Leaky Lifeboat

“Leaky lifeboat
Sleeps off shore
Now we're sailing backwards
To the freaky north”

         Sonic Youth, “Leaky Lifeboat”

I am a huge Sonic Youth fan, ever since they opened for Wilco on a 2003 episode of “Soundstage.”  Sonic Youth formed in New York City as an Eighties hard rock punk band with Steve Shelley on drums and Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo on guitar and vocals.  During the alternative rock ascendance of the mid-1990s they had a hit single “Bull in the Heather” and headlined Lollapalooza 1995 in Chicago. “The Eternal” (2009), their final and biggest selling album, contains “Leaky Lifeboat,” dedicated to beat poet Gregory Corso, whose most famous work, “Marriage,” begins: “Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?”  A protégé of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, he imagines the wedding, with “all her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded just waiting to get at the drinks and food.”  Corso (1930-2001) arranged for his ashes to be deposited at the foot of Percy Shelley’s grave in Rome and prepared this epitaph for his tombstone:

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

The final verse of “Leaky Lifeboat” goes:

Leaky lifeboat
Called to shore
You got another
Chance to score

My brother the wind
He's got to know
We've got to get it together
And blow
Before the sun gets cold
Cold to gold

“Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn,” also on “The Eternal,” is about the Germs punk rocker Darby Crash, who killed himself in 1980; it opens with these lines:

We did not fade from the noise meditation
We stopped abruptly while spinning down

The final lines go:

Take me back to disgraceland - in love with
Nothing at all

I have “The Eternal” on heavy rotation with CDs by Cat Stevens, BoDeans, Spin Doctors, and Depeche Mode.

Brenden Bayer commented:

            My favorite concert I ever attended was Sonic Youth at Tuxedo Junction in Danbury, Ct.  While the opening act was taking a break, my friend and I started talking to what seemed to be the most out of place, older couple in the joint. Turned out they were Thurston Moore's parents. Moore and Gordon were married at the time, and we thought that was pretty cool.  The show was phenomenal, and I ended up with three staples in the back of my head, and blood stains down the back of my favorite Ren and Stimpy t-shirt.

Ren and Stimpy

Here’s what Warren Buffet said about a leaky boat: “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” “Leaky boat” can be a metaphor for a troubled relationship.  For example, in 1981 the New Zealand band Split Enz recorded “Six Months in a Leaky Boat,” on “Time and Tide.” The song begins:

When I was a young boy
I wanted to sail around the world
That's the life for me, living on the sea
Spirit of a sailor, circumnavigates the globe
The lust of a pioneer, will acknowledge no frontier
I remember you by, thunderclap in the sky
Lightning flash, tempers flare,
'round the horn if you dare
I just spent six months in a leaky boat
Lucky just to keep afloat

In Richard Russo’s “That Old Cape Magic” Jack Griffin’s marriage has sprung leaks.  Driving to Cape Cod without Joy, he felt a vague thrill at being alone.  Russo wrote:

  The whole of Boston fit neatly into the rectangle of his rearview mirror, and by the time the Sagamore Bridge hove into view, the sky was silver in the east, and he felt the last remnants of yesterday’s prevarications begin to lift like the patchy fog he’d been in and out of since leaving the city. The Sagamore arched dramatically upward in the middle. Helping to pull the sun over the horizon, and though the air was far too cool, Griffin pulled onto the shoulder of the road and put the convertible’s top down, feeling truly off the reservation for the first time since leaving home in Connecticut.

 Titanic lifeboat

In 1790 Englishman Henry Greathead designed the first vessel specifically meant to be a rescue lifeboat.   In 1912, when the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, the luxury liner had only 20 lifeboats, which could accommodate barely a third of those on board.  Rescue lifeboats saved many lives recently when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas and Irma flooded Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. 

Gary Works patriotic meeting; below Sebastian Aiello and Mary Ventura

In Jonathyne Briggs’ World War I seminar, I mentioned that Gary, founded by United States Steel Corporation, was just 8 years old when the Great War started in Europe, yet had a population of 30,000, more than half foreign-born.  Over a thousand Serbian nationals returned to the old country to fight against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  Reporting on his Archives project, Dan Hartman found a newspaper article about Serbs from Gary rioting in Chicago when denied passage to Europe due evidently to incompetent officials fearing that American citizens were among them.  After the United States entered the fray in April 1917, Gary boosters adopted the slogan “Most American of American Cities” to allay fears about the city’s “hyphenated” population. I showed 14 photos about wartime Gary, including shots of Unity parades and patriotic meetings at Gary Works. Mill officials deducted a day’s pay every two weeks as “donations” to the Red Cross. One illustration showed kids playing war, with Sabastian Anello dressed as a soldier and Mary Ventura as a nurse. Another depicted library staff members wearing masks during the 1918 influenza epidemic.  In fact, most public places, not only libraries but schools, theaters, pool halls, and dance parlors, closed for three weeks.

