Another HBO *Treme* Trailer

Treme, season 3, premieres September 23!




Thanks this time to Alex Rawls for the heads up.

Gads, I'mma missin' New Orleans.  Can't wait until getting back in October!  Fortunately there will be 2 - 3 more visits soon after that one.

In the meantime, first I've got to go to London in September.

Book Jail

Memory sparked by a post up on Premium T's blog:

I've imprisoned a 99 cent mass market paperback copy of Eugene D. Genovese's The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of the Slave South (1965) in a plastic bag with baking soda and occasional spritzes of white vinegar in hopes of etting rid of that horrid mildew smell.

It's been in that bag since the start of June. I keep forgetting to check it. It may be in that bag unto the end of its days, it looks like.

In the meantime I've been resorting to google and a library copy of the book for checking facts and notes.

A Brilliant Soft Shell Blue Crab Season!

Which is good news in a way, for the ever-endangered Chesapeake Bay and the equally endangered watermen and their way of life.  A bushel of the Chesapeake *Blue Crab is currently selling for $130.00, that is a bushel sold right off the boat. Even so the cost of fuel and bait are eating into the watermen's profits.At a market that bushel's going to run a lot higher than that. So, down on the Bay, it's crabbin' time!  Our Shore and Baltimore friends are in a good mood. I do wonder, however, with the end of newspapers, how we're gonna eat crabs and lobsters and crawfish.The outdoor feast on newspaper covered surfaces, impromptu or planned, home or restaurant, is nearly a year-round tradition from the Bay to the Gulf.

In the meantime, I just learned noted Baltimore novelist, Laura Lippman's Baltimore PI protagonist of her Tess Monaghan series, graduated from Chestertown's Washington College. This information about Tess would have been meaningless to me only three years ago, when I knew neither Chestertown nor Baltimore, which are now permanent parts of my heart.  I learned this via listening to an audio version of Charm City (1997), the second of the Tess Monaghan series.  I also know how Charm City got to be used as a moniker for Baltimore, which I didn't even know was a moniker three years ago, much less why -- even though I already knew personally Madison Smartt Bell, who wrote the walking Baltimore book, titled, of course, Charm City.  But I didn't read that until I'd been to Baltimore a couple of times, though I did read it before **Madison gave a personally conducted walking tour of Baltimore that following spring.

Is it not wonderful to have cities to love -- even if you may also hate them, like I love-hate New Orleans and New York?  I don't know Baltimore well enough yet to have a love-hate relationship with it, but I know many Baltimore natives who do love and hate the city that they will never leave. I love Chestertown because it is so very satisfied to be what it is and has no pretensions or desires to be anything but what it has always been, except, of course, better! I also love Havana and Santiago, but these are not the cities of my own country, so I can't / don't have the hate part -- I have no personal responsibility for these cities, outside of whatever unpleasant designs my country has on them -- which isn't the fault or responsibility of the two cities in question.

So here I sit, attempting to get some energy flowing again. Therapist really wailed on me today.  The glutes are gonna hurt like sin by tomorrow, I'm betting.  At least I have until Monday to recover.

Hot and humid again.

We have construction of some kind or another -- or maybe only maintenance, next door.  Just the building of the scaffolding that envelops the entire building top to bottom took a week of clanging and banging.  What they will do once the scoffold is entirely up I have no idea. I hope it won't be water blasting to clean it .... If there is another hurricane like Irene from last year I shudder to think what will happen to our building as the steel scaffolding ribs are thrown into our walls.

There's also construction across the street, which is in reality preparation for deconstruction of the current ediface to build a newer! better! (much) taller! and MORE EXPENSIVE one.

And just to make it entirely fun, the block and the cross street are blocked off by a shoot -- whether for television or a movie, I have no idea.  Floodlights burning up the night all night long, and all like that.  So much fun ....

Well, at least cold penne, pestp and veggies, plus salad, for dinner to look forward to!
----------------------------------

* If you want to learn about Blue Crabs and their place in the eco and social systems of the Chesapeake, the book you want is Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay by William W. Warner, illustrated by Consuelo Hanks, which has never been out of print since publication in 1994. If you visit anyone on the Bay the book will be guaranteed to be on their shelves, and you probably will be gifted with a copy. There was a copy in the House when we arrived in C'town, and the second weekend we were given a copy of our own.

