Donald J. Raleigh: 'Soviet Baby Boomers' (2012), Part I

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

An absorbing look at the world through the hearts and minds of the Soviet high school graduating class of 1967. Specifically, via two elite high schools, one in Moscow and one in Saratov, a city on the Volga River that is about 850 kilometers / 528 miles southeast of Moscow. From the perspective of "the Sputnik Generation," one also gets at the entire arc of the Soviet Union, from beginning to end, and then onward right into the Vladimir Putin era. 

Their grandparents' generation, generally speaking, experienced the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War; and their parents, the Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) era, including mass repression, the Second World War, and the Nikita Kruschev (1894-1971) "Thaw" after Stalin's death. 

The Baby Boomers benefited from the Thaw, were excited by Sputnik and Kruschev, but eventually became embittered during the Leonid Brezhnev era (1906-1982), especially toward its end; then on to Mikhail Gorbachev (born 1931), glasnost, perestroika, the breakup of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) and Putin (born 1952).

Most of the interviewed boomers were the children of "third tier" elites -- those immediately below nomenklatura and second tier elites -- that is, they were children "of the mass intelligentsia -- professionals (doctors, research scientists, professors, engineers, architects, artists, teachers, librarians, etc.)," the kinds of bourgeois specialists who tend to help maintain a semblance of civil society (not only in the Soviet Union but also in 'The West'). (page 22)

Stalin, a brutish nationalist and proponent of the Cult of Personality (namely his own), turned against those with a more internationalist sensibility, and aimed, almost right up to the time of his death in 1953, "to root out 'cosmopolitanism,'" partly a code word for Jewish intellectuals, sophisticated urbanites and their "fellow travelers."  (page 32) Luckily for most, in the wake of Stalin's death came "the Thaw," which relaxed the atmosphere a bit.

As for attitudes and actions over time, Raleigh notes: "Within any historical situation, people pick their fates and live their lives both as passive objects and as active agents." (page 64)

Teachers were very important to the elite Baby Boomers: they "'had very colorful personalities' and played an enormous role in shaping their charges' worldviews' . . . 'They taught us to think, not only to learn things by heart' . . . 'Actually, all of the teachers were excellent! Except for a few individuals, they were all interesting.'" (page 91)

[To be continued.] 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: West Franklin Street, 1968-2018

Along West Franklin Street, starting at the Columbia Street intersection and heading toward Carrboro, there are still some vestiges of the Chapel Hill of 1968. There were more when I was a student at the University of North Carolina.

Of the "south" side of West Franklin, I've previously discussed University Square in another post. Next was Hardee's at 213 West Franklin (now there's a Panera at that address); Union Bus Station at 311 (the Franklin Hotel is now at that address) and the Chapel Hill Weekly newspaper at 501.

I certainly remember the Hardee's and the newspaper building, having eaten at the former and worked immediately next to the latter (at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill).

The bus station building I remember vaguely. Having been completed in 1946, it soon thereafter became part of the history of the civil rights movement:

"On April 9, 1947, eight African American and eight white members of CORE (known as the Freedom Riders) set out from Washington, D.C. on Greyhound and Trailways buses; on April 12, both buses arrived in Chapel Hill. As the buses departed Chapel Hill for Greensboro on April 13, four of the riders were arrested. The commotion aboard the buses drew a large crowd of spectators, including several white taxi drivers. 

The men were taken to the police station, with a fifty dollar bond placed on each man. As white rider James Peck got off the bus to pay their bonds, a taxi driver struck him in the head.  

In May 1947, those members who had been arrested went on trial and were sentenced. The riders unsuccessfully appealed their sentences. On March 21, 1949, they surrendered at the courthouse in Hillsborough and were sent to segregated chain gangs." 

The bus station's food service desegregated in the early 1960s, under pressure.  Source: "Trailways Bus Station," Open Orange. Website link here.

