Whig Hill

some things

I'm really liking last.fm. It offers songs from other artists based on your listening habits...so I've been hearing some new twang lately.

Also, the Smithsonian Folkways Collection podcast is a series of twenty-four shows based on their Folkways Collection. I just finished the second one. Should be real cool, but I do hope they get self-critical about...authenticity. We'll see. I'm enjoying it so far. When I'm on the radio I play a lot, and I mean a lot of music off the SF label.

Lastly, at the Y this morning a fire alarm went off while I was in the shower and I said to myself "no way in Hell I'm running outside naked and wet" and calmly went about my business. Later it occurred to me that if I had died of smoke inhalation for being so vain how embarrassing that would be.

review

Endnotes not included.

Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: The New Press, 2001).

    Ray Raphael does well in this effort to raise awareness of “common people” during the American Revolution. The cumulative effect of his chapters is a multitude of scenes and voices ranging from the Boston wharves to Creek huts of the trans montaine south, and the point is made clear that for the great mass of people, the Revolution was a bloody mess. The author builds this unromantic review on recent reliable scholarship. This book is part of the New Press People’s History Series and with Howard Zinn at the helm, has the intention of telling this story with an emphasis on how common people instigated, reacted to, or otherwise shaped the direction of this transformative event.

Grant Wood, Spring Turning

  Grant Wood, Spring Turning 
  Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

This is a bad copy of a stunning painting you can see at the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. I love Grant Wood. I love Thomas Hart Benton so much, too. (Well, both of them). And I'd like to get to know John Steuart Curry better.

Wood did another painting called Dinner for Threshers that reminds me of the Joad family (in better times) in the Grapes of Wrath.

The play is going well. I f'd up one word last night that rendered Noah's whole comment incomprehensible. But hey, at least nothing fell over on stage. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, but when I'm on stage--especially when I'm speaking--it just goes by in a blur. I hope someone makes a video of it so I can see if what I'm doing is working.

Actually, I haven't really seen anything past Act I because I'm not in it past that so never came to rehearsal and now I'm stuck back stage for the balance of the play. Got to admit, it sounds pretty compelling. Unlike the movie, the play (closer to the novel, of course) has a more depressing ending. And you know I like that.

Come see it.

Oh, the latest No Depression mag has a really creepy pinup photo of Porter Wagoner layed out across his bed. You have to see the newsstand copy, but the cover photo, here, gives you a hint.

I said "sacerdotal"

I don't think I've ever written anything so smart that says so little as this book review. Endnotes removed.

David D. Hall. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989.

This book is about culture and the practice of religion in early New England. David Hall examines the experiences and expressions of lay piety and discovers ambiguity as the central theme. Not to suggest disaffection, but rather devotion based on negotiation, anxiety, sincerity, and doubt amidst a world buffeted by the supernatural combat of sin and salvation and the temporal mechanisms of epistemology and lore. He takes Seventeenth Century Puritan—or “Reformer”—Christianity out of the pulpit and places it in taverns, courthouses, homes, roads, and bookshops and on the tongues of commoners. In the Reformer communities of New England, literate people (nearly all, by Hall’s estimate), in conjunction with their learned ministers, utilized books, sermons, notes, ritual, life crises, and supernatural wonders to define for themselves the meaning of salvation and its meaning in the of process in daily life.

Oh, hell yeah

Look at that list of guests. Impressive.

But I'll go just to get a picture with Miss Occoneechee Speedway.

!!!!!!!

 

Good reading for museum and history folks

Thought I'd pass along some excellent recent blog posts re: history and museums.

Kevin Levin, as usual, is thinking ahead to potential problems with the upcoming Civil War commemorations. (Actually, passing along Ervin Jordan's thoughts.)

In a completely different area, Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum in Australia has an excellent post about museums and social networking. Key point:

...even if your organisation is not producing social media about yourself, then your audiences almost certainly are. If you aren’t aware of what your audiences are saying about you, what they are taking photos of, or recording on their camera phones, then you are missing a unique opportunity to understand this generally highly engaged tip of your audience.

