Gina Harris's Blog, page 45

Labor Day hopes

Happy Labor Day!

I start my new job in a week. It makes this time look a little different.

I hope you are having a good day.

I hope you like whom you are.

I hope your needs are being met.

I hope you get some good wants met too.

Let's work on that for everyone.

Love,
Gina

Music Review: Mike Ferry

Mike Ferry is a fiddler, songwriter, and composer, with a rather shocking divide in his Spotify catalog.

His two most recent albums, 2020's From Ulster to Appalachia and 2017's Virginia, are both lively instrumentals, feeling very traditionally Irish but also reminding of the trans-Atlantic connection between the two places.

Then there are 2007's Songs For Quirky and 2006's A Feather. It barely sounds like the same person.

There are hints on the earlier albums, like "In Pacem", where you can hear the roots of the later work. It still feels like a conundrum.

I guess a lot can happen over ten years.

It does look like there were some changes over that time, including exploring the Irish heritage of his grandparents.

I prefer listening to the newer music, but I admit that the previous albums make a stronger impression, with a real danger of tracks getting stuck in one's head.

https://mikeferrymusic.net/ 

https://www.facebook.com/mikeferrymusic 

https://www.youtube.com/user/MikeFerryMusic 

https://twitter.com/mikeferrymusic

Wisdom from Audre Lorde and A Burst of Light

There were two specific quotes that drew me to Audre Lorde and A Burst of Light:

“Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

“I just know I must not surrender my body to others unless I completely understand and agree with what they think should be done to it... I know I can broaden the definition of winning to the point where I can’t lose.”

Caring for myself has been something I have been struggling with since I have realized it was something I needed to do. I can't even count the years before when it didn't seem relevant. 

Then, feeling so frustrated with my health and my health care, and knowing that sometimes the things that I needed were not an option, being able to redefine what "winning" could mean seemed like my only hope.

Lorde is an amazing writer, thinking deeply and crafting her words carefully. I might have responded to A Burst of Light no matter what, but timing was important. I needed it when it came to me. That it was decades after it was originally written is interesting, but only crucial in that it made it possible for it to be there.

For Lorde, living with metastasized cancer resulted in clarity. She cherished what she loved more, and was able to recognize what was important and to cast off what was not important. If Sister Outsider teaches about harnessing anger, A Burst of Light may be more about transcending it, even though the causes for anger are still there, and still being fought.

I recognized her as a kindred spirit when her diagnosis sent her to Barnes & Noble to read everything that she could about liver cancer. I recognize the deliberate attempt to live by one's values. 

I am not good at self-care.

I hope to learn. There were three quotes that seem to give a kind of formula, not exact, but important. 

I am going to treat them in reverse order.

“Another secret is to find some particular thing your soul craves for nourishment – a different religion, a quiet spot, a dance class – and satisfy it. That satisfaction does not have to be costly or difficult. Only a need that is recognized, articulated, and answered.” p.123

This should be the easiest, but may be the easiest to feel guilty about instead, which seems vaguely unfair. 

“One secret is to ask as many people as possible for help, depending on all of them and on none of them at the same time. Some will help, others cannot. For the time being.” p. 122 

We know that asking for help is difficult, but what if we did it this way? So frequently and commonly, that none of the requests had to be desperate? There is even hope built in, that requests now may come to fruition later.

 “The energies I gain from my work help me neutralize those implanted forces of negativity and self-destructiveness that is white America's way of making sure I keep whatever is powerful and creative within me unavailable, ineffective, and nonthreatening.” p. 118

There is some fortune in being able to support yourself by work that nurtures you.

That was a dream for a long time, that has been put to rest. However, there are other things I do. I must give some of that time to my creativity and my power.

That is, of course, an important reason to keep up with this blog, which appears to be the main kind of writing that I can manage now, and which I hope does some good. 

That leads to another quote:

 “Most of all I think of how important it is for us to share with each other the powers buried within the breaking of silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease. But that stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.”

There are so many things we are not supposed to talk about: talking about money is vulgar and talking about our bodies is embarrassing and admitting our vulnerabilities is dangerous. It keeps injustice strong and leaves us oppressed and lonely.

I have my honesty and openness. They were not built up overnight but they are strong. That is what I can give, because it is mine.

That is what I will continue to do.

The time we have

I need to preface anything I write today by saying that yesterday we got hit with three deaths over the course of a few hours. Only one of them is really personal, but still...