Of the "north" side of West Franklin, an earlier post covered the first block off from Columbia Street, heading toward Carrboro. If you crossed Church Street going in the same direction in 1968, there was a Belk-Leggett department store at 206 West Franklin, Fowler's meats at 306, Carolina Grill at 312, Village Pharmacy at 318 and The Cavern at 452 1/2.  

The Bookshop (pictured above) came into being in 1985 at 400 West Franklin, a merger of Keith Martin Bookshop and Bookends (both Chapel Hill book shops). I remember all three of them, having bought books at each. The Bookshop closed in the summer of 2017, having lasted close to thirty-two years in that location.

Belk-Leggett was gone from its 206 location by the time I came to Chapel Hill. Fowler's was still at 306 for a while and then folded. There was one in Durham, too. 

I loved the Carolina Grill -- you could eat like a king on the budget of a college student. Which may be why they eventually had to close. I remember flat steaks there, excellent meat and potatoes type staples, probably requisitioned from next-door Fowler's. It was sort of like a large hall with tables, for some reason making me think of a Bavarian beer hall in memory. 

Village Pharmacy, 318 West Franklin, "Home of the Big O." This place was around for a while but must have eventually died on the vine. Browsing issues of the Daily Tar Heel, I came across an advertisement for Village Pharmacy from the September 28, 1949 issue: "Opposite Bus Station - Phone F-3966."  In "land line" telephone exchanges of the twentieth century, "F" might be named Flanders, Fleetwood, Factory, etcetera.  In any case, when I was working at Algonquin Books, I'd occasionally walk to Village Pharmacy for its soda fountain features. They served fresh lemonade, orangeade, milkshakes and grill food. No longer.

The Cave is a long-standing underground bar and music venue. Because I have detailed location notes from college journals dating to the 1980s, I'll devote more time to The Cave in a later post. It nearly folded after fifty years (1968-2018), but was saved by Melissa Swingle and Autumn Spencer in the summer of 2018 -- thank God! Here's a link to their website. Dig it!

Invaluable resource to cross-check memories, places:  OCCUPANTS AND STRUCTURES OF FRANKLIN STREET, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA AT 5-YEAR INTERVALS, 1793-1998, by Bernard Lee Bryant, Jr. Chapel Hill Historical Society, printed out by J.D. Eyre in 1999. Link here.

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: Internationalist Books

It's like the book title, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Elegiac America. Chapel Hill Daze. Since I first scampered around Franklin Street as a kid till now, a lot of melting. 

Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.

~ from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Lament" (1921)

Internationalist Books is gone! It had, believe it or not, four locations before vanishing into the ether of Saṃsāra. Perhaps it'll cycle through again. The four locations were:

Chapel Hill. 108 Henderson Street (upstairs, above Henderson Street Bar & Grill; aka Linda's Bar & Grill; now Imbibe), by the Continental Café/Hector's (now gone) and across the street from the US Post Office (still there). It was tiny. (Notice in Daily Tar Heel, February 3, 1982). Call 942-REDS. Early 1982 (late 1981)-1984.

Chapel Hill. 408 West Rosemary Street, 1984-1991+. Part of a spacious former house. This allowed plenty of room for meeting, reading, discussing, organizing. I worked at this location as a volunteer. The house is still standing and serves as Mama Dip's Kitchen, which used to be at a nearby location (405 West Rosemary).  

Chapel Hill. 405 West Franklin Street, circa 1995-2014. I took the photo at top on November 24, 2012.  

Carrboro. 101 Lloyd Street, 2014-September 2016. Final stand.

International Books founder Bob Sheldon (April 17, 1950--February 22, 1991) was murdered during the opening phase of the Gulf War, which he opposed. The case remains unsolved. Originally from Colorado, he graduated from Temple University, Philadelphia, and worked as a nurse at UNC, as well as being an organizer and book store founder. He is buried in Colorado Springs (see "Find A Grave"). 

I am really happy to see that his papers are held at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Here's a link to the Guide to the Bob Sheldon Papers, 1968-1991.  

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Chapel Hill Daze: Pictures of Another Gone World: University Square

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World (The Pocket Poet Series, Number One). San Francisco: City Lights, 1955.  A salute to Ferlinghetti, who is ninety-nine years old -- born on March 24, 1919. Graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1941. I saw him give a reading in Chapel Hill in the 1980s, when he was but a young lad in his sixties. Afterwards, he signed my copy of Jack's Book. (I also remember when Harlan Ellison came to town to write a story based on a given first line -- but that's another story). 

And now it's time to turn to pictures of another gone world, a University Square of the Mind, as it were. University Square was an entry point for me, I liked the area for parking, sitting with cups of coffee, writing in journals. And now it's gone, gone, gone, transmogrified into "Carolina Square." The buildings and entire complex that comprised University Square were demolished in 2015. 

So let's do the Proust thing and bring back some of the names of that lost world. 

In the 1980s, let's say around 1983, you could walk from Columbia Street along Franklin Street on the "north" side, going toward Carrboro, and you'd pass Logo's Book Store (Christian books?), Mr. Gatti's Pizza, the Yogurt Pump, a jewelry store, an electronics store, the entrance pathway to He's Not Here (which always made me think of the Alamo - lots of stories to go with He's Not Here); a Pizza Hut, a sporting goods shop, the Pump House, a funeral home, McFarling's Exxon, Hunam's Restaurant, and a parking lot that ended with Church Street. If you kept going, you'd pass another parking lot, a telephone building, Peppi's Pizza, Woofer & Tweeter, a Gulf station; Fowler's Food (giant deli type meat place), McFarling's garage, Chapel Hill Rare Books, Martin Keith Book Shop, a florist, Phoenicia Restaurant, Village Pharmacy and Noel's Sub Machine. 

The only place left standing from the previous paragraph is He's Not Here.

Let's walk back to the intersection of Columbia and Franklin and cross the street to the "south" side.

Just at the corner is a large Baptist Church (still). Back around 1983, there was next a beauty salon (Scissorium) of which I remember nothing except that maybe it was a small single story stand alone. 

University Square was divided into three large sections: University Square East, University Square, and University Square West. The anchor for East was a CCB (Central Carolina Bank) Bank with ATM designed to trick students into overdrafts (or so it seemed to students). East included Kemp Jewelers: Circle Travel (anyone wonder about travel agencies?  This was one and I went in there occasionally); the Chapel Hill barbershop; Aesthetic Styling Salon; Cabana Tanning Center; Monkey Business -- never went in that one and have no idea what it was pitching.

University Square [Central]. Time-Out Restaurant was a 24-hour place with biscuits and salty kinds of college student food. The aroma of fresh buttered biscuits perpetually hovered about.

There were green and white awnings that fringed the roof edges, and cool passageways that let you cross through to the back side of the complex, one of my favorite design features that I often took advantage of -- built-in desire paths.

Time-Out still exists but has moved to where Hector's once stood, at 201 East Franklin at Henderson, across Henderson Street from the US Post Office.

Swensen's Ice Cream was one of the those old-fashioned places that left me bewildered -- a lot like Mayberry's. There are three Swensen's left in the entire USA, as of this post. Mayberry Ice Cream is down to a couple left in North Carolina, I think.

Other places in the middle section: Ken's Quickie Mart; Knit-A-Bit; Second Sole (shoe repairs, I think); Cameron Craft. The Painted Bird had various types of cool little things, arts type goodies. I think they had stationary and cards, too. 

And there was my favorite University Square hangout of all, on the side facing away from Franklin Street: The Looking Glass Café. More on this at some point, I suspect. The scent of fresh coffee permeated. There's a place with the same name now open in nearby Carrboro, at 601 West Main Street. I'll have to inquire to see if they are connected in some direct way, or even indirectly by inspiration. 

