Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

C is for color, or the lack thereof

I got interested in the issue of skin color – well, always.

I’m finding this a little weird. Because of my skin color, some of the Daughter’s friends don’t believe I am black, or African-American if you prefer (I don’t), so they don’t think she’s part black.

Her first set of friends are first- or second-generation sub-Saharan Africans, so I sort of get that. But I’ve been getting the same message from her American black and even American white buddies.

In fact, we were all at a play at her school this spring, the fourth iteration of Lion King I’ve ever seen. My wife and I were sitting a dozen rows behind the Daughter and her friends. At the intermission, she and one of her friends came back to where I was seated. She specifically pointed to my hand, pointing out the variated skin tone. “See, he’s darker there. He just has this skin condition.”

As I’ve noted before, the condition is called vitiligo. Incidentally, Chuck linked to Why you don’t say what you shouldn’t say to people who look “different”, including those with vitiligo far more severe than mine. Also see vitiligo queen and Artist Creates Dolls With Vitiligo.

When I was diagnosed with it, I was extremely cautious about going outside, so paranoid about developing skin cancer. I was much paler than I am now. In fact, there were black and white pictures of me from 2010-2015 and I do not recognize myself.

My forehead is somewhat darker, but, as you may be able to see, the top of my head is still lighter, and thus much more vulnerable to sunburn or worse.

I got interested in the issue of skin color – well, always. My mom was very fair, my father much darker, and her family was not pleased when they were courting, I’ve been told. Colorism does exist in many cultures.

And when Roseanne Barr made an offensive tweet about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, Barr’s defense was that she didn’t know Jarrett was black. Her racial identification was well-reported, but also obvious to my eye.

Of course, race in America has been complicated in what is now the United States only for about four centuries. This is interesting to me: They considered themselves white, but DNA tests told a more complex story.

For ABC Wednesday

Sister Leslie is home, having a birthday

Leslie’s tribe of friends had wanted the feeding tube gone much earlier.

Sister LeslieI had this post about my sister Leslie converting to Roman Catholicism this year pretty well constructed in my mind. It’d have been how it was surprising it was – she did it as a secret from virtually everyone – but how it was fine by me.

Then she had this serious bicycle accident on June 4. To recap, she had been on vacation the previous month in Europe seeing her daughter Rebecca Jade sing on a cruise, but also spending a few days in Copenhagen, Denmark on her own.

She went back to San Diego and decided to start riding her bicycle partway to work. Since she is a safety official, she thought she ought to wear a helmet, so she bought one on June 1; wearing it almost certainly saved her life.

While I was in San Diego July 9-14, her friend Cathy managed to recover Leslie’s stuff that had been in storage at the first hospital she went to, Scripps Mercy. The distinct smell of dried blood remained on the helmet even days after being aired out. She’s keeping it, certainly not to wear again but possibly as a prop, along with her mangled bike, about the importance of bicycle safety.

Sister Leslie was semi-liberated from the SECOND hospital, Kaiser Permanente, on July 4, but she had a hospital bed in her bedroom at home because she still had a feeding tube attached. She was getting 1500 calories via it every night, but we – Leslie, her wonderful friend Leilani, the nutritionist, and i – agreed to start cutting back incrementally.

My primary task while I was out there was to get her from the bed, where she was not comfortable enough to sleep through the night, to a reclining chair. I became moderately competent at detaching and reattaching the “food” line when she needed to walk around.

I went to a couple of her doctors’ visits, notably to a heck and neck guy who removed the eight screws that had aligned her teeth to her jaw but were no longer necessary. Remember the worst pain you ever had at the dentist? Double that and add another 30%. That’s what the removal of the metal appeared to feel like, despite six shots of Novocaine, and I was in the room when it happened.

The good news is that, absent the metallic taste and feel in her mouth, she was more inclined to eat on her own. Then the feeding tube was removed on June 20. Leslie’s tribe of friends had wanted it gone much earlier, and I understood their feelings. I said, and she agreed, that it made her LOOK sick.

A couple of her friends asked me if her cognitive ability had been hampered. She took a test, and not only did she ace it, she explained the flaws in the testing instrument: “If Jill is taking off from her stockbroker job to raise the kids, what money are they living on?”

