This book on necks (which I mentioned in yesterday's post) threw me for a loop today when it stated—astonishingly—that there are over a hundred ways to tie a necktie. What??? That's not possible! For one thing, in my (admittedly limited) experience (not ever having had to wear one), there are exactly two ways to tie a necktie: the what I will call "simple" way and the way that my husband favors, the Windsor knot way.
But no: although I will still (after some research) not go so far as to say there are over a hundred ways, there are, indeed, many ways to tie a necktie. In a couple of mathematical modelers' findings, there are exactly 85 ways. But more reasonably, there are maybe ten, twelve:
I mean, granted, they all look pretty similar (until you get to that wacky bottom row). But yeah, I do find some of them sexier than others. And isn't that part of what a tie is all about? Getting you to look at a man's vulnerable neck? Whether to lust after it or to assess its worthiness for a fight to the death, who's to say.
This all comes up in the neck book when talking about the 2008 presidential candidates:
Candidate Barack Obama sported a tie with a four-in-hand knot, “an awkward and asymmetrical cinch invented by 19th-century carriage drivers (who held four reins in hand).” He displayed “a knot for the masses.” By contrast, Obama’s opponent, John McCain, wore a symmetrical, triangular Windsor knot, which “screamed old-guard Washington establishment.”
I do find myself admiring ties on TV and in the movies—the materials, the textures, the patterns. There are some really beautiful ties out in the world. I can't find any especially good examples online, but here's a set of four ties that Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) wears in SE7EN, and they pretty much qualify as, well, eye-catching at least:
Though in all this time, I've never noticed the knots. I'll have to pay more attention.
Here's a video on the ONLY 5 neckties you need to own (and 3 to avoid):
(a) I find it amusing that people get worked up about this, and (b) check out the knots! They're different!
And then there's the YouTube station "The Tie Tutorial," which presents 90+ ways to tie a tie, one knot at a time. That took dedication.
And really, that's all I have to say on the subject (because no, I'm not going to mention Trump and his ridiculous long red tie—and really, who cares what knot he favors).
I ran across this in a book I'm working on about the neck: Zulu love letters, aka incwadi—small beadwork creations, talismans from a girl to her sweetheart, which are fashioned into a sort of necklace. Here's what the books says:
The early stages of courtship commonly begins when a girl offers a prospective boyfriend a simple string of white beads, an ucu. By wearing the ucu around his neck, the boy accepts her overture. The girl might then send a sequence of small pendant panels, incwadi, that are usually about 2–4 centimeters square. . . . These beaded love-letters communicate . . . messages, encoded in an array of designs and colors. For example, an upward-pointing triangle signifies an unmarried woman, and a downward-pointing triangle means an unmarried man. Two triangles joined to form a diamond is a married woman, while two triangles touching at their points in an hourglass shape is a married man. Each color expresses two emotions, either positive or negative. For instance, red can mean desire or anger, blue can mean fidelity or hostility, green can mean contentment or discord. Color combinations commonly indicate where someone lives.
Here are a few examples:
And the color language works like this, at least according to the website Earth Africa:
WHITE: a symbol of hope, purity, cleanliness, and true love.
BLACK: grief, loneliness, my heart has turned as black as the rafters in the hut as I hear you have another maiden.
YELLOW: wealth (or lack of) if we marry I will be hungry as you own no bull to slaughter.
GREEN: lovesickness, jealousy, I have become as thin as a blade of grass from pining for you.
BLUE: faithfulness, if I were a dove I would fly through blue skies to reach you.
TURQUOISE: impatience, I am losing hope that you will marry me.
RED: intense love, longing, my heart bleeds with love for you.
PINK: abject poverty, if you keep on gambling and wasting money, you will never save enough for my Lobola (dowry paid in cattle).
BROWN: my love is like the earth that gives rise to new life.
STRIPED BEADS: doubt, accusations, two-timing. You are like the Ntothoviyane (striped grasshopper) springing from bush to bush.