University Square West. Little Professor Book Center. I frequently ducked into this and many of the other Chapel Hill book and record stores. At its peak, there were more than one hundred Little Professor book stores around the USA; there are now (in July of 2018), as far as I can determine, three left.

Other stuff: Tyndall's Formal Wear (rentals, mostly); Shoe Doctor; University Opticians; Fine Feathers - clothes; and T'Boli Imports. The last one had lots of wine, if memory serves.

I have no idea what was in the upper floors of the main buildings: offices, apartments, condos?  

University Square: gone but not forgotten. Anyone who has any idea of what the above is about, please add details, memories, observations. And if not about here, how about somewhere that you once knew that's now part of another gone world?

Photos: "Downtown Chapel Hill" website; University Gazette (2008); Wiki Commons (July 28, 2008). 

Invaluable resource to cross-check memories, places:  OCCUPANTS AND STRUCTURES OF FRANKLIN STREET, CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA AT 5-YEAR INTERVALS, 1793-1998, by Bernard Lee Bryant, Jr. Chapel Hill Historical Society, printed out by J.D. Eyre in 1999. Link here.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Robert Mitchum's 'Thunder Road' (1958)

Starting with the name, "Thunder Road" takes on mythic proportions as it flows from the 1958 Robert Mitchum movie through the 1975 Bruce Springsteen song and beyond. There's even another movie with the same title out in 2018. During the US-Vietnam War, Thunder Road was the dub name for South Vietnam's National Route 13. 

The movie Thunder Road was really Robert Mitchum's labor of love. Arthur Ripley was given the director's credits. but Mitchum was the main man for this project. Much of it was filmed in and around Asheville, North Carolina, standing in for Harlan County, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Thunder Road is a bit different from what one might expect. It's largely sympathetic to moonshine runners in a largely dry American South, but also shows that change is inevitable. Gangsters are trying to take over the routes, lawmen seek to disrupt the system, generational differences are starting to emerge. 

Lucas (the Robert Mitchum character) is a veteran of the Korean War and a very tough dude, indeed. He has a spacial lady friend in Memphis and an admirer in a girl next door in the Appalachians. His younger brother Robin (played by Robert Mitchum's son James) services his smuggling cars but also wants to be a driver -- something Lucas wants to deter at all costs. The Korean War did something to him, too -- made him world weary. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Filming at Duke University: Volker Schlöndorff's Adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1990)

Volker Schlöndorff focuses consistently on such themes as explored in The Handmaid's Tale. His Der junge Törless / Young Törless (1966) is concerned with how social psychology works as a psychic battleground between mass contagion and individual choice. His other movies, all exacting, include Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975),  Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976),  Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979), Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984) and Diplomatie / Diplomacy (2014). 

Schlöndorff takes a few liberties with The Handmaid's Tale (1990), but the gist remains. Fascism or plain old authoritarianism, patriarchy melded with pseudo-religious ideology, cults of macho personality -- gang's all here. In 2018, one can see variants of the same in Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, Boko Haram, Orthodox Conservative Christianity and Orthodox Conservative Judaism, Putin, Duterte, Trump, Erdoğan, and so on -- enemies all to cosmopolitan egalitarianism, equality and diversity, and thereby enemies all to my own sweet sensibilities! 

Today's Rune: Flow.

Tristine Rainer's 'Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin' (2017)

Tristine Rainer, Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2017.

An insightful and entertaining journey, focusing on the period from the early 1960s until Nin's death in 1977. We learn a lot about Rainer's lives -- inner and outer -- and about Anaïs Nin and some of her core relationships. There's also much about the creation of art through living and writing -- including the interconnection of diaries, memoirs, novels and essays. 

Synchronicity: in the last post -- on James Brown and the American South -- James McBride discussed the use of "masks" by people in order to live in the world. Here, too, Rainer and Nin delve into the same concept, with a Jungian flavor.

Nin had spoken a Jungian "riddle" about persona masks: "The mask should be held eighteen inches in front of the face." (page 330)

Who is the inner person, and who is a projection, or is there any difference? (Good question in the Age of Trump).

Tristine Rainer: "I had confused a lot of masks with myself. . . Anaïs certainly had worn masks, too -- dazzling creations, their beauty attracting her followers . . . Maybe she was saying that personas, while seductive and useful, are not the dancer, and like the dancer's fan, they can be discarded, replaced, or retrieved when the music changes." (pages 330-331) 

Rainer quotes Hugo Guiler, speaking to Anaïs near the end of her life: "You were a creature of flight and had to fulfill your nature." (page 345)

Anaïs tells Rainer: "You must complete yourself . . . You must own your own wildness!" (page 213)

Rainer's description of meeting Henry Miller in 1965 is mordant. Anaïs needed his blessing in order to publish her diary volumes with him in it -- he was all the rage in 1965. His novel Tropic of Cancer, finally published in the USA, had been cleared of obscenity charges by the Supreme Court in 1964. 

What Rainer saw in Miller, then seventy-five: "When Henry opened the door to his surprisingly conventional white ranch house [in California], I saw a bald troll holding onto a walker, and my heart sank. Anaïs air-kissed his wrinkled, sagging cheeks." And: "His troll eyes twinkled." (page 241).

My only wish for any new editions of Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin?  An index.

Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998), with whom I became friends near the end of his life, told many gripping stories about Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. He knew them both and corresponded with them, but especially with Miller. He was a great correspondent and also sent me several letters, which are now part of the Wallace Fowlie Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. It gives me a tingle to note that letters from Anaïs Nin to Wallace are in Box 2 and letters to me from Wallace are in Box 5. Here's a link to the guide. 

It's a small world after all -- as Tristine Rainer writes about so well. 

p.s. Anaïs Nin is often thought of as purely French, but her parents were Cuban and she spent much of her life in the USA. 

Today's Rune: Growth. 

Volker Schlöndorff's Adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1990)

Volker Schlöndorff's 1990 adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) was filmed at Duke University (pictured above) and elsewhere around Durham (one scene looks like the rail line behind Brightleaf Mall, a cluster of converted tobacco warehouses), Raleigh and the mountains of North Carolina. It's colorful, harrowing in parts and yet also salted occasionally with wry, dark humor. 

Volker Schlöndorff focuses consistently on such themes as explored in The Handmaid's Tale. His Der junge Törless / Young Törless (1966) is concerned with how social psychology works as a psychic battleground between mass contagion and individual choice. His other movies, all exacting, include Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975),  Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976),  Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979), Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984) and Diplomatie / Diplomacy (2014). 

Schlöndorff takes a few liberties with The Handmaid's Tale (1990), but the gist remains. Fascism or plain old authoritarianism, patriarchy melded with pseudo-religious ideology, cults of macho personality -- gang's all here. In 2017, one can see variants of the same in Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, Boko Haram, Orthodox Conservative Christianity and Judaism, Putin, Duterte, Trump, Erdoğan, and so on -- enemies all to cosmopolitan egalitarianism, equality and diversity, and thereby enemies all to my own sensibilities. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

'Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary' (2016)

Made a pilgrimage to the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff to see John Scheinfeld's Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (2016). I wanted to see and hear Coltrane on the big screen. Well worth the extra effort.

The film is partly about the man and the musician, whose 1965 album A Love Supreme usually makes it into the top five jazz recordings of all time (that is, since electronic recordings began in earnest around the time of World War I). The film is also about Coltrane's impact on various people and their evolving ways of perceiving the world, plus more specifically his influence on musicians of various genres.

From the first time I listened to a John Coltrane recording, in my mid-teens, I've been hooked. Even now, I've got a framed album cover of Giant Steps in my work office and a framed cover of Blue Train at home. I've got three copies of A Love Supreme. I also dig Alice Coltrane, who continued down his mystical path after John's death in 1967 at the age of forty.

The most interesting surprise to me about Chasing Trane is a side trip to Japan, during Coltrane's last extended tour, and his visit to the Nagasaki atomic bombing memorial, and the enthusiastic Japanese response. 

The Texas Theatre is where Lee Harvey Oswald was nabbed on November 22, 1963, shortly after 1:40 p.m. A strange feeling to be seeing a John Coltrane documentary in this place on John Fitzgerald Kennedy's 100th birthday. But fitting, because Trane's music provides a portal to places far beyond our typical experience of space and time. 

Today's Music: Flow.  

Mystic Chords of Memory: Teachers

I. Back then there was a marvelous history teacher named Ruth Cunningham Bishop. First we knew her as Ms. Cunningham, then as Dr. Bishop. She was always inspiring us to learn by employing a playful sense of things. I took as many classes with her as I could, learning a lot about the British Empire, World War I, China and “Contemporary Issues.”

Dr. Bishop was studying, it seems, British India and colonialism. She had lived in India and had many tales to relate. It’s because of her willingness to share some of her personal thoughts with us that her imparted wisdom stuck with me. More on these in a future post, no doubt.

As far as history and culture goes, Dr. Bishop explained the Indian origin of the word “thug” – “deceiver” in Hindi. These were organized crime groups that operated for centuries, from the 1200s well into the 1800s. Some were Muslims and some Hindu followers of the Goddess Kali, a whirlwind deity of chaos, destruction and, oddly, motherhood. Thugs enjoyed infiltrating and waylaying merchants and travelers with stealth and surprise. Dr. Bishop would occasionally sing a little ditty about Kali, based on a song composed in 1912 but sung by many vocalists ever since: “My Melancholy Baby.” A play on words ("My Melon-Kali Baby"), a way to get us to pay attention and to remember. Obviously this method worked, at least for me.

Of the crisis leading up to World War One, Dr. Bishop composed and sang a variation on the “Oscar Meyer Wiener song:”

I wish I were in Bosnia-Herzegovina,

That is where I truly wish to be

‘Cause if I controlled that Bosnia-Herzegovina

Everyone would be in love with me

(Sounds a lot like Vladimir Putin today, eh?)

Later, in her Chinese history class, when she came to the communist revolution, she had us learn all about “Mousey Tongue” – Mao-tse-tung, aka Mao Zedong (1893-1976). Which reminds me that Beijing used to be called, in the West, Peking. 

It’s no surprise in retrospect that Dr. Bishop came to operate a cabaret in Chapel Hill. We drove by there once, but weren’t old enough to be able to get in. The mystery of it remains intact.

II. Another teacher of a different sort (figuratively, not literally a teacher) was Mely. I asked her out. She was a year older than I was, a significant stretch for a teenager who hadn't even had a driver's license for long. It was agreed that I'd pick her up at her house, where she lived with her parents. I had to borrow my parents' Jeep Wagoneer for the outing. It was a rather comical date. 

Mely (Melisandre, an unusual name -- at least before Game of Thrones) lived in Duke Park, which was not very far from where I lived with my family on Gregson Street in Trinity Park, as these "districts" of Durham were called. Duke Park was even called North Durham, but when I look at a map now, they're only about a mile and a half apart. Still, Duke Park felt like an alien place to me, hidden in wooded, hilly terrain and slightly menacing. I didn't know the territory.

When I got to her house, Mely opened the door, but there, too, were her parents. Her father, Ed, had a gruff, scary presence. He was a big deal, a White House correspondent who had covered Nixon, and he'd been a pilot in World War II in the Asia Pacific, surviving terrible things. Luckily Betty, a literary critic and general columnist at the Durham Morning Herald (where Ed also worked), was nicer. Thanks to Ed, though, I was glad to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

Mely suggested we go to a dive bar downtown off West Main, across Albemarle Street from the Ivy Room and the Cosmo Room. Soon we were chatting it up when an old African American man came by and began singing the Nat King Cole version of "Mona Lisa:"

"So like the lady with the mystic smile . . . 
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep
They just lie there and they die there . . ."

