Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Most months, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, we would gather at Grandpappy’s for a little family fun and to celebrate whosoever should be having a birthday that time around.  The cousins from Pappy’s brothers’ families would be there and they taught me about tackle football and Skoal Bandits.  Being youngest of the boys, I cannot recall teaching them much of anything.  As was the intention of the people who put these gatherings together, I did not see a huge distinction between myself and my siblings and our wider relations.

But when I was I child I reasoned as a child.  When I became a man I realized that there were a lot of countrified rednecks in my family, and I say that with nothing but love and respect for countrified rednecks.  It is not so much with shame but with wonder that I consider how differently we in my immediate family turned out in comparison to our cousins.  It seems as if, although our lives did not seem all that different from the perspective of children, we had some very different expectations being communicated to us much of the time.  And some things just broke differently for us.

Things broke differently, or so I imagine, for a number of my grade school classmates as well.  Again, from the perspective of a child, I did not feel terribly different from the other kids in my school.  (Or, shall I say I did not feel especially different from any one other set of kids.  All the kids in school scared the hell out of me equally.)  In the years since, as we have grown up, I have been more and more aware of the deep differences in how things were for me as a kid and how things were for some of those other kids.

My parents would not have seen those differences either, because their schools were segregated.  Mine was the first generation to grow up in schools that served all children regardless of race.  Because of that, I sometimes have thought that all the kids I went to school with grew up in the same way that I did.  Obviously, this is taking a very narrow view based on 6 or 7 hours out of each 24.  The roots of poverty and racism reach far beyond our public schools.

Those schools were not a bad place to start building structures of generational wealth in families which have historically been economically suppressed.  To allow the building to stop at school, however, would be to fail at truly making amends for and reconciling to the past.  One might dispute whether or not my generation owes an amends to our black neighbors for previous generations’ legacies of social, legal, and economic oppression.  I would argue that my generation owes it to ourselves to make things right.

One word:

Chanticleer

I don’t give a damn if it is February, this Chanticleer Brumalia album is staying on my iPod until 58 degrees qualifies as a cold night.  Them boys can sing like a teenage pot dealer in the county lock up.  One benefit of having been so tied to the computer so long that showering and exercising both  seem like more trouble than they are worth is that I get to experience the goosebumps that come from hearing them sing “O Holy Night.”  Who knew it had a second verse?

I had almost forgotten that there was anything on the Touchy besides Vampire Weekend’s new album “Contra.”  Other than the “Twilight” associations of the band’s name, there is nothing I don’t love about the record.  Well, except that it is a little disturbing to have the last three albums I’ve bought be this one, the Animal Collective album, and a Big Star double album.  If I start making favorable comparisons to Dick from “High Fidelity” you will do an intervention, right?  Thanks.

So, “Contra” has big fingerprints from Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints” albums all over it.  There are other elements readily attributable to other artists in there as well, though I’m at a loss for the moment to give them to you.  It’s sort of like listening to Phish in that you know you have heard a lot of these elements before.  Unlike Phish, however, the resulting mix is fresh and interesting, greater than the sum of its identifiable parts.  When VW (as the kids appear to call them) come to Altamont in April, I wonder if Carl will be my date?