When I search for pictures of anyone actually wearing such a necklace, I come up with nothing. Perhaps it's a vanished practice. Perhaps it's just about the beading anymore, and the "love letter" aspect is no longer in play. Like, this necklace, which is pretty—a nice design—but if the above list is remotely accurate, I'd say it conveys a confusing message:
I wonder if this is still a thing. It seems like a lovely custom. Especially the fact that it's the girl who woos the boy.
I recently started following the poet George Bilgere's online newsletter "Poetry Town." As he puts it, every day he "selects a poem by a writer he’s crazy about and he says a few words about why he picked it." It's something I look forward to. Last week he shared this poem, by Tony Hoagland, a poet I love. "How many times have I felt like this little champion!" he wrote. "I guess my question for you is: who, or what, is your animal? I guess most of us have one." (The photo accompanied the post; it's by Ray Cannon, a red lacewing butterfly "puddling" on a dead frog.)
Little Champion
When I get hopeless about human life,
which quite frankly is far too difficult for me,
I like to remember that in the desert there is a
little butterfly that lives by drinking urine,
and when I have to drive to work on Saturday,
to spend an hour opening the mail,
deciding what to keep and throw away,
one piece at a time,
I think of the butterfly following its animal around,
through the morning and the night,
fluttering, weaving sideways through
the cactus and the rocks.
And when I have to meet all Tuesday afternoon
with the committee to discuss new by-laws,
or listen to the dinner guest explain his recipe for German beer,
or listen to the scholar tell, once more,
about his book intended to destroy, once and for all,
the cult of heteronormativity,
I think of that tough little champion
with orange and black markings on its wings
resting in the shade beneath a ledge of rock
while its animal sleeps nearby;
and I see how the droplets hang and gleam among
the thorns and drab green leaves of desert plants
and how the butterfly alights and drinks from them
deeply, with a kind of thoughtfulness.
Male butterflies drink water to get sodium and other dissolved minerals they can't obtain from food. This drinking behavior is called "puddling." They do it on lake shores, in rainforest puddles, or even in dew drops. Some butterflies can puddle for hours, drinking hundreds of gut-loads of water. They excrete the water and retain the salts.
Because of its high salt and mineral content, urine is especially healthy for butterflies. There's even some evidence that butterflies prefer the urine of meat-eating animals, although we don't know why.
Male butterflies pass the nutrients from puddling to females during mating.
David got home from Norway yesterday, and this evening we went out to our favorite Mexican restaurant to celebrate and catch up. On his trip he went to the fiftieth birthday party of our Norwegian sister-in-law's nephew Marius, which was a full-on sit-down dinner complete with speeches and plenty to drink. It turns out Marius is an adventurer: one adventure being crossing Greenland (unclear just how: skis, maybe?) with three fellow adventurers.
Said fellow adventurers were at the party, of course, and they apparently are scheming up a new adventure, this one involving cars—junkers, is how it came across, but the official/not-so-official website for the rally in question, known as the Mongol Rally, suggests it's not the age or condition of the car so much as the size that matters. Here's how they put it:
Any old dullard can purchase a 4x4 that could easily make it across the surface of the moon and drive a quarter of the world’s circumference, and that is exactly what the Mongol Rally is not about.
It’s about small. It’s about stupid. It’s about unsuitability. It’s about humour.
We have purposely set the bar for engine size to a mere 1 Litre—or 1000cc. We shall allow up to a 1.3 for those of you who can’t handle a whole litre of courage, but anything over this and you’ll have to contact us directly and pitch your ideas to us very carefully. We shall allow larger engines if we think it’s unsuitable and ridiculous enough.
Ha ha, that is ridiculous. But there are rules, number 1 being that "small and shit vehicle." (The default car is apparently a Nissan Micra, though if you're interested, this thread has various other suggestions.) You can also opt for a motorbike, but nothing over 125cc. A scooter is best. Rule number 2: "You're completely on your own." As they put it, "if it's not dangerous and you aren't lost, you're not on an adventure." And rule number 3: Raise £500 for the official charity Cool Earth.
