Hold Steady

‘There's gonna come a time when the true scene leaders
Forget where they differ and get big picture’

    “Stay Positive,” The Hold Steady

Rolling Stone gave a plug to The Hold Steady’s forthcoming CD “Thrashing Through the Passions” on its latest “Quick List” of top new albums.  The Brooklyn band formed in 2003. Josh Leffingwell burned me their 2006 CD “Boys and Girls in America.  The first song, “Stuck Between Stations,” has a line that references Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” (1957):

There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together

“Chillout Tent” is about two young people at a rock concert who meet in a chill-out tent after being taken there by paramedics when they’d overdosed on mushrooms, then given oranges and cigarettes (for nourishment and stimulation?).  My favorite track is “Southtown Girls,” which contains a line “Hey Bloomington, what’d you let them do to you” (an IU reference perhaps?)and the much-repeated couplet:

Southtown girls won't blow you away
But you know that they'll stay

We celebrated Dave’s fiftieth birthday at BC Osaka in Merrillville, a Japanese restaurant whose buffet included a wide variety of dishes.  Many seemed spicy so I favored the roast beef, crab Rangoon, and salad along with small portions of Mongolian beef and a noodle dish, then finished with jello, ice cream, and cream-filled pastries.  Toni especially enjoyed the sushi selections, not my cup of tea.  The night before, Dave and Angie dined at Ivy’s Bohemia House, where Becca works, with several old friends.  Dave asked Toni details about the day he was born (in Washington, DC), and we discussed summer of ’69 news events, including the Apollo 11 moon landing, Chappaquiddick, and Woodstock. which would become a counter-culture symbol peace and harmony, with a half-million hippies gathering in a rain-drenched field without violence.  I’m not sad to have missed it, but those who went gained bigtime bragging rights. Toni and I saw Martin Scorsese’s documentary in the spring of 1970 at a venerable theater near Kensington and Allegheny in north Philly while visiting her parents Blanche and Tony. Performing at Woodstock fiftieth anniversary festival will be original artists John Sebastian, John Fogarty, Carlos Santana, David Crosby, and Country Joe McDonald, whose antiwar “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag” chorus went, “One, two, three what are we fighting for?”

I could hardly watch the news with two mass shootings that took dozens of lives in El Paso and Dayton – within hours of one another. More people died at the hands of the white supremacist in ten minutes than the average in El Paso for an entire year. Trump stayed away from El Paso mercifully and instead delivered a mealy-mouthed address from the White House and said nothing about banning assault rifles or mandating universal background checks. Kyle Telechan posted this comment:

    It's weird how quickly mental health suddenly becomes important to Republican politicians and pundits the few moments after a mass shooter is found to be a white supremacist, and how unimportant it becomes soon thereafter. If you want to claim that "mental health" is the base cause of these shootings, sounds like maybe we should work on getting a system where everyone can get the help they need regardless of their economic status?  No? We're going to forget about this in a few days until the next white kid with obvious supremacist views extinguishes more human lives? Also related, can you imagine how quickly they'd be racing to address this instead of hand-wringing and "thoughts and prayers"-ing if the mass shootings were inspired by ISIS? If you don't see their inaction as speaking volumes of their motives, you're not paying attention.

Mike Olszanski posted this Carl Sagan quote: “For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.”

On category in the Jeopardy Teen tournament was Vinyl.  I knew four of the five answers, including Juke box, revolutions per minute, turn-table, and 21 Pilots, a pop group Miranda turned me onto.

Knowing I’d seen Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Jonathyne Briggs asked if it was worth seeing  in a theater. I gave him an emphatic yes!  As Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote: “The action jumps off the screen while setting up psychological provocations with a reverb that won’t quit.”

IUN math professor Jon Becker just published a book titled “The Flunked-Out Professor,” based on his college experience.  Here’s how Amazon advertised the Kindle edition:

   Jon has been kicked out of college.He spends his days playing video games and his nights delivering pizzas, with no motivation to develop a sustainable plan for the future. Recognizing this, Jon's girlfriend decides that she doesn't want to be stuck with a video game-addicted pizza delivery man for the rest of her life. So, she tells him to get his act together, or she will have to end their relationship. Jon feels like a total failure.
  SOUND FAMILIAR?

  Failure is a common part of life for everyone. But when we fail, most people make the mistake of identifying themselves as the failure instead of recognizing that they have experienced failure.In The Flunked-Out Professor,readers follow Jon as he makes a series of bad choices which get him kicked out of college and beaten down in life. Eventually, he chooses a new path--one that ultimately leads him back to the same college that kicked him out...as a faculty member!

Lou Nimnicht wrote a piece for Barb Walczak’s Newsletterabout competing in a tournament in Las Vegas.  He claimed that in the Friday Knockout he and his partner came in second of 25 teams, “despite losing to a squad whose average age was about 10!” Now if that was not a facetious exaggeration, it would be most unusual, as most competitors are seniors.  I will have to investigate.  Last year IUN student Meriah Isaza (below) interviewed Nimnicht for an oral history assignment.  I asked Terry Bauer, recently elected president of bridge Unit 154 for Northern Indiana, and he quipped that Nimnicht considers anyone under the age of 60 a kid. He added, however, that he’d lost at a tournament to 12-year-olds.