**Hey, thanks again, Madison.  It is a day I still recall in detail and with great pleasure.

1850 and Subsequent National Crises

I'm half way transcribing and writing up my notes for that focus on the decade preceding the official break out of the U.S. Civil War.  Though the more you learn about this period it becomes inescapable that we were already at war.  The defining moment for the war's inevitability was Texas's recognition as a state.  Those f*ckers were from the gitgo bugf*ck insane -- so naturally the South Carolinian slaveholding power elite loved them and egged them on.  In the meantime Limbaugh, Fox News, Bachman, Beck, et al. Calhoun had successfully dispersed his toxic slave society pride and hatred for the New Englanders throughout what would become the confederacy.  He had done so, so successfully, that on his deathbed in 1850, his last words predicted correctly, with specific detail, when and how Secession would come about, even calling it over a presidential election. Even before that, Nashville, TN hosted conventions that discussed Secession.


I cannot express how much everything that we've been experiencing in the last ten years looks so much like 1850 -- the year the elected politicians gridlocked for good, the constant rhetoric -- and even actions -- of violence employed on constant basis by the southerners against what they saw as trespasses against their rights -- which was the right to trample on everyone else, and curtail everyone's freedom for the sake of them keeping their slaves and spreading slavery everywhere, and what follows. With the Fugitive Slave Act in action, people in the free states were not only digusted by what they were seeing, but by what they were told  they, by law, had to do to aid the slave owners.  Their inevitable conclusion, based on this, and what the slave owners actually said, was that ultimately even white men could be enslaved by the same slave owners who were forcing them to recover slaves.


After I finish this task, I'm going to go backwards, to the 1830's, specifically Washington D.C.  The one part of the Little Compromise that Stephen Douglas got through at the end of the longest legislative session ever, by lobbying incessantly that "the non-slave states had to be given a mite (while the slave states got the Fugitive Slave Act, which did more to turn the non-slave states abolitionist than anything else)," was the end of the slave trade in D.C.  It was a national disgrace, that all other nations regarded with shaken horror and bewilderment that this could go on within the capital of the nation that so trumpeted freedom and liberty.  Of course by the time of 1850, most of the actual trade had been removed, due to this disgrace and embarrassment, to outside of D.C., to Alexandria, which part had been retroceded to Virginia, so it was no longer in the District of Columbia's precincts.

I've read quite a few accounts, if only in passing, by first hand witnesses of the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in Washington D.C.  Now I'm going to concentrate on it for a while.

El Museo Del Barrio

There's a three museum exhibit this summer titled "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Ave., the Studio Museum  in Harlem, 144 West 125th St. and Queen Museum of Art, Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

This weekend we visited the two parts up at el museo del barrio, "Counterpoints" and "Patriot Acts."

The large oil canvas, "Conversation" by Jamaican artist, Barrington Watson, was my favorite of the 20th century pieces in the galleries:

More about the artist here.

The older pieces were what had the most interest for us, including a John Trumble oil portrait of Alexander Hamilton (circa 1804). It was included because Hamilton, as you all know, was born on the island of Nevis, one of the least of the Leward Islands > Lesser Antilles, which border the Caribbean Basin. Soon after, his mother, not married to his father, and possibly married to someone else, moved them to St. Crois, in the Virgin Islands.  He lived his first years there, and also received his financial training, clerking in mercantile concerns.

The best was seeing some of Agostino Brunias's originals, and three in Victor Landaluze's iconic series, Tipos Populares, illustrating late 19th century Cuba, particularly Havana.  El V used some of those in Cuba and Its Music.

There were also some interesting works by Gauguin and Pissaro from their stays  on Martinque (from where hailed Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, she who became Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of the French), and St. Lucía.

As the museo is located across from the most northern part of Central Park, we walked there and enjoyed it very much, hearing latin drumming reaching from across Fifth Avenue.  This is what used to be called Spanish Harlem.  Puerto Rico, Yo!  Then the Dominicans took over, but now it's the turn of the Mexicans. It feels homey there, just as does the Harlem of the West Side.

We had an ample, tasty, inexpensive Mexican dinner, all made with ingredients brought up from home, at a lovely, very tiny, Mexican restaurant.

Then home so I could ice my back.

Though I moved slowly and deliberately, sat down frequently, I was pleased that I'd managed to do a whole day away from home, and much of it on my feet. It's been a while since I could manage the energy for that.

Puerto Rican music festival got rained out last night.  Dang!

Tonight it's the cast-crew screening of  Red Hook Summer, yay!

Now, back to writing up my notes on the 1850 gridlock-and-violence in the Senate and House, Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico and California.

She Fled From Facebook to – Marfa – to Write a Book – about Facebook

The Washington Post's magazine features Katherine Losse this week, “Refugee From Facebook.”  Her book, The Boy Kings, is her inside view of Facebook and explains why she divested herself of FB stock (and thus got a lot of money because she sold when the stock was still high) and deleted all her FB pages and info.
Then she moved to Marfa, Texas -- where we were supposed to be this month until the Las Vidas Perfectas video shoot got postponed. I might have met her.  Marfa's only got 2,000 residents.