I was writing about mortality anyway. I have been thinking about death. And yet, my thoughts are not focusing well today.

For the record, two of the deaths were definitely not COVID; I am not sure about the other.

Regardless, there are families that are grieving today. 

I am religious and faithful. Part of what that means for me is that I believe in life after death, and that we will all get to see each other again. Animals too.

I feel pretty sure about that, and that works well for me. Without that, I think there would be all of this existential dread and I wouldn't know what to do with it. 

There was a point in the care giving where I was thinking about death a lot, but it was preparing for my mother to die. It was mainly about things that would need to be done and being ready to get them done so I could make everything go as smoothly as possible for everyone else. I wanted to minimize the pain.

In terms of thinking about my emotions about losing her, that didn't seem like as much of an issue. It will hurt, just as the extent to which she is lost to us while still living now hurts, but that separation will also only be temporary.

That also means that I view my own death as something that would be a transition, but ultimately be a positive one.

None of that makes it not hurt.

Does it make it hurt less? Does it even make it hurt differently? I am not sure.

There are families grieving today.

We do not know how much time we have.

In a way, this is not really that different from yesterday's post, where you have to make your time align with your values as much as possible.

It is important to value people.

It is important that it shows in the way you treat them, so they know that you value them. 

It's important to clear the air if that is what is needed. It is important to say things you feel.

Sometimes people are toxic, and the choices aren't ideal, but that unknown limit on time is also a part of that choice.

And it is really important to not live your life in a way that you are cutting other people's time short with your own rotten behavior and capitalist greed. 

No, this post is not about COVID, yet thinking about those grieving families, and knowing that there have been 641,000 US COVID death, and 4.53 million globally, and how many of those could have been avoided...

What is wrong with people?

Mortality is hard and it is also precious. 

Don't be the one cutting it short.

In the year 2026

One job interview question (and I got asked twice last week) was "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

I have no idea.

I get the question. I have asked the question myself. You ask it to see if the person is goal-oriented or flaky or if you can reasonably expect to have them around for the amount of time that the job lasts.

Being asked nearly brought me to tears. (It's okay; I did not cry and they still hired me.)

It's not just that I have been out of things for so long, making re-entering the work force is a major adjustment that frankly has a lot of anxiety attached to it. It's also that during that time period the world seems to have become ever more unpredictable.

Fascist gets elected, then gets voted out, but a bunch of fascist thugs tried to undo that and apparently were ready to hang everyone in the line of succession, including the vice president who was technically one of theirs.

Climate change contributes to smoky skies, worse storms, plague rats, and speaking of plagues...

Global pandemic that we can't seem to halt because some people have made resistance to knowledge the defining core of their personality. Worth dying for, and especially worth letting other people die for.

So I find it a little hard to think about whether I want to get on a management track or go back to school when I am not sure what kind of hellscape we will be seeing in 2026.

Are there technical writing positions within the company? Maybe I should learn to code?

In the last  part of A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde writes about different things she is working on. She is setting up a new office, and there are graduate papers to comment on, and speaking engagements, I think. She led a busy life. 

What she had then, though, was a lack of certainty about what could be completed. She didn't know how much time she had left. 

What is there time to finish, and is it a good use of time if it won't be finished?

I am living my life every particular day no matter where I am, nor in what pursuit. It is the consciousness of this that gives a marvelous breadth to everything I do consciously. My most deeply held convictions and beliefs can be equally expressed in how I deal with chemotherapy as well as in how I scrutinize a poem. It's about trying to know who I am wherever I am. It's not as if I'm in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living again.

Realistically, my situation is not that dire. As I start working again, I will get a better idea of what I want to do for that. 

It will have to be based on my values. 

Taking care of Mom myself definitely felt like the right thing to do. I still don't doubt that, despite the price paid financially and emotionally. It was the only right choice.

Future job choices will probably not be that stark (I hope not), but I will still make those decisions based on what feels right and appropriate. I will make choices based on what I care about, and what I can manage.

I will make choices based on faith.

I hope it doesn't mean always being broke, but there are no guarantees.

Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing – or loosely asserting – that I can do anything, along with my dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their places, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition.

I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity.

My year of Audre Lorde

I have written before that I often feel a kind of book sense, where I know what to read at the time that I need it. That feels especially true with my introduction to Audre Lorde. 

Of course I knew that she existed; she is quoted about the masters' tools and the masters' house pretty frequently. However, I had never read any of her work before. In 2021 I have read two collections, re-reading them both in a series of four books that needed multiple readings. 