One of the words she’s had trouble remembering was “morphine,” which she was on during her first two weeks in hospital. It was probably just as well, as she had four broken ribs, but it really disoriented her. Except for that period, she was unfailing polite to everyone.

Given how she appeared in photos a month and a half ago, I note that she looks pretty darn good, i.e., more like herself. She has this little Harry Potter scar, and another hidden by her glasses.

The primary concern now is her left, dominant hand, which is still wrapped. Her friends need to exercise her fingers, lest they atrophy. She also likes lotion, especially between the fingers.

I’ve known sister Leslie longer than any living person and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to help her a little, even though I never did figure out all that long-term disability paperwork.

Movie review: Hearts Beat Loud

Will “We Are Not A Band,” Sam’s declaration, become, well, a band?

Hearts Beat LoudWhen the family went to see Hearts Beat Loud at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, I felt that the relationship between Frank, a widowed Brooklyn father (Nick Offerman) and his daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) felt real, genuine. The departed mother figure is not forgotten even as they both negotiate changes in their lives.

Sam is getting ready to study pre-med on the opposite coast. Frank decides that’s just the right time for them to start a band, even as he gets ready to close his record store. The girl IS a talented singer-songwriter, and they’d jammed in the past, but that was strictly recreational.

Moreover, though Sam has started a new romance, this does not alter her plans to move away and find her own way. Frank secretly tries to keep the musical dream alive. Will “We Are Not A Band,” Sam’s declaration, become, well, a band? The film is a bit sentimental without being schmaltzy.

The director and co-writer is Brett Haley, whose worst reviewed film, the Hero (2017) was still 78% positive. I couldn’t help but wondering why Hearts Beat Loud reviewed far worse with audiences (72% positive) than with critics (90% positive). I have a theory, but it’s a bit of a spoiler.

I also resonated with the cause of of death of the mother which resonated in my life far more than it might have a couple months earlier.

The movie also stars Ted Danson as a bartender who is nothing like Sam Malone on the TV show Cheers; Toni Collette as the landlord at Frank’s store, and maybe more; Sasha Lane; and Blythe Danner as Frank’s mom. Danner also starred in Haley’s I’ll See You in My Dreams (2015), which I saw at the Spectrum, naturally, and mostly liked.

The Rogerebert.com page calls Hearts Beat Loud “warm and intimate.” I’ll accept that assessment.

Musician Yusef/Cat Stevens turns 70

The trauma sharpened Cat Stevens’ quest for a more spiritually focused life.

There’s an article in the September 15, 2017 New Yorker entitled The Unlikely Return of Cat Stevens. That’s the truth.

“In the years since he formally retired from the popular music world, in 1978, his name has popped up in the media from time to time… It was difficult to… reconcile this cold, humorless, unhappy, and severe-looking man with the joyful, understanding, goofy, wise songwriter whose music we’d known and loved.

“For a long time, the man who’d changed his name to Yusuf Islam had completely disowned his artistic output as Cat Stevens—a confusing, dispiriting slap in the face to those it once meant a great deal to.”

A GREAT deal.

Steven Demetre Georgiou, born on 21 July 1948 in the Marylebone area of London, was the youngest child of a Greek Cypriot father, Stavros Georgiou (1900–1978), and a Swedish mother, Ingrid Wickman (1915-1989). “They lived above the family’s restaurant, Moulin Rouge, and everyone, including the children, helped out with the business.”

His interest in music began as a young teen, playing piano and guitar by 15, inspired by the Beatles, folk music, and show tunes such as West Side Story. He also took up drawing, “a skill later displayed in the purposely naive paintings that adorned the covers of his best-known albums.

“By 1966 he had chosen the stage name Cat Stevens because… his girlfriend said his eyes had a feline shape and allure.”

He had some early success on his first two albums. But he made a major change in both his music and his philosophy after contracting tuberculosis, which nearly killed him.

Tea for the Tillerman, which became a Top 10 Billboard hit, sold over 500,000 copies within six months of its release. Teaser and the Firecat (1971) was equally successful.
“Many more hits followed, in an increasingly broad range of styles and arrangements…

“By that time, the singer had already started his religious sojourn… Stevens almost drowned off the coast of Malibu, California [in 1975]. The trauma sharpened his quest for a more spiritually focused life. He found his way into Islam, changing his name to Yusuf Islam in July 1978. The singer’s next album, Back to Earth (1978), would be his last pop record for decades.”