After this eerie little ditty, he left. The rest of the evening must remain shrouded in quietude, though for no particular reason. Maybe I've been watching too many classic Japanese films lately. 

That dive bar space is still there, but now it's called James Joyce Irish Pub. Passing strange, if you ask me.

Fast-forward eight or nine years. I finished college over in Chapel Hill and worked for a small publishing company that was eventually snapped up by a bigger one. Thanks to this turn of events, I applied for a job as library clerk at Perkins Library in Durham, at Duke University. And surprisingly, I was hired.

The very next person hired in the same capacity as a library clerk, in a different department, in the same library was -- perhaps you guessed it -- Mely. We officially begin working there on the very same day. 

That, my friends, is far more than passing strange. Kismet, synchronicity, what? 

I liked library work so much that I went back to Chapel Hill to get an MSLS, wrapping it up in a couple years with an internship at Duke, where I did preservation work on League of Nations documents that culminated in a display about the Great War and its aftermath. I can thank Dr. Bishop again for the head start on this kind of thing.

I'd worked about three years at Perkins, coming out as a library assistant and then a professional librarian. 

When I headed for London for another library internship and then Philadelphia for another graduate degree (surprise, in history), Mely, who had also been promoted to library assistant, was still at Perkins Library. But, for the final kicker, last I heard from former co-workers was that she also eventually moved out of state and then became a professional librarian herself! 

As Paul Simon put it in a 1986 song, "These are the days of miracle and wonder." They really are, pretty much always. Indeed, as the late great Chuck Berry phrased it back in 1964, "'C'est la vie,' say the old folks, 'it goes to show you never can tell.'"

Today's Rune: Strength. 

Mystic Chords of Memory: Scholey Pitcher and Yoko Akiba

They never knew each other, but they were connected. Scholey Pitcher was a publisher at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; Yoko Akiba was a wizard with maps, a librarian, who worked in the Public Documents and Maps Department at Duke University's Perkins Library. For a few years in my twenties, I worked at both places and came to know them both.

When I knew him, Scholey (whose muted first name was Charles) was often smoking one of his beloved tobacco pipes and talking in a courtly manner. He was from Charleston, South Carolina, had been a stock broker. I remember one of his stories about World War II. He was an R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer's Training School) cadet at The Citadel in Charleston at the time of Pearl Harbor, just shy of age eighteen. With the US hurled into the war, The Citadel accelerated graduation, turning out second lieutenants for military service. As a neophyte lieutenant, Scholey was quickly trained and sent to the War in the Pacific. He vividly remembered being crammed into an amphibious assault vehicle heading for the shoreline, under fire from Japanese defenders. The images and feelings had stuck with him like it was yesterday. If I remember right (and it's quite possible that I am mis-remembering this detail of his story), Scholey was with a company of Marines and the battle he described was Tarawa, November 1943, when he was just shy of age twenty. 

Not only was Yoko Akiba a master of the maps, she was also edgy and often cracked me up with her quips. Two of her favorites: "Never tell" and "I'm sick of their faces." The first meant she was going to make a pithy or catty observation, which she herself would proceed to repeat along and down the line, selectively. The second statement was usually aimed at any dull-minded or overly bureaucratic person that annoyed her sense of fairness. She was very much about social fairness and had been a socialist in Japan. Yoko was just shy of six years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, and nine and a half years old when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She remembered them well, and the widespread firebombings beforehand. Late in the war, she and hundreds of thousands of other children were evacuated to the countryside. If I remember right, Akiba was placed in an area near Hiroshima. As a little kid, she had to learn to quickly identify incoming American planes, high-flying bombers and low-flying fighters: B-29s, Wildcats, Hellcats, P-38s, P-51 Mustangs and others as they bombed, strafed, scouted or escorted.  