But that started in 2020.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-fragility-author-robin-diangelo-paid-more-for-university-speaking-gig-than-black-counterpart

I am always a little irritated when the go-to sources on racism are white people, especially when they are the sources getting paid. I was irritated with this, but the only thing I could really do (besides sharing the article) was read Austin Channing Brown's book, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness.

I loved it! I read it, read it again, and then made my sisters read it. I was right to do so, because they still refer to it.

So I recommend that book to anyone, but there was also a part where she talks about anger, which had initially felt forbidden to her. In addition to her being a woman (so conditioned to be nice) and being Black (so having to fight the stereotypes of the "angry Black woman"), she is also Christian; there would be many influences telling her to let go of anger as harmful.

I not only related to two of those ways, but I had been feeling a lot of anger at the time that did not seem helpful.

Brown referenced Lorde's Sister Outsider, and being inspired to channel her anger creatively to do good. 

I needed to read that. 

I am not even sure that I learned how to channel my anger creatively from it, but I found the essay collection inspiring. I read it multiple times, worrying about missing anything.

Those were read in December and March, respectively.

Then I saw a tweet. 

Tarana Burke, #MeToo creator, had collaborated with Brené Brown to get several Black people to write about shame and resilience in You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience and the Black Community.

I did need to read it more than once and take notes. Austin Channing Brown was in it again, but this time it was Jessica J. Williams that referenced Audre Lorde, this time for A Burst of Light.

It was beautiful. After reading it twice I went through it again with my most extensive note-taking ever. There was so much for me in there, especially so much for me right now.

I know it is completely possible that I could have seen different things and been led to different books; maybe that would be fine too. 

For how this has gone down, I am grateful.

Music Review: Evil Saints

Evil Saints is a metal band from Arizona.

For the type of metal, they list death, black, thrash, and sludge. While the music is brisk, I would expect thrash to go a little faster, whereas I definitely hear some sludginess reminiscent of Torche. There is a sort of unrelenting darkness but with religious and historic themes (possibly based on medieval Europe) that very much says black metal to me.

Therefore, I am going to say that this may be more for sludge and black metal fans, but I also hear some Metallica, I think.

This is an area where I have to acknowledge weakness; because I am not a huge metal fan. I don't know how much distinction people who are bigger fans would make between the different types, nor how much they would reject or accept one type over another.

Evil Saints' music is mostly instrumental, not particularly melody-driven, and growls and pounds as it drives. If that sounds good to you, this is probably your thing. 

If it does not, then this may not be the band for you, but it is also possible I am not doing the best job of describing it.

In addition to the links below, Evil Saints are available on Spotify with a 30 minute EP, so there is no reason for metalheads not to check it out. Even if you are anti-Spotify, there are three other streaming options.

There is no downside to checking them out.

https://evilsaintsmusic.com/

https://www.facebook.com/evilsaintsmusic 

https://evilsaints.bandcamp.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvelMHaT-yssFX-L0c8inKQ 

https://www.instagram.com/evilsaintsmusic/ 

https://soundcloud.com/evilsaints

https://www.reverbnation.com/evilsaints

https://twitter.com/evilsaintsmusic

Remembering Miss Sharon Jones

I have already written this, but I was touched by all of the affection and caring that was shown in Miss Sharon Jones!

The thing that was delightful was for the first time realizing that she really was short.

She was quoted many times as saying that she was told she was "too fat, too black, too short, and too old". I didn't doubt that she was told that or that the prejudices mentioned could be an issue, but she still never seemed that short to me.

I never got to see her live, but in videos of her performing, she is such a powerful presence on the stage that I never really saw the shortness. Seeing her standing still, next to other people... okay, she was short. 

I can't explain why it made me smile so much. Maybe it was finding something new, or new confirmation of something old.

I did learn things from the movie, but the emotional impact was more one of grief. You see, I knew about the cancer, and about her beating cancer, as the movie shows. I had not seen the movie, but I knew it was there and what it was about. 

Again, she was such a powerful presence, that is probably what influenced my thinking, but I was really sure that she was good. Then it came back and she died. I was not expecting that.

Well, she had a stroke when Trump was elected, and attributed the stroke to that. She died really shortly after, so I feel pretty comfortable blaming him, but also, I had sort of forgotten how I felt about cancer.

Several years ago, three people I knew were fighting cancer at around the same time. They were a woman that my mother worked for, the father of some kids I knew from church and school, and a boy I used to babysit. They had all had the cancer, fought it, gone into remission -- some for a longer time than others -- and then it came back. 

They still fought, but they all died within a relatively short time frame. I remember seeing Larry at Jon's funeral, and thinking that he must have known he was next, and how do you deal with that?

My dramatic conclusion from this was that if I ever got cancer there wasn't going to be any chemotherapy or radiation or amputation, because clearly none of it worked.

That's been about twenty years, I think. It wasn't something that I thought about all of the time, but the thought was still there.

Over these past few years of care giving, I did think about death a lot. Sometimes I was longing for it, but more often I was trying to be prepared for my mother's death. That seemed like the only possible end, and I just wanted to be able to handle it as well as possible.

Then -- when things changed in a way better than I could have expected, but also there was that brief possibility that I might have cancer -- I did start having some thoughts again.

There was some reading that helped me. I will spend more time on that, but also, from watching Sharon Jones, I think I have a better understanding of the fight, because she bought time.

It wasn't even very much time, from one perspective. The initial cancer was announced in 2013, she was treated and cleared in the course of the documentary, and then the return was announced in 2015 with her dying in November 2016. (His fault.)

From another perspective, it was enough time to tour, and release new music and to share love with friends.

Those three people from before all died, but they all got more time with the people they did not want to leave. As much pain as their departures cost, they probably still would have chosen to fight for more time, even knowing in advance.

That is the one guarantee: we all die. 

We can exert some control over when and how. 

There are still a lot of unknowns, but we should be able to derive some clarity from that.

Postscript to Black Music Month

I wrote earlier that I might want to do separate posts on both 20 Feet From Stardom and Miss Sharon Jones!.

As it was, they were both movies that I was interested in and hadn't gotten too. What pushed me forward was a thread on 20 Feet From Stardom, focused on the appropriation aspects. 

Frequently, you have white musicians mimicking sounds they had heard from Black musicians. That was true with Elvis and The Rolling Stones and too many to count, actually. 

Beyond that, they were generally also being supported by Black musicians. The movie focuses on backing vocals, but session musicians also were often Black. Their contribution was crucial, but crediting them was never considered to be so.

For me the most appalling thing in the film was that Phil Specter had The Blossoms record "He's A Rebel" to get it out ahead of another label, but they were credited as the Crystals, who could not record as they were on tour. Then the Crystals needed to try and mimic that sound, causing a shift in vocalists.

Why not just release a Blossoms song?

Then, when The Blossoms recorded "He's Sure the Boy I Love", which was supposed to be theirs, it got attributed to the Crystals again. 

There can't have been a lot of value placed on the individuals by the labels. And it's not surprising to have Phil Specter be terrible, but it is really doing dirt to both bands.

The Blossoms had Darlene Love in the band, and I was familiar with her later work. It also sounded familiar though, and I realized that they had come up when I was going through different girl groups as part of daily songs celebrating Black women. 

I remembered that Cissy Houston was part of one group, The Sweet Inspirations, who sang their own music, and backup for Elvis, and then Cissy had solo songs too. 

The movie also taught me that many of these girl groups had preachers' daughters in them, and church singing was where they got their start. 

That was interesting information on its own, but then added to it backup singing and solo work, there is clearly a lot more to know. As I go back and review all of those musicians, that calls for some more research.

(Just in that list there were nineteen distinct groups, all with at least one song you could still find.)

The Twitter thread mentioned Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and how The Dap-Kings had toured with Amy Winehouse. That was why I remembered to watch Miss Sharon Jones!

That is one reason why I am writing about both films in a single post, but this is also a bridging post.

Miss Sharon Jones! had me thinking about death, and that correlated with some other reading, and that is where I am heading tomorrow.

But yesterday was about that irresistible urge to defend white people and explain away racism, and that was a definite feature of the Twitter thread. That wasn't posted by the author; that was in the replies she got.

This is where it comes back to the appropriation. The Rolling Stones made a lot of money incorporating grooves and dialects into their songs that were not from London. They also took Ike and Tina Turner on tour with them. That was a good opportunity for the Turners, but it doesn't undo the racist structure that emphasizes white profit over equality.

("Rocket 88" was also wrongly credited when it was released.)

I do not expect any one band to solve structural racism; that would be ludicrous. However, when there is a discussion about how racism diffuses culture, and how capitalism and racism support each other, how is it that the instinctive response becomes defending whiteness?

