Letter from Nesmith

 When I read the headline that Michael Nesmith had died out loud to my wife, I told her, "I have a letter from him."

"Really?" she asked. 

"Yes."

"Well, you're full of surprises," she said. 

We've known each other 15 years and I had never mentioned the letter. His passing brought it back to mind, and so I went into my home office to find the documentary proof. From a time-worn little manila envelope with a postage meter stamp that says it was mailed from Van Nuys, California on Feb. 23, 1972, I pulled out the letter. 

I scanned it into my PC to try to let you read it as is, but the Blogger platform only gives me a few style options, and none of them look really legible when I preview them. 

So let me give a little background. I liked Nesmith's albums with his post-Monkees' project The First National Band, especially the third and final one, "Nