Foster Dickson's Blog, page 45
April 27, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “What’s it take to make it out there?”
[image error]Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a formula? Heck, even an instruction book! Here’s what you do, and you’ll be fine . . . Two centuries ago, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist called it the Lebensplan, the idea that planning one’s life extremely effectively could reduced or eliminate the pitfalls. We’ve been trying to figure these things out for longer than human history has been recorded; we’re still working on it . . . but we’ve got some good clues.
April 26, 2019
“My Source for Some Definitive”: 30 Years since “Closer to Fine”
In the “People” section of the April 26, 1989 issue of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, the headline read, “It’s Full Speed Ahead for Local Indigo Girls.” The article below explained that the folk-rock duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers was on tour with REM, had an album that had gone gold, was about to appear on the David Letterman Show, and had plans to tour with both Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Furthermore, their first single “Closer to Fine” was scheduled to “be shipped to commercial radio stations nationally in late May.” That was thirty years ago today.
Other mentions in the Constitution from that summer shared that the Indigo Girls album had moved up to #74 on the Billboard charts by July, and in late August was at #55. As 1990 began, The Indigo Girls were Grammy-nominated, in the Best New Artist and Best Contemporary Folk Album categories. They won the award in the latter.
Though it never reached the top-ten on the Billboard charts, that album’s first single “Closer to Fine” may be one of the most influential songs from Generation X. Alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Teen Angst,” and “Alive,” “Closer to Fine” grabs at something that a lot of us felt as we foraged through our teenage years at a time when the cheesy ’80s were shifting gears into the fin de siecle angst of the ’90s. Music reviewer Tom Moon, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 1989, put it well:
The fact that it’s 1989 rather than 1970 becomes obvious in the sing-song opening track, “Closer to Fine.” Rather than talking in absolutes, or in the universal terms that dogged much ’60s message-music, the duo simply relates the product of its experience in the innocent language of a ringing, ethnic-sounding folk melody: “There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line / The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”
That same month, the Los Angeles Times described the song as a “wry, warm-spirited celebration of life and its mysteries.” The Austin American-Statesman called it a “philosophically uplifting tune” and remarked, “It features the strongest lyrics on an album that has a lot more to say than most records coming out on major labels today.”
Though I wasn’t exactly a late-’80s folkie, I did and still do like acoustic music, and this song resonated with me, too. It preceded “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which was the opening track on 1991’s Nevermind, and might have been our generation’s anthem had Cobain’s quirky poetics and dissonant sound not caught on like it did. What was particularly appealing were these lyrics about seeking answers from adults, even the supposedly wise ones, and finding none there that satisfied the zeitgeist of an era defined not by Civil Rights protests and Vietnam but by the fall of the Berlin Wall, skyrocketing divorce rates, and “free” credit cards we could apply for on the sidewalk of the college campus. It was a time before cellphones or the internet, when drinking and reading were still source material for teenage searchers. Speaking for myself, I read both Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Albert Camus’ The Stranger in 1988 and ’89 – I was in the ninth grade – and my half-baked brain then cooked up a bittersweet mental soup with those existential ideas, my Southern upbringing, and the rock-music imagery that cast an iridescent lacquer over everything we did. By 1989, our infatuation with the angry decadence of Appetite for Destruction had worn off, and the Sunset Strip had become less interesting to those who never planned on wearing skin-tight leather pants. I may not have been a folkie, but seeing the Indigo Girls standing on the railroad tracks and in back alleys in torn jeans and leather jackets, singing about their zigzaggy personal journey— it lit up my cerebral cortex.
For some of us in the Deep South, the Indigo Girls’ success was another fleck of gold-leaf on a countercultural badge of honor that our homeland never seemed to get to wear. The state of Georgia had produced REM and Widespread Panic earlier in the ’80s, and by the time “Closer to Fine” became a hit, both groups were touring nationally. Document and Green, in 1987 and ’88, had pushed REM all the way into the MTV-fueled limelight, and Space Wrangler came out in ’88, too. Moreover, The Black Crowes were right on the Indigo Girls’ heels, with Shake Your Money Maker in 1990. But the Indigo Girls were unique within this Deep Southern mini-barrage of alternative bands: not only were they female among a passel of raggedy, long-haired boys who built new sounds from their own eclectic record collection, the Indigo Girls were . . . lesbians. In today’s culture, that may sound passe to the point of who-cares, but in the South, in the era of The Christian Coalition and The 700 Club, it was a big deal— and to those of us who saw little appeal in mainstream attitudes, who were looking for a more inclusive way of living our lives, we were intrigued.
After the hubbub over their self-titled album died down, and listening audiences moved on to the next big thing — Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual and Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression came out the next year, in 1990 — The Indigo Girls continued and put out a string of good albums. My personal favorite of their subsequent albums is 1997’s Shaming the Sun, in particular the songs “Shame on You” and “Get Out the Map.” All in all, “Closer to Fine” has aged well, appearing not only the radio from time to time, but also in commencement speeches and academic papers as us Gen-Xers get older and proceed to become the people who didn’t satisfy us when we were young.
April 25, 2019
#throwbackthursday: The Columbine Shootings, April 1999
It was twenty years ago this week that America, its schools in particular, were changed forever by the actions of two high school students named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who carried out a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999. It was reported later that week that the disgruntled, heavily armed boys had set out to commit the violence on Adolph Hitler’s birthday. As a Gen-Xer, who was in my mid-twenties in 1999, I regard the Columbine shootings as a demarcation point for my generation. The youngest of us were born in 1980 and would have graduated from high school in 1998, the school year before this event occurred. Though school shootings did occur before this, during our time too, none was like this, and no school administrator in America could ignore the new reality that a shooting could happen anywhere on any day.
April 24, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Adia Victoria @ Saturn Birmingham”
I’ve got this friend who knows how much I like The New Yorker, but who is also aware that I don’t subscribe because I can’t seem to keep up with weekly magazines, so he passes on a stack to me after he’s piled up a few. When I get them, I thumb through each issue’s table of contents and fold them open to the articles I intend to read, relegating the others to the general-use stack in my classroom.
One morning, a few weeks ago, I grabbed one of those folded-back New Yorkers and hurried to the school bus stop for my monthly duty. I was flipping the pages and had just finished reading “Liberal-in-Chief,” Adam Gopnik’s piece about President Obama, when this woman’s stunningly solemn face appeared. Her glare was framed by a jet-black mod hairdo, and she was surrounded by tall wildflowers. This was Adia Victoria, the text below it explained.
April 23, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing and Noblesse Oblige
[image error]Among the array of colorful posters and artworks in my office are two that I intentionally placed on the wall right above my desk. One is a cardboard Amos Kennedy print with a royal blue background that declares in big block letters: PROCEED AND BE BOLD! Below is the name of Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, who was the founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The other is a screen-printed piece from Standard Deluxe that features two little girls running with an Alabama flag and also a coiled snake accompanied by the words DON’T TREAD ON ME amid the jumble of colorful layers. Living and working in the Deep South, as a writer and teacher intent on seeing things get better, both sentiments seem necessary.
The latter, which comes from the Gadsden flag during the Revolutionary War, is today most often associated with far-right conservatives and gun-rights advocates, though to me it’s more about the generally American, albeit distinctly Southern belief in the greatest degree of freedom possible. This admonition has an ironic presence within Southern culture, considering the region’s historic habit of treading on all sorts of people: African Americans, the poor, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and LGBTQ people. Interestingly, the self-same culture that has many times wagged a finger of warning at the federal government and the rest of the nation about states‘ rights also spawned and fueled one of the world’s greatest movements for human rights.
The former, which lacks that historical baggage, is no less poignant— also only four words, it provides an insistent urging that is something like Winston Churchill‘s “never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.” Mockbee was a Macarthur Foundation “Genius Grant”recipient whose mission to design and build better and more affordable housing for the rural poor led him to Hale County, Alabama, a place whose poverty and isolation were chronicled in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (and can more recently be surveyed in the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening). The phrase was also the title of a documentary about letterpress printer Amos Kennedy, whose spirit, I can attest from personal experience, is nothing if not bold.
To face what the Deep South has become requires anyone with an eye toward improvement to consider these notions: Don’t tread on me, and proceed and be bold. I can remember realizing, even as a teenager and young man in Alabama in the 1980s and ’90s, that our societal trajectory was a troublesome one. Coming to political and social awareness during the era of party-switching and crossover voting, at the time of Billy Jack Gaither’s murder and Revonda Bowen’s prom, and when the Christian Coalition set a precedent for defeating the state’s only hope for new revenue . . . I witnessed the post-movement evolution into our 21st-century culture, in which new groups are raising their voices to say, Don’t tread on me.
Yet, to proceed and be bold doesn’t mean to fight. I dislike the word fight as a political term. In election years, I see campaign ads in which candidates proclaim, “I’ll fight the Washington establishment,” and “I’ll fight for you.” I don’t want for us to fight anymore, and I don’t want to vote for people who regard politics as a fight. I would rather live in a culture where we differentiate the best and worst parts of our culture, where we listen and learn from good ideas, where we respect each other, compromise, and cooperate. I want for the people of the Deep South to look willingly at our long historical penchant for antagonism and choose now to proceed boldly into a better way, one seriously lacking in meanness and suspicion and refusal.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
April 22, 2019
April 18, 2019
#throwbackthursday: Go to Church . . .
Since it’s Holy Thursday (and Easter is this Sunday), it seems like a good time to remind everyone of the message on this infamous sign facing the northbound lanes of I-65 between Montgomery and Birmingham. I have no idea how long this sign has been there — for decades at least, since I can remember as far back as high school — though it has been blown (or knocked) over at least once. Today, a newer version stands in its place . . . but it still the same blunt message.
April 17, 2019
Going to the National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy!
I’m proud to share that I was accepted to participate in the National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy this summer as part of a “teacher team” with Gina Aaij from LAMP High School. Mrs. Aaij is the activities coordinator for her school, and I’m the school garden guy at mine, and we will be traveling to Missoula, Montana in June for the academy. About the program, the website explains:
The Rob and Melani Walton National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy is an intensive, five-day professional development workshop for K-12 teachers held every summer. Teachers of any subject and grade should apply with a partner from their school or district. These teacher teams receive a thorough introduction to sustainability science through hands-on activities and lectures by experts in the field. Engaging field trips highlight sustainability in action at local business and other organizations. Through ample networking opportunities, teachers become part of a dedicated community of sustainability activists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other educators.
The goal of the trip, of course, will be to bring back ideas for achieving greater sustainability in our schools, ones that could hopefully be implemented on a larger scale as well.
April 16, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
When the Hollywood agent OJ Berman first meets Paul Varjack at Holly Golightly’s wild party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, OJ asks the handsome young writer, “Is she or isn’t she?” Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about at first, and Berman has to clarify: is Holly a phony? They then talk as men will, trying to discern the true nature of this charming woman who has endeared herself to them both. Yes, she is, Berman informs Paul, but she’s not just any old phony— she’s a real phony, a cunning chameleon who moves on once she has what she wants.
[image error]We’ve all known real phonies in our lives, and their airs can be enticing . . . for a while, and as long as we remember what they are. Their siren songs can be beautiful and alluring, but as our hero knew in the Odyssey, we must strap ourselves to the mast so we don’t follow their music to grave consequences. The temptations of the real phony litter classic literature because they’re as old as human history – the Tartuffes and Falstaffs – and Holly Golightly herself even articulates one of the dangers to poor old Doc as he boards the bus to return alone to Tulip, Texas: falling in love with a wild thing will not end well.
Alabama is well-known for its wild things, the eccentrics and characters – the author of the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote was one of them – but unfortunately, we also have our real phonies. Sometimes we see them coming, tipped off by their strange packaging, but other times their finery fools us . . . and we trust them, enable them, and even vote for them. Unlike Holly Golightly, whose elegant speech and grace of manners tease the rats and super-rats into giving her $50 for the powder room, ours grease the bearings with aw-shucks populism and promises to keep the political boogeymen at bay.
Meanwhile, the real problems persist, in part because the siren song says that the real problems are things like the Common Core standards and people who oppose plastic bags. We need to strap ourselves to the mast. Or, if we don’t, we’ll find ourselves once again like one of Holly’s suitors: duped, confused, and pleading through the door, while our prize escapes out the window once again.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
April 15, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “That’s news to me.”
On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the Wall Street Journal ran a chilling story about the young people of our nation. It wasn’t about drug use, unplanned pregnancies, binge drinking, casual sex, or dropout rates. Far more frighteningly, the report relayed the findings of a Stanford University study about the current generation’s inability to distinguish real news from paid advertisements. Put simply, they don’t know corporate bullshit when they’re looking right at it.
