History Begets Music

Video Find of the Day

The bells being played at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, Icon of the Holy Virgin. The cathedral was built to commemorate the victory of the Russian army over Polish invaders in 1612. This time you have to read the description at YouTube!

Мой звон в Казанском соборе - My chime at Kazan Cathedral

Road Trip III

After stopping to gawk at the Grand Canyon, we finished the last leg of Route 66. Then there was a detour south to Tijuana, where my parents spent most of a day looking for souvenirs. One of the souvenirs they got was this tourist shot of me posing on a burro painted to look like a zebra. We also got one of my Father on the burro wearing one of the other hats, but I've lost that one. My Mother was in a foul mood most of the time we were in Tijuana, complaining about how dirty it was, and how all the souvenirs were junk, but she cheered up during the taking of these pictures, because we looked so silly.

The planned ride up the coast was skipped in favor of a faster inland route. We were getting behind schedule. So I had to see the coastal highway another time. The highways we took eventually brought us to the Eastside and we approached Seattle by way of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge.

I'd been to Seattle before, over two years earlier, but I couldn't make much of it, because all I had to compare it with was my little neighborhood in Schofield Barracks, and the comparison was too distant to put anything in perspective.

But this time, I'd been across the country, passing through 15 states and hundreds of cities and towns, all fresh in my mind. There were a couple of things about Seattle now that stood out and struck me as pretty special.

For one, it is way cool that a nearly 4000 mile journey can end with a drive on a road on a lake that takes you into a tunnel which then spills you out into the guts of the city, to see the downtown skyline suddenly, as you emerge. That's a hell of a cool entrance.

For the other: At that time in history Seattle didn't look like any of the other cities and towns I'd recently been in. I couldn't place the difference at first. There was something about the overall impression that was unique, but it took a day or two to figure it out.

The houses were unalike! Every other town and city I'd been through had a more or less uniform look to it, at least neighborhood by neighborhood. There'd be block after block of nearly identical houses with nearly identical color schemes and architecture. In places in Seattle you might have four or five similar houses in a row, but there'd never be that degree of sameness throughout a neighborhood.

When I realized that was the difference I felt a great sense of relief. At least architecturally, Seattle was an escape from the culture of conformity that was the United States in the 1950s.

It was another couple of years before I noticed it, but Seattle was also pretty special in its sense of humor. Back then, before Century 21 and the '62 World's Fair, Seattleites didn't think of the idea of Seattle being "New York By and By" as a goal to grow by. It was just an in-joke. Nobody took the aspirations to greatness seriously. Or almost nobody.

The sense of humor even extended to its oppression. Today motorcycle cops in Seattle run you off the road and pin you to a wall before giving you a jaywalking ticket. In the 50s they enforced the jaywalking law with the same 50s sense of humor that got us Seafair Pirates.

One day when my parents had taken me downtown to do some shopping, it was either '55 or '58, we were standing at the southeast corner of 3rd & Pine waiting for the light to change, when a man next to us stepped off the curb prematurely. There was immediately a booming voice saying, "You in the blue and green flannel shirt! Yes, you! Step back on the curb, please! Don't make me send my buddies over to talk with you!" My Father pointed up in front of us. It was a policeman with a bullhorn cheerfully directing us pedestrians from a vantage point above the awning of the Bon Marché. All you had to do was listen to the happy policeman, and you didn't get a ticket. There was none of the gotcha games that the city is into now. They were after compliance, not collecting fines.

Another example of the great old-time spirit of Seattle turned up when I was finding this image of the Bon (4th & Pine corner) over at Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article tells how Josephine Brennan, cofounder of the Bon with her husband Edward Nordhoff, learned Chinook to better serve her Native American customers.

It was definitely in '55 when my Father drove us downtown for the first time in my memory. When going downtown we always followed the same route that the bus from Beacon Hill took in those days, north into the city on 4th Avenue. So we passed under the 4th & Yesler overpass and drove by the City Hall Park. The Park was then just like it is now except the trees were smaller. There were the same number of poor people lying on the grass. My Father pointed to them with pride. He said that in other cities, they wouldn't let their poor people lie down like that, but Seattleites were proud of the fact that they didn't punish people for being poor.

Whenever we passed poor people downtown, Dad would say, there goes some local color. "That's what makes Seattle great," he'd say, "anyone can be at home here." He wasn't the only one who had that attitude. Many strangers that I met on buses and in diners over the next ten years expressed the same feelings.

Of course, in the 50s, a lot of Seattleites were proud that, while Olympia was the official capital of the state, Seattle was the real de facto capital of the Soviet of Washington.

[Left: James Farley, Postmaster General for FDR, who is credited with coining the phrase, "There are forty-seven states in the Union, and the soviet of Washington." The same year, 1936, he also came up with the gem, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."]

Out of Algeria

Video Find of the Day

Here's a beautiful pictorial video of old Algerian Sephardic communities, with a song by Lili Boniche.

Lili Boniche, Jewish Algerian Chaabi master

Group Yodel

Video Find of the Day

Doesn't this look like a great way to kick back after a day of hard, back-breaking, recreational skiing? Everyone loads up on their beverage of choice, wine, beer, or ovaltine. Sit around out in the brisk air letting the breeze evaporate that excess perspiration, and get led in rounds of yodeling until your toes freeze. Beautiful!

Yodel in Adelboden

Road Trip II

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened late June, 1955, two or three weeks before my 6th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

From Springfield, MO, Rte. 66 goes through a piece of Kansas, then Oklahoma, then northern Texas. The only thing I remember about Texas was that Dr Pepper was king. In those days soft drinks, soda pop, or whatever you call them, came in little bottles out of a machine. They were each a nickel. The bottle caps were lined with cork, and if you were careful you could pry the cork out intact, put the cap on the outside of your shirt, and press the cork back in on the inside, and it would hold, making a little badge. We kids thought that was cool.

Don't get me wrong, I had no shortage of toys. What my parents lacked in the love and care department, they made up for as best they could by buying me crap. The US jigsaw puzzle map, for instance. But I had at least as much fun with bottle caps, sticks, and rocks, and stuff I found (like the muddy tennis ball) as I did with all the toys they bought me.

As the highway continued on through New Mexico and Arizona, more and more roadside shops, diners, and gas stations carried Native American gift items, such as baskets, blankets, shawls, scarves, beadwork and leathers. Some had abstract Navajo designs. My favorites were decorated with abstract Thunderbirds. My Father said those were junk, that the local natives didn't do thunderbirds, and therefore they were "trash for stupid tourists." I achieved a new insight: My Father always saw the negative of everything. The positives didn't register or weren't important. "Beautiful" couldn't be allowed to outweigh "Inauthentic." But, by the same token, "Authentic" would never outweigh "Ugly." What rose to the top was not any particular quality, but negativeness itself. My Father simply chose to see everything around him in the worst possible light.

I vowed not to be that way, but to look for treasure everywhere. It was another step on the way to becoming as xenomanic as I am today.

Old Route 66 passed through the middle of the Petrified Forest, AKA the Painted Desert. We made a toilet stop and everyone looked for petrified tree trunks high enough to pee behind without alarming other passing motorists. My Mother had Koko on a leash and lost her grip, and Koko raced off into the desert, so we had to sit around for half an hour until he got bored and came back. My Father fumed at my Mother. "We have to get to a motel before dark! Why couldn't you be more careful?" I don't actually think it would have hurt to drive in the dark. He did it deliberately at other times.

The next day we took a side trip north and visited the Grand Canyon. Dad wasn't taking chances now. Favorite son Koko was kept in the car except for a brief walk.

Every time we stopped at one of those places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Petrified Forest, the expansiveness of the scenes gave me hope that I might find a way to lose my parents. I began to have fantasies of finding a wilderness Eden of my own with plenty of foragables, living off the land out of a shack or a cave.

Probably the persistence of those fantasies contributed to my homelessness later, because I became conditioned to the idea that it was only by such means I could achieve peace. As a social solution seemed impossible since I couldn't even openly discuss the problems I had, the only thing left was to run away and become a hermit. Eventually it became the solution of last resort for everything, always there in the back of my mind.

Superb Accuracy

A sentence in a CNN.com story today showed the kind of scientific accuracy we used to laugh about back in grad school. The story was cutely titled, "Hair may solve mammoth mystery." It was about efforts to learn more about extinct mammoths from sequencing the DNA of their hair. Lead researcher Stephan C. Schuster, of Penn State University, had this to say about it:

"It is important to understand the genetic makeup of an organism before it went extinct."

You see, once a species becomes extinct, it ceases to die and leave fossils. The only fossils we have of a species are the ones left by animals before extinction or on the very edge of it. Ergo, it is best to obtain samples of that nature, rather than wasting time going around looking for post-extinction fossils, which form a null set.

As always, I wish to remind my readers that if I write a sentence such as these, it was intentional.

[Above right: The finest mammoth DNA always comes from animals such as depicted here, as had once existed. Never settle for anything less.]

Mouret Rondeau

Video Find of the Day

Here's a beautiful version of Rondeau de Mouret, AKA the Masterpiece Theater theme. I was surprised by how clear the trumpet is on this video. You don't expect that from the internet.

MOURET TRUMPET

Meanwhile, in Clejani

Video Find of the Day

While we were wondering what Oprah had to say about bipolar children and whether we should cut out all trans-fats or if a little wouldn't kill us, Clejani, RO, was waking the dead.

Gypsy kids from Clejani, RO