That's it! The entry fee is modest enough, £895 per vehicle (4 people on a team max) or £425 per motorbike. For that you get such things as "an awesome finish line to mark your glorious arrival" and "stories so fucking excellent your friends will be in awe of you for decades to come," as well, perhaps, as "a heap of expert knowledge and organisation in the months leading up to the launch"—though that pointedly does not include "a set route." And there's an unwritten rule number 4: You need to get your car back home once the race is finished. No abandoning it in Mongolia.
The Mongol Rally was launched in 2004 with six teams participating; four completed the course, which runs from West Sussex, England, or Prague if you wish, to, at that time, Ulan Bator, Mongolia (but this year it ended in Kazakhstan because they couldn't go through Russia... or maybe it was Iran that was out of bounds: I don't know; in any case, the end point seems to change). That's about 10,000 miles, and one participant said it took his team 5 weeks in 2020. These days, 250 to 300 teams take part in this mayhem. I wish I'd ever had that sort of chutzpah. Or maybe just the wacky friends, because I may well have had the chutzpah if I'd been in the proper company.
Here are a few videos. First, The Mongol Rally: A Brief Guide:
Next, Mongol Rally 2019: Official Recap of Overland Chaos:
And finally, here is an hour-and-a-half "full documentary" of the Mongol Rally as done in a Fiat Panda over the course of 70 days:
I think it's fitting that the folks who put this thing on call themselves The Adventurists. Who, by the way, also sponsor an entirely incomprehensible road trip adventure they call the Poles of Inconvenience—which has no rules whatsoever! Which I guess makes the challenge that much easier? The Poles in question are "splendidly inconvenient locations from Norway to Western Sahara and across to Turkey" and including "the UK's toughest off road track which is often mostly underwater." They also throw in "Golden Poles," randomly announced during the four-week (July–August) rally and worth heaps of points. I think just planning these extravaganzas would be a world of wicked fun.
If you can imagine: a short-haired, clean-shaven, suit-and-tie-wearing, twenty-two-year-old Frank Zappa on the Steve Allen Show in 1963,playing, yes, a bicycle:
I posted this video on FB, and my guitarist friend Dorian had this to say, which I absolutely agree with: "the
great thing about this is that steve allen was so hip. its easy to see
how zappa could be his satirical concept art self. but what impresses
one most is that steve allen would put this on his show and go along
with, and dig, the whole concept."
But back to Zappa: Whenever I drive over the Grapevine, heading into or out of LA, and pass by Gorman, I think of him and his song "Billy the Mountain" (sadly, I find no video of it being performed, but it's a good listen regardless, this one live from 1971):
And here he is speaking about his work (it's a compilation—but he does mention a few timestamps):
One of his last performances, in Prague, 1991 (he died on my birthday in 1993, of prostate cancer, age 52); the music starts at about 5:15, but the rest is worth hearing:
I could go on mining and posting videos of him, but instead I'll just end with his classic "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow and Nanook Rubs It"—politically incorrect perhaps, but did Frank care? Nah. Or yeah, sure. He saw the complexity, the ineffability, the possibility—the gray—in things.
PS. I wasn't thinking about Frank Zappa at all today, or at all recently for that matter, but I had a rough work day, and was considering just skipping the blog post. But then I went googling, just to see if I'd happen on something worth relating. I don't even remember what got me to that Steven Allen Show episode, but once there, I was glad. Zappa was his own kind of genius.
And that's one reason I enjoy doing this blog. Sometimes I stumble on the darnedest, most enriching things.
Finally, finally, here's a revealing article from the WaPo just two weeks ago, about Zappa's family and legacy. Why does life have to be so complicated? Maybe he wouldn't have found it surprising, who knows.
Just a few photos today from my morning: a new cactus flower, Milo at the park, fading naked ladies, a mailbox spider and her prey, and the snoozing cats. (Now, six hours later, the cats are still snoozing!)
Ah, but the afternoon walk had its own delights. Tomorrow, there will be two cactus flowers, where this morning there was but one. The thistles were bustling. And we spent several minutes watching a great blue heron hunt—with much success!—in our dwindling Frog Pond. (I took a video, but the interface doesn't approve of its format, apparently, so all you get is a lousy zoomed-in iPhone shot.)
