Salt & Sundry

Joan Mitchell, Salut Tom (1979)

A place to park some things that have been rambling around my brain the last few days. Connections. Words. Discoveries. Explorations.

A smattering:

• Last night I watched the Oakland episode of Hip Hop Evolution. The biggest takeaways for me were (1) that I need to find some Too Short; (2) how the connections between the Panthers and dance and revolution made Oakland hip-hop a very special thing; (3) that Hammer's dancing is still just so much fun (and, somehow, connected directly to #2); (4) that Tupac was in Digital Underground [of Humpty Dance fame!] - somehow I'd never quite made that connection.

  Then I fell down an internet rabbit hole and learned that Tupac and Jada Pinkett (Smith) went to an arts High School together in Baltimore! Who knew?! Someone should make a movie about that. Though, there are probably 300 scripts along those lines already floating around.

• The new Jason Isbell live album (despite a bad review from WaPo) has been on repeat for me lately. The opening lines of "Hope the High Road" dig deep. It was great to see him at Newport.. it'd be amazing to see him again.

• Can't wait to finish re-watching the Wire - Season 4. This is a great article on how the Wire nailed public education. Is the Wire really that forgotten of a show?

• Still rolling through "There There" - losing the thread a bit, but it's really a function of my lack of focus. There's some really incredible writing, rich characters, and buried narratives being unearthed here that make it well worth the read. I'm excited to see where Tommy Orange goes from here. It feels like White Teeth - a stunning debut which just promises much more ahead.

• I'm really loving the LitHub decade-by-decade surveys of defining books. The 90's is up today and there's a lot I agree with - and a lot I'd quibble with. But we're now in a decade where I remember buying some of these books when they were new (Jhumpa Lahiri!). Very much looking forward to the next installments..

• This Eileen Myles interview just kills me. She's so present, so funny, so alive.

  Suddenly things were very open. I don’t know what it was that I expected to be doing, but there I was. I wasn’t teaching, I didn’t have any commitments. And it was just really funny to be in this position where, at least for a time, I was experiencing New York City in an ideal way in my 60s that very much resembles me in my 20s, except that these days nobody else is living this way. But for this window of time, I was very free. I kind of had no schedule. I don’t remember being particularly broke. And I just wasn’t under any pressure. I was just in this expanse of time that not anybody I knew was in… and I was in the city. And it was funny. I wrote the poem “Evolution” out of that kind of lengthy, loose feeling. That characterized a lot of this work. I think that I write kind of seasonally in some way, and my poems always make me know about the curve of time.

• The new Dylan Bootleg Series (at least based on the First Listen Sampler on NPR) is good - but nothing earthshaking. Greil is right - the Minneapolis sessions saved the album, myths aside.

• And this new show at the Met on Armenia seems fascinating! Particularly after seeing a glimpse of Armenia at the Folklife Fest this year. A quick trip to NYC, soon, might be in order..

• Caught the Diane Arbus (small!) show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum the other day. About a portfolio of 10 prints she was working on when she died. There was a reference to her address in an ad for the Portfolio, which I looked up and it led me to a fascinating story about how the old Bell Telephone Labs on the West Side became an artists community. And how the renovation was done by a young Richard Meier. Stories within stories. Always.