Little Free Record Library in front of my home in Hampden, Baltimore, MD. Photo by Suzie Ross
Well, Spring is already nigh, and my record collection has been asking me whether I even care about it. The answer is, of course, but honestly, not as much as I used to. At least, for some of you that don’t get listened to, having you does not bring me as much joy as buying you did.
A lot of new stuff is coming in. There’s a few new Jewish summer camp records I found on eBay, including one from Blue Star Camps in North Carolina in 1979 and Brandeis-Bardin Institute, where I grew up at (I’ve been deep in a Max Helfman rabbit hole). There’s a box of 250 Jewish CD’s of various sorts that were donated to me by a dear friend from her synagogue that had them sitting in a closet, gathering dust and are awaiting cataloging, ripping, scanning, and writing metadata into MusicBrainz/Archive.org.
And another unknown amount of records and a mandolin and a couple of other string instruments that were willed to me by my Uncle Mickey, my Grandfather’s brother, who died last month with a treasure trove of 33’s, analog recording gear, instruments of all sorts, and an incredible legacy. Uncle Mickey was my first exposure to Old Time music. He played in a banjo orchestra for decades. He taught music all around Southern California, including at Cal State Los Angeles.
I love putting my producer hat back on a few times a year. I spend so much time behind the computer, moving pixels around and submitting invoices, sometimes I forget the work that I’m doing is a spiritual practice. It is a practice that I share with professionals around the country at the intersection of faith, justice, and narrative development.
It seems strange, really quite strange, that sitting at the top of my music library tonight, the most recently added album, and there have been many recently, is Mahler’s 5th with the face of the MTT on the cover. Just three days after I added it, with the intention to listen to it in the next week, I read the news today of the death of the great conductor, composer, and arts leader.
The news broke into my feed from the Milken Center, via UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music ofAmerican Jewish Experience. While so many organizations and artists are honoring the Maestro, it is fitting for the Milken Center to acknowledge Tilson Thomas’ family roots in the Yiddish theater, and his unique position of carrying on the Thomashevsky legacy to new heights, a capstone on a story that mirrors, magnifies, and personifies the Jewish experience in America.
Juxtaposed with the complexity of Mahler’s thundering dissonant pageantry, I sit down to reflect on that narrative. And Tilson Thomas is considered to be a particularly masterful interpreter of Mahler, for reasons that I’m sure would be fun to learn.
Last weekend, we held Friends Changemaker Weekend for the first time. A merging of Spring Lobby Weekend and Quaker Public Policy Institute, we brought an intergenerational mix to Washington D.C. (well, Arlington, mostly) for 3 days of advocacy training, community-building, and finally, a lobby day against funding for this absurd war in Iran.
One question that came up was “what was one of your earliest memories of advocacy?” I shared with a few people at my table memories of protesting the Iraq War on the street outside of my high school, a distinctly unpopular opinion in conservative Orange County. I still remember the smug, snide faces that Taylor Smith would make about it in Biology class. There was also a Beard for World Peace Facebook group somewhat soon after, though it must have been towards the end of high school, since we didn’t get access to Facebook until we got our .edu emails.
impressed
melancholy
hopeful
energetic
accomplished
