AnimaMundi

Thanksgiving and Living Between The Ticks Of The Clock

I do not want to sound unthankful. I am thankful to have reasonably good psychic and physical health, friends, a home, food, heat, wine, music, Aldo, our French bulldog and, of course, many other things, tangible or not. Thanksgiving, as a holiday, for me, has always been a thanks for being given what? Life? What I have and what others have not? What I have regardless of what other people have or have not? 

Be thankful quickly though, because the Christmas frenzy has already started. One day to give thanks. That's it. Mark Twain, whose autobiography is currently clocking in at #1 at Amazon , was right on the money here, again, America. What about the other 364 days of the year? 

Ashley Morris, "Treme" Salutes You

Ashley, "Treme" is now in its sixth episode. I think you would like most of it. I also know that you would be on Simon's ass for the verisimilitude  factor. There's plenty of people on the ground looking out for that, don't worry. It's important because all of New Orleans' cultures are trying to speak and be heard. Not an easy thing to do, precisely due to the nuances and feel that many of them invoke on so many levels. You know much better than I about all of that bubbling through. According to most New Orleanians, "Treme" has portrayed your city and its people pretty accurately, more or less. It's the more or less part that is creating the lubricating friction for debate amongst the viewers. That's a good thing. People are talking and thinking about how it has all played out five years later. "Played out" is a relative term, as you well know. It is still playing out, every day, every hurricane season. The next naming season starts in a few short weeks. Oh, and the wetlands restoration has been dealt a fucking blow by BP bigtime. The levees are still not Netherlands-quality and might never be. There has been guilt laid at the feet of those who used papier mache for levee construction. We'll see where that goes, if anywhere.

I don't have to tell you about The Saints and the new mayor. You already knew about that. Greg of Suspect Device who now lives in your great city, said that when your Saints won the NFC Championship it would have killed you if you weren't already dead, big mon. That gave me a good laugh. Actually, you would have had to die again when your Saints got their Superbowl rings. How many times does a young man have to die?

Well, things were on quite a roll until BP had to fuck it up. They will pay. I just hope that the wetlands and wildlife aren't completely screwed, that the fishermen can still bring in their bounty from the Gulf. 

The Hurricane of '38

Last night I tuned into the PBS American Experience show on the Hurricane of '38 a little late. The moment that I tuned in the narrator, the great David McCullough, mentioned Watch Hill and Westerly, RI, the town I was raised in. If you look at a map of the southern New England coast, you can see that New London, CT and Westerly, RI stand a good chance of being in the path of a major hurricane coming up the Atlantic coast. In March of 2009, I was at the shore and took this photo of Napatree Point.

 
Below is Napatree Point before the Hurricane of '38.

"Rhode Island saw the greatest destruction, as wind and tide proved deadly. Along Fort Road in Watch Hill,the beach was swept clean of any signs of habitation. That area of beach has never been rebuilt...  

In New London, Connecticut, the tidal surge drove the five-masted school ship Marsala into a warehouse complex along the docks, setting off a short circuit and fire which consumed a quarter-mile area of the business district -- the worst calamity in New London since Benedict Arnold burned the city in 1781."

From the transcript: Patricia Shuttleworth (West Hampton, L.I.): "About 3:30 or quarter of four, my brother came running into the house, saying, "The water's coming up, the water's coming up." And at that moment, they had to make, again, split-second decisions about what to do with all the people in the house. So they put as many people as they could into that little five-passenger Ford which they had. Mother drove. She put grandmother in and her guests, Father and the other children, but they couldn't fit the help in, so they said, "You'll just have to fend for yourselves." And she said she would never forget the sight of them standing there, waiting, when the water came up."

"In Long Island on the storm's eastern rim, winds slammed into the land at 100 miles per hour. The seismic impact registered as far away as Sitka, Alaska."

My grandparents, my father along with his sister and brothers, were living in New London close to the business district at the time. My grandparents and father had emigrated from Sicily sometime around the end of WW I. I remember my father telling me of that fire, of how their home was almost lost to the inferno.

I also distinctly remember the aftermath of Hurricane Carol in 1954.  My father was a photographer and took me with him the day after the storm. I don't know what happened to those photos, lost to time I guess. But the images of destruction are emblazoned on my memory card. Rows of slabs where homes once stood. One of my aunt Celena's beach homes lying mostly intact on the opposite shore of a salt lake behind Atlantic Avenue in Misquamicut. A glass bottle of milk standing on a door step of a vanished home.