We need to get past that defensiveness, because it stops us from getting past anything else. That is the job of white people. 

I don't know how things look once we stop being defensive, but holding on to that definitely supports racism.

One thing I did was to post songs from several of the artists featured in 20 Feet From Stardom. That is a thing that I have the ability to do. They do have their own music out there, and we do not have to limit our support of them to when they are supporting bigger names.

In addition, one thing that came up in Miss Sharon Jones! was the financial needs of musicians, something I have long been aware of. 

One of the band members was trying to buy a house and had an issue getting approval because of the loan processor knowing about Sharon Jones' cancer, and questioning whether there would be income. 

The health insurance became more important than ever with a cancer diagnosis.

The label had to take out a loan to keep people insured and paid.

No one wanted to pressure Sharon and threaten her recovery (I was so touched with the caring shown in the film), but they also needed to live.

A society with greater financial equality and safety nets will not automatically eradicate racism. In fact, racism will make it really hard to reach that equality. We need to be able to aim for all of that, together.

And we can.

Related posts (there were about eight posts on Black Music Month this year, depending on what you count):

(first) https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/07/black-music-month-2021-overview.html

(most recent) https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/08/daily-songs-inspired-by-black-music.html

White nonsense

Does that title sound racist to you?

There have been some fun reminders of how racism works. Well, there are always lots of reminders, but there have been more food-based ones. That means we are going to talk about delicious foods, all based in Asia and shockingly different from each other.

It started with a white woman taking over congee (rice porridge), which she discovered was great for her digestion. She created recipes that would appeal to white palates and christened herself the congee queen.

(I am not going to link to her or the dumpling woman, but you could find them if you were sufficiently motivated.)

There were discussions about that and the appropriation, and lots of defenses of the woman; after all, it meant she appreciated the food. I am sure all of the other white people she hired (there was a team picture) had also become big fans of congee.

The problem is that she is profiting off of anti-Asian prejudice, where there is an expectation that if the food is made by Asian people it should be cheap, and it might be kind of low-class until a white person elevates it and jacks up the price. The "queen" did not create that situation, but she is upholding the system and profiting off of it. 

There would have been opportunities to promote already existing business or cookbooks. That could have skipped the "elevating" part, where she took these weird foods and made them okay. It would mean the loss of her crown, though, and don't white people have the right to be wonderful and profit off of brown people?

That leads to our next white woman, who had fond childhood memories of this weird Asian market with all of the strange smells and exotic ingredients. She mastered it and had a dumpling and noodle cookbook. 

There was a tweet asking -- generally, not to her -- what the deal was with that. Fumpling queen passive aggressively said she was not trying to be defensive, and she showed some understanding of internet harassment, but then defensively sent internet harassment at the tweeter. That was completely fair because that person had more followers. It wasn't a big enough difference to count, and certainly not with the extra permission people feel to attack women of color, but I had to feel that maybe she hadn't tried hard enough to not be defensive.

This seems like a good time to point out that when you feel affection for a food, there may still be racism tied up in how you perceive that food. This is also true for people. You may love a person, and that does not feel like how you think racism goes. However, when when you are still surprised when they do not conform to stereotypes, that is racism, which is about structure, not feelings.

I could also write about how whiteness is seen as deserving of defense and protection, and maybe mention something about bari-weiss-amy-cooper, but we are on a food theme now, so I am going to go here instead:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/media/gene-weingarten-indian-food-apology/index.html 

The point I want to make is just what a privilege it is to be able to post something petulant, ignorant, and not serious and get paid for that. There are literally thousands of people who say much more pertinent, intelligent things, and instead of getting paid they get abused by people who believe reverse racism is a thing.

It stuck out to me more because a friend had just tweeted about cooking versus restaurant food, and usually she can do better except for Thai and Indian. I had replied that Indian was the one I have decided to let restaurants make for me. That isn't even so much for being labor-intensive or difficult, but just because there are so many different ingredients required, and keeping them on hand versus how often I would cook... yep, just one spice. You nailed it, white guy I had not previously heard of!

Black children are frequently told that they need to work twice as hard to get half as far.

White men, on the other hand... first a stupid column, a digging in harder defense of the column, but a correction from the paper, and finally kind of a mea culpa, but still not sorry and not going to be a better person.

All paid.

That is structural, and it is privilege.

 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/01/asian-food.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/01/baby-corn.html