In Steve McShane’s Indiana History class Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi Goodman helped me demonstrate how bridge hands are played.  Steve had pushed tables together so that six groups could simultaneously play hands, first at No-Trump and then with the dealer naming his longest suit trump. I skipped over the bidding process and just had those to the left of the dealer start leading.  Most caught on pretty quickly, but there was puzzlement as to the need for a dummy.  That should become clearer after next week’s lesson on bidding.

Dee Van Bebber and I finished third in the Chesterton game.  We got terrible cards but shined on defense.  Against Alan Yngve and Helen Booth we took a single trick in the first hand and no tricks in the second.  Terry Bauer recently went on the Boston Freedom Trail tour and saw the Boston Massacre commemorative marker.  I noted that African American Crispus Attucks is celebrated as the first casualty of the American Revolution and the many black schools were named for him, including Oscar Robertson’s Indianapolis alma mater that won the famous 1955 championship contest against Gary Roosevelt, another black institution. “I was at that game,” Dee exclaimed.  She worked for a Newcastle school official unable to attend who gave her his ticket. I mentioned attending the Eagles 1960 NFL championship victory over Green Bay.  “Bednarik,” Bauer said, referring to his game-saving tackle.  The last pro player to go both ways, I replied, adding, “And I don’t mean sexual.”  Terry chuckled. Bednarik played center on offense and linebacker on defense.

After a big day, I fell asleep listening to the Cubs win a laugher against the Mets, then woke up well before dawn.  It reminded me of the opening lines of “That Old Cape Magic”:

  Though the digital clock on the bedside table in his hotel room read 5:17, Jack Griffin, suddenly wide awake, knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.  He’d allowed himself to drift off too early the night before.

At Banta Center in Valpo, a Cleveland fan playing bridge let out a hoot upon receiving the news on an iPhone that “Da Tribe” won a record 21 straight games in a row.

Ronald Cohen loaned me John A. Farrell’s “Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned” (2011). The introduction, titled “Jefferson’s Heir,” contains this judgmental paragraph:

  In his personal life, Darrow was a notorious rake – a professed sensualist who took too much pleasure from the chase, seduction, and act of love.  He relied on “physical nearness” to escape the “emptiness” and “spiritual isolation” of his life, said Mary Field Patron, for he was often lonely, haunted by death, and prey to melancholy.  “Sex,” he told her, was “the only feeling in the world that can make you forget for a little while.”  Work was an anodyne as well.

AWST Press published “Bodhisattva Training,” by Allison Schuette, about turning to Buddhist meditation as a way of dealing with Graves disease. Allison described her involvement in “Flight Paths” with fellow VU professor Liz Wuerffel:

  And, so, on the campus where you teach, you join with your partner in starting a story collection and facilitation practice. You interview students and faculty and staff about their experiences with belonging and not belonging. You edit the interviews into stories that you use in classrooms, presentations, and workshops to help people reflect on what it takes to live well together. The stories, especially those of harassment and exclusion, draw you out into the community, the city where you live, a city once known in the region as a sundown town. You discover an underlying story between your county, Porter County, and the one next door, Lake County, home to Gary, Indiana. It’s a story of redlining, restrictive covenants, and white flight; a story of civil rights, the push for open housing, and the first election of a black mayor; a story of automation and layoffs at the mills, of suburbanization, and the erosion of Gary’s tax base. You broaden the reach of your story collection. You believe that there’s an overarching story here, which if heard, will free everyone to live differently.

        To fix is to pin down, to hold in place, to render immobile.

        To heal is to cross your legs on the cushion, to make room, to unfurl.

  Through research, you develop a picture of the legacy of a sundown town. In 1960, your city’s population was 99.8% white. In 1980, 97.7%. In 1990, 98%. In 2000, 94.4%. This final figure [was] at a time when the country reported a population only 77.1% white and Lake County next door 60% white. Maybe African Americans no longer have to leave by sundown, but they certainly aren’t being invited to stay. In fact, you further learn that a series of cross burnings in the late ‘90s prompted a colleague to start a research center to track bias incidents in the region. When the center studied newspaper reports from 1990-2014, they found over twice as many bias incidents occurred in your city than in any other single city or town in Lake and Porter counties, most of them racially motivated.

The reference to “sundown town” referred to places where African Americans were not welcome after dark, which included white areas in Gary such as Miller and Glen Park prior to the 1960s.  At one time it was common in southern Indiana to come upon signs reading, “N-----, Don’t Let the Sun Set ON YOU.” 

R.I.P.: Actor Frank Vincent, 80, gangster Phil Leotardo in “The Sopranos” and, before that, Salvy in Martin Scorcese’s “Raging Bull” and Bill Batts in "Goodfellas.”  In the latter, after serving a six-year prison sentence for drug possession, he tells Tommy DeVeto (Joe Pesci), “Now go home and get your fuckin’ shine box” – a reference to when Tommy shined shoes as a kid.  “I was just breaking his balls,” Batts claimed, only to be pistol-whipped and fatally shot. 

Miranda congratulated “daddio” Phil for his 23 years of service at WGVU in Grand Rapids.