He was embroiled in a long-running controversy “regarding comments which he made in 1989 about the death fatwa on author Salman Rushdie.” He believes he was misunderstood, but 10,000 Maniacs removed his Peace Train from one of their albums. In perhaps a confusion over a similar name, he was on a No-Fly list into the United States in 2004.

He started making music again in the 1990s, “though, at first, it was of an entirely religious nature… He didn’t start exploring secular music again until the new millennium, leading to the release of An Other Cup in 2006, by which point he was again allowed to fly into the US.

Listen to:

The First Cut Is the Deepest from Mona Bone Jakon

Tea for the Tillerman
Where Do the Children Play?
Hard Headed Woman
Wild World
Sad Lisa
Father and Son

Teaser and the Firecat
The Wind; a great description of this song on his Rock and Hall Hall of Fame 2014 induction page
Morning Has Broken
Bitterblue
Moonshadow
Peace Train

Oh Very Young from Buddha and the Chocolate Box (1974)

Boots and Sand, about his 2004 exclusion from the US, recorded in 2008, featuring Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, and Terry Sylvester

Yusuf / Cat Stevens – CBS Sunday Morning Interview, 2014

Saturday Sessions (CBS)- His most recent album re-covers some of his earliest music (2017)

Coverville: 599: The Cat Stevens Cover Story (August 5, 2009) and 1179: Scrambled Cover Stories for Don Henley, Carlos Santana and Cat Stevens (July 19, 2017)

The flights of the infrequent passenger

Children flying in the middle of the night are cranky.

United_planeDuring the second week of July, I flew from Albany, NY to San Diego, CA and back. I had not been on a plane since May 2009, when my daughter and I took round-trip flights to Charlotte, NC, via LaGuardia, NYC to attend my niece Alex’s high school graduation. This time, I went to help out my sister Leslie after her bicycle accident on June 4. This will be a transportation report; I’ll write about the medical situation soon.

Because my understanding the flying landscape is nil, I got to the ALB airport a couple hours early. I paid for a checked bag (why was it $35 out, but $25 back?) because I don’t know how to pack for five or six days with carry-on bags.

I was surprised to discover that I was designated for TSA PreCheck line for the flights in both direction, which is “a U.S. government program that allows travelers deemed low-risk… to pass through an expedited security screening at certain U.S. airports. Qualifying travelers don’t have to remove their belts, shoes or lightweight jackets.”

How that this happen? I didn’t sign up for it, and I’m hardly a frequent flyer. They must have determined I’m no longer a likely terrorist.

It turned out that the plane to Newark was about 75 minutes late. I had some cushion, but I was starting to think I was going to have to run through the next airport. Some guy flying from Newark to Minneapolis was apoplectic, giving the United representative grief continually.

In both legs of the flight out, and my return trip from San Diego, I had a window seat in rows 25 to 35. My shin was right up against the seat in front of me. And the toilet was tinier than I recalled.

Children flying in the middle of the night are cranky, based on one boy deplaning in Chicago wanting his mommy though she was right there, and one girl at O’Hare who couldn’t get her tablet (which was the size of her head) to work, so her mother took it away and the girl wailed so loudly she could be heard four gates away, no exaggeration.

Odd thing about the flight from Chicago to Albany. I was in row 10, on the left aisle, two rows behind first class, and my knees didn’t reach the seat in front of me. Joy, seriously! On the opposite side, some tall guy, definitely over six and a half feet tall, stuck in the middle seat, had an app that told him that there was an aisle seat in row 35 of that plane that was available.

But the flight attendant said he’d have be even less legroom. Do the legroom is less the further back you’re seated?

Then the guy on the right aisle got bumped up to first class, allowing the tall guy to move to the aisle seat. Did the flight attendant facilitate that? Je ne sais pas, but the lucky passenger in first class seemed pleasantly surprised, and tall guy was relieved.

The worst thing about flying east is that it took me three or four days to catch up on my sleep. It’s almost never a problem flying west three time zones, but it’s almost always an issue on the return flight.

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