Scholey Pitcher and Yoko Akiba both experienced the nightmare hell of the War in the Pacific. As adults, both were really cool people who carried a certain sadness with them, masked in part by their playful sense of humor. Scholey died 1998 at the age of seventy-four. Yoko died early in 2004 just shy of age sixty-nine. 

I will always think of Scholey smoking a fine pipe and of Yoko carefully arranging her beautiful maps.  Before she died, Yoko went on to work at the Library of Congress, her field of dreams, which is where she still roams in mine. 

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Liz Garbus: 'What Happened, Miss Simone?' (2015)

Liz Garbus' What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) is a thrilling, consciousness-raising documentary about Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul. 

The inescapable context of the life of Nina Simone (1933-2003) was and is the intractable racial divisiveness of the USA. American society just can't seem to get it together as a whole.

Born in North Carolina before becoming Nina Simone, Nina was known locally as Eunice Waymon. Eunice/Nina became a classically trained Julliard pianist. Her most active recording years took her from the late 1950s into the 1970s. She became a powerful civil and human rights advocate.

However, disgusted with the slow pace of social progress in the United States (and to escape from her violent ex-cop husband), she went on to live more freely in Barbados and London before finally basing herself, for the last ten years of her life, in the South of France. 

A strong and unique singer and person, Nina's mental health suffered in later years -- perhaps, one may suspect, in part from earlier domestic abuse. But when she was on, she was truly spectacular, even towards the end.

What Happened, Miss Simone? is an outstanding Netflix Documentary and RadicalMedia/Moxie Firecracker Production. I waited for the 2016 DVD, which includes a companion CD. The latter has a sampling that highlights many of Nina's most powerful tracks, ranging from "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "I Put a Spell on You" to "Mississippi Goddamn" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." I dig it!

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Twenty Fifteen of the Common Era

Into Year 2015

MMXV 

14 Nivôse CCXXIII

New Year's, a wedding of Space and Time, requires: 

Something Olde

Something New

Something Borrowed

Something Blue . . .

A Sixpence in your Shoe

All such elements are jammed into my newly vamped gym jukebox iPod mix. Before last year lurched into this one, I purposely deleted my entire playlist and began a new one. It was high time.

The new stripped down core-first-round playlist, to be expanded during this year  -- already fondly known as Twenty Fifteen -- goes like this . . . playback is in random order, and sometimes I switch earphones or headphones to highlight different aspects of each track for the benefit of both the other ear and the other side of the mind . . . a good way to keep it fresh, keeping it reel-to-reel.

Open Up Like a French 75 -- drink or artillery, take your pick:

Breaking Glass  (David Bowie)

Chinese Rock (Ramones)

Editions of You (Roxy Music)

Feeling Good (Nina Simone)

Get Up Offa That Thing (James Brown)

I'm a King Bee (Slim Harpo)

The 'In' Crowd (Bryan Ferry)

Lust for Life (Iggy Pop)

See-Line Woman (Nina Simone)

Shake Your Hips (Slim Harpo)

Sound & Vision (David Bowie)

Super Bad, Parts 1 and 2 (James Brown)

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (Bob Dylan)

What in the World (David Bowie with Iggy Pop)

You Know I'm No Good (Amy Winehouse)

This stuff works for me. Specifically for the time blocks spent on things like the stationary bike, moon walk or regular treadmill. 

I've picked up a whole new appreciation for "Get Up Offa That Thing" (1976) -- can listen to it, the extended version, dozens of times and hear something new. For now, it's the side track electric funk guitar parts and embedded mutter-rapped words such as "Melvin Parker [on drums] . . . North Carolina . . ."   

2015: The adventure continues . . .

Today's Rune: Initiation.