Chan keeps crankin' 'em out. Go, Seb!

Look, ma!

I'm on the front page of the New York Times!

Well, you know.

The article in question points out that diabetes patients often (with the tacit consent of doctors) do not treat other aspects of the disease that will prove just as fatal. Namely, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease.

I'm glad to say that the doctors at Duke are setting me on the right path regarding this treatment. Not only am I taking insulin, but kidney drugs, aspirin, and niacin, as well as monitoring my blood pressure and migrating to a lifestyle change that rests on eating a AHA diet (that all of you should be eating) and exercise. I don't need to take a statin yet, because my cholesterol numbers are normal, but we keep track of that as well.

Everything about my experience tells me I'm in a new generation of diabetic treatment, from the Lantus to the comprehensive outlook on my health. The problems identified in this article are artifacts of older ways of approaching this thing.

For those keeping track, I'm up to 40 units of Lantus a day.

That is all.

GoW

Grapes of Wrath is the play I'm in. I auditioned on a lark and after being first assigned to various background characters, the director promoted me to Noah, the brother of Tom Joad. I'm only in the first act, but in it quite a bit. Noah suffers, apparently, from Asperger's Syndrome, so he's a little disconnected, fidgety, impervious to emotion, and a "funny kind of fellow". The part was made for me!

Anyhow, this is my first time on stage and it's been real fun. I like the actors and director...they're very patient with me. I like the focus the group has in rehearsal.

GoW opens this weekend, Friday night, and runs Saturday and Sunday and then the following weekend. Sundays are matinees and are "pay what you can."

More information here. Hope you can make it.

Radio (update)

Heh... I'll be on the radio tomorrow noon-2. Given my condition, it ought to be a doozie!

This turned out to be a rather pleasant retrospective of my last twelve years in song...so it's all about heartbreak and recovery. Obviously.

The playlist.

Spent all day yesterday at school buying pencil boxes and trapper-keepers for class. More on that later. Much better now, btw.

like exhiliration and fear at the same time

Rough couple of days; lots going on.  All the stress seems to have overwhelmed the brain pills and I’m beginning to see the usual symptoms; everything goes wrong, I say and do things that go horribly awry, and people kick me when I’m down… Again, I’m aware this is brain chemicals and not reality, but you can’t help feeling this way. I just want to crawl under the covers and focus on the dropping sensation in my chest and stomach.

I’ll get over it. And probably sooner rather than later. But lets review:

I begin school Monday. I imagine the classwork will fall on me like a ton… But I don’t yet know what that work will be. Waiting to schedule the week before is a bad idea when students with day jobs need to fit that around the workload. Well, I’m in G’boro today tending to that.

The trip to New Bern took it out of me more than I’d expected. Plus, the extra fifteen hours I put on it over the weekend and the workshop I did on Monday have me frazzled. I took a day off yesterday…pictures on the Flickr page.

I’m in a play. It’s fun and I’ll talk more about it later, but rehearsals and shows overlap with the first week of class. And I flubbed my big scene in rehearsal the other night.

My iPod cable is broke so I can’t update the podcasts. So, all I have left are my sad, sad, very sad, songs. The broken cable isn’t the problem…the songs are.

The deletions and clarifications below indicate some highly stressful unpleasantness that I regret and won’t be going into here. But it’s taking up a great deal of my mindshare right now.

And, as usual, some things I’m not telling you.

This morning I saw a guy in his yard giving away free stuff. I saw something interesting so I stopped. He talked to me, and talked, and talked, and it was all about how his neighbor hates him and he yells at his neighbor and the city is harassing him and he doesn’t like his neighborhood and really should move out to the county. You could tell his crankiness and bitterness cause him more trouble than anything else, but he couldn’t recognize it. And I though…right now I’m thinking and feeling very much like him.

And the item I took…? A mirror.