I've been bingeing Schitt's Creek(for the third time) while my husband is off gallivanting in Norway. One of tonight's episodes had a scene involving a grant for public art awards, to be decided on by the Schitt's Creek town council. After several suggestions are batted down, Moira Rose pulls out her own proposal: a sculpture park.
I’d like us all to close our eyes and picture three to five hundred acres of carefully manicured lawn, accessorized with sculptures from some of the world’s most significant cultural contributors. On your left, a whimsical gestalt by David von Schlegell; on your right, a playful abstract by Isamu Noguchi; dead ahead, your senses have just been affronted by a Magdalena Abakanovicz. Now, imagine an even more splendacious art park in your very own backyard! Council, I humbly present: Rosewood.
Mind you, Schitt's Creek is—well, just about what you'd expect from a name like that. Sophistocated, not: with the marked exception of the Rose family. Though perhaps "pretentious" is the better word for them? (You really need to be able to "hear" the above quote in Moira/Catherine O'Hara's voice for any of this to make sense.)
In any case, I was curious about these named sculptors. And here's a little sampling.
David von Schlegell (1920–1992), "whimsical gestalt":
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), "playful abstract":
Magdalena Abakanovicz (1930–2017), "your senses have just been affronted by":
Meanwhile, the crass and crude mayor, Roland Schitt, protests that there's no way they're going to get a Noguchi or a Schlegell—which just adds to the joke.
What wins in the end: a singles week, an idea Moira stole from her daughter, then expanded from an evening to an entire week, but only to (she thought) elevate her own proposal—not realizing that a singles week might win.
If you haven't seen Schittt's Creek, much of this won't mean much to you. But the hubris of late-twentieth-century sculpture should.
Just one today, because I missed it last night and I want to keep it here for posterity—fingers so very crossed that rationality and love of country will prevail. I will be writing letters to potential voters urging them to vote and donating $$$ to key campaigns—that's what I can do from here. And, I suppose, doing my own version of praying. Anyway, here's Kamala's acceptance speech:
And now I'm done lying about being done with political speeches—and will be returning to regular programming. But it feels good to feel somewhat heartened about the upcoming election. Though I will forever remain baffled by the fact that half this country can support, never mind trust, someone as odious—selfish, mean, and petty—as Trump (and his henchmen).
I never watch political conventions. But this year? I am so enjoying the outpouring of joy and hope at this year's Democratic nominating convention, and the possibility that decency may prevail in November. And so I'll just post a couple more videos of speeches that I found impressive, from this evening, the third night of the convention. All of these people are zeroing in on different aspects of our national identity—because each of these people has their own personal experience of what it means to be an American. And I suppose I don't need to mention that it hasn't always been positive. (Black, gay, what can I say?)
First, a surprise speaker, Oprah Winfrey:
And Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation (though he never gets called that lately—he's just the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana):
And now I'm done with the political speeches. But honestly, and the reason I posted these here: I really do think I will draw inspiration and courage from watching some of these heartfelt and well-articulated speeches again. (And I've missed a bunch, but I promise there won't be a part 3.)
PS, I enjoyed Tim Walz's speech too, especially his "pep talk" at the end. But we'll be hearing more of the same in the next few weeks, I'm sure.
This was a really good, heartfelt speech, on day 1 of the Democratic National Convention.
Hillary would have been a good president too. But let's hope Kamala takes us there. Let's break that glass ceiling, once and for all.
And the next evening brought us both Michelle and Barack Obama. I loved listening to them. I am feeling hesitantly optimistic that we will not get "the bad orange man," as my friend Sherilyn calls him, again. It astonishes me that sensible people could prefer a narcissistic con man to smart, capable, committed, empathetic, patriotic individuals who want to support regular Americans...
Anyway, political interlude over now. Back to regular programming.
The other evening I watched the movie Ghostlight, about a man who's lost his 17-year-old son to a pill overdose, and he begins to work through his grief by becoming involved with an amateur (in the true sense of the word) production of Romeo and Juliet. It's a lovely movie—and I loved it that the main actors, playing the grieving family, are an actual family in real life.
At one point, the movie featured the song "Stand by Me," which is irresistible. So I of course had to see if Playing for Change had ever done it. And of course they had:
(I kind of love it that the opening shot is on the Santa Monica Mall, in my hometown.)