 

 

Library of Alexandria

Some years before I had even heard of the Library of Alexandria, I had a big dream about its contents and its wealth as "the place of the cure of the soul". The books and manuscipts were displayed before me in a special light. It was a humbling dream. It only was years later through reading the works of Carl Jung and E.M. Forster that I learned of the biblioteke, which term actually refers to the Collection of Books rather than the building itself, and its importance in the history of western civilization. In light of the dream, the print copy book versus the ebook is at an interesting nexus right about now.

Ancient Rites and Wine

Grist for a future post and nothing to do with the Sarah Plain turkey video:

"At Rome it appears certain that the deity was conceived to be "increased" or "strengthened" (mactus) by the wine or other offering. There was a tradition that originally the offering was not the animal but with grain with salt and wine or milk. Animal sacrifices there almost certainly were on occasion, and in the later period they are familiar; the god received not only the fat (omentum) but also the parts concerned in consciousness---heart, lungs, liverand gall---perhaps in connection with extispicium (prophecy by entrail examination). Grain with salt and wine were before the slaughter sprinkled over the victim, and there was a preliminary offering of incense (i.e. the exudations, sap of trees) and wine. Incense had apparently replaced native grain or aromatic leaves, as e.g. of the laurel with their gum and and oil, pinguis verbena, of which, as we have seen, the "heads of the gods" consisted. "Incense and wine" appear to have been the customary offering in a supplicatio, and we hear that they were applied by the state to private citizens for that purpose at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. They were also what the dead received, not in vapour as to the gods but directly, as the grease and wine to the bones and the grease to the stones in Homer. Roman deities also received unguent directly. Thus the Arval Brothers "anointed the goddesses"; Lar was anointed; Terminus (the boundary stone) was anointed; upon Pales milk was poured etc."

Richard Onians "Origins of European Thought"

P.S. Onians is best read on the toilet. Keep it in or near the bathroom.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929

Dick Cavett once told a story of Groucho Marx and the crash of 1929. Reportedly Groucho lost about $250,000 buckeroos in the crash. At one point in the hapless trading, he got up and sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" to total silence on the floor.

Chicago Summer 1968

Mark at Toulouse Street recalls some of what went down in the 60's and the aftermath. With the ubiquitous Internets, the whole world is watching takes on a different cast. Pun intended. I do like his Dictator of the Stonertariat, though. It might not have been a bad idea afterall.

Who Are Those People?

Johnny Morris was the house pianist at Jimmy Ryan's on 52nd St in NYC for seven years, appearing with trumpeter Roy Eldridge and later with Spanky Davis. In the latest newsletter from A Place For Jazz, Johnny Morris tells this anecdote. The waiters at Jimmy Ryan's were a surly bunch. No food minimum, only snacks. There was a drink minimum, but only dinky sized bottles of beer. The waiters would refill and wait for people to order more. One waiter in particular really just wanted to make money and didn't care about what was going on in the place. One night some people came by to say hello to Roy Eldridge and gathered up a bunch of the tiny cocktail tables in a corner so they could all sit together. This waiter was very pissed off that these tables were taken from his station. The people who came buy to see Roy Eldridge were: Tommy Flanagan pianist, Bobby Durham dummer, Keter Betts bass,(i.e. Ella Fitzgerald's rhythm section), Connie Kay from MJQ, Benny Carter and Oscar Peterson. It was like a surrealist dream, all these jazz greats in a corner. The clueless waiter asks me "Who are those people with Roy and who do they think they are?" So I said to the waiter, "Please don't say anything. Those are some very famous people. I really feel I'm in a dream, here."

December 1947

The following article appeared in Time Magazine on December 15, 1947, about 8 months after I was born.

"By last week, this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world's most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one. In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara."

Does anyone really need a Hummer?

Ancient Americas

P.J. O'Rourke on Ancient Americans:

"The ancient Americans weren't regular folks. They lived strange, spectacular lives on strange, spectacular continents untrod by man and more remote for them than Mars--or the world of museum curation--is for us. The ancient Americans were tough as hell. They did their share of nasty stuff. But even the Aztec don't deserve to be patronized, demeaned, and insulted by what is--or is supposed to be, or once was--one of the white man's great institutions of learning."