Quote:

[ " Another time, Losse cringed when she learned that a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called “dark profiles” — pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary users, Losse said, but if the person eventually signed up, Facebook would activate those latent links to other users. " ]

Quote:

[ " But Losse’s concerns about online socializing tracks with the findings of Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist who says users of social media have little understanding of the personal information they are giving away. Nor, she said, do many understand the potentially distorting consequences when they put their lives on public display, as what amounts to an ongoing performance on social media. " ]

Quote:

[ " Losse eventually reactivated her Facebook account. Rejecting it altogether felt, to her, extreme. But she approached it this time with a new wariness, not as a place to make and maintain friendships but one where a new author could cultivate a public image. " ]

She felt Facebook was eating her life and providing an inauthentic social life, so she ran away to a more authentic place (an artists' colony!) to write a book about social media while using her wireless capacity and digital skills to interact with the rest of the world, including her editors for the endless drafts of the book she was writing.

I find this enormously amusing. Is it because as of this writing, neither el V nor I have fb accounts nor have we ever.

Gore Vidal Has Left The Stage 1925 - 2012

From the New York Times obituary, Charles McGrath states: "Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization ...."

For anyone who has read Vidal's work with delight and care, it is hard to believe that Vidal saw the United States as possessing a civilization that could end. Power, yes: the nation has great power, wielded without regret and directed anywhere those who possess it choose. But the USA, a civilized nation? Debatable, as Vidal saw it.

That the country could at times be a great deal of fun, or at least amusing, and a pre-eminent provider of entertainment -- that Vidal would agree with, laughing all the while. Like Aaron Burr, who as protagonist opened Vidal's extended fictional portrait of the carpeted halls of power, he enjoyed himself, and laughed more than most -- at the nation, at us, at the power brokers and even at himself.

His wide-ranging body of work is like no other, as we see in his obituary. He had the courage of his convictions, or perhaps the courage of one born into the families that determine our national and personal fates, but who was fated by his lesser status among them -- relatively poor, proudly sexually transgressive, highly educated in the arts, aesthetics and intellectual analysis -- never to be a serious political player himself. He therefore had nothing to lose from honesty, and he was openly, aggressively, fluidly sexual at a time when few could afford to be, writing both non-fiction and outrageous comic fiction with post-gender attitude.

Narratives of Empire, his heptalogy of historical novels published between 1968 and 2000, traces the United States from the Age of Burr through the Age of Mass Media. It reveals more than many non-fiction histories about how power is inherited, used, and guarded in America. These seven novels of our national political life bristle with ideas and even historical facts that were not discussed -- or admitted to -- by either critics or historians, by and large, and certainly not by politicians. Though this is his best work, Vidal will probably be remembered more for his lesser achievements -- theater, film, and television appearances, feuds with other writers.

Vidal compared himself on at least one occasion to historian Henry Adams, who as the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents was present not only in the hallways of power but also in the homes where the power brokers lived and socialized. Adams's influence was not always positive: in 1876, Vidal avenged his precursor's personal prejudice against President Ulysses Grant in a way that was unworthy of most of his historical work -- mean, petty, nasty, and a historical lie.

Adams is most often remembered today for the rather historically irrelevant cultural musings of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres and for his highly selective personal memoir The Education of Henry Adams. While Education is empty of Adams's wife's suicide and the decades they were together, and leaves out his D.C. salon and ever-changing circle of 'nieces', it is worth reading, if only for Adams's account of being private secretary to his father, Francis Adams, who as minister of the Mission to St. James in London was appointed by Lincoln to ensure that Britain not recognize the Confederacy. But Adams's grand works are his histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations -- and possibly "Napoleon I At San Domingo" (in Adams's Collected Essays, 1891), the most clear-eyed and even admiring assessment written by a white American historian in the nineteenth century of General Toussaint Louverture and of what the San Domingan revolution meant for the history of the United States.

These two writers offer a grand composite vision of the history of the United States. They were there, and if they weren't there, their relatives were. They brought us their visions of our shared past; they have themselves become part of the historical record.

Biblio:

Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire, which I list in historical order, not in the order they were published: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington D.C., The Golden Age.

Henry Adams's Collected Essays; History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson; History of the United States of America During the Administrations of James Madison; The Education of Henry Adams.

Edited to Add: Here's a splendid photo gallery on the Washington Post of the public parts of Vidal's writing and Hollywood life. And another obituary by Jon Wiener, who knew and understood Vidal, in The Nation.