But really, there is and can never be any better version than the original, by Ben E. King from 1961:
That YouTube site says the song was inspired by a spiritual written by Sam Cooke and J. W. Alexander called "Stand by Me Father," recorded by the Soul Stirrers with Johnnie Taylor singing lead. Here's that one:
This Rolling Stone article presents twenty of the best covers of the song, including Otis Redding and the Kingsmen. Unfortunately, most of the links no longer work, but they're searchable: like this one, of John Lennon covering the tune:
As songs go, it's pretty perfect. Again: especially in King's own version.
When the night has come And the land is dark And the moon is the only light we'll see No I won't be afraid Oh, I won't be afraid Just as long as you stand, stand by me...
I am a quarter of the way through Lonesome Dove, 225 pages, 24 chapters, in:it is long! And so when a box of books arrived on my doorstep today, and one of them happened to be a children's picture book—I love me a beautiful picture book—I decided the Dove wouldn't mind if I forsook it for another book for, oh, fifteen minutes.
I first learned about The Yellow Bus in a New York Times article that describes the author, Loren Long's painstaking construction of a model town for the yellow bus, and the actual bus that served as his inspiration: abandoned in a farmer's field, with goats grazing nearby. The bus took over his imagination as he wondered about its life and all the people (and other creatures) who "filled it with joy."
It's a lovely story of life and change, loss and renewal. In his notes at the end of the book, Loren writes:
As I worked, I was struck by the fact that this story is about an object universally and instantly recognized as yellow. It was this yellow that I wanted to shine through the artwork, no matter where the bus was in her journey.
Perhaps for this reason, many of the images in the book are plain graphite, with the bus and its occupants providing the only burst of color. He continues:
Which brings me back to the yellow bus that I still run past every day. I'll probably never know how it got there and what its story actually is. But I'm thankful for that bus—for the life it had and for the one it has now. I'm thankful that it inspired me to think and reflect and imagine and create. And I'm thankful that when I look at my own life, I see many people who embody what the yellow bus is all about.
Here are some images from the book (they're in somewhat reverse order, but I'm including them for their graphic quality, not for a sense of story). The art, the copyright page says, "was crafted with graphite pencil, charcoal pencil, and charcoal dust on Epson Doubleweight Matte paper; it was scratched out with X-Acto blades and smudged with Q-tips. The colors were created with acrylic paint, and all of it was mixed with whatever dust and dog hair may have been floating in the artist's studio."
And finally, here are a couple of photos from the NYT article, of Long's working drawings on his drafting table and of the town he built. I love to see the creative process in action. And I love this book.
Yet more flowers: today, by the Englishwoman Mary Delany (1700–1788), who when she was 72 noticed the similarity between the petals of a geranium and a piece of red paper she spotted lying on a table. She took up some scissors and soon had created a convincing facsimile of the flower. And on she went, fashioning nearly 1,000 "cut flowers" or, as she called them, "mosaicks" before failing eyesight forced her to stop in 1782. The collection, known as the Flora Delanica, filled ten albums, which came to the British Museum in 1897, bequeathed by her niece, and today are among the most-viewed items in the Department of Prints and Drawings. (The entire collection is browsable here.) Her skill was such that the great 18th-century botanist Sir Joseph Banks declared her collages to be "the only imitations of nature" he had ever seen from which he "could venture to describe botanically any plant without the least fear of committing an error."
Sometimes she touched up her creations with watercolor, or incorporated a bit of plant material itself—as in this winter cherry or Chinese lantern (Physalis sp.).
But mostly, they were simply paper. Here are a few more of her creations. And to think, she started at age 72! Maybe there's hope for me yet.
Centaurea cyanis, 1779
Aloe perfoliata, 1780
Cyclamen europaeum, 1777
Helianthus annuus (Great Sun-flower), 1772–82
Paeonia tenuifolia, 1778
Rosa gallica, 1782
Pancratium maritimum (Sea Daffodil),1778
Passiflora laurifolia: bay leaved, 1777 (with over 230 paper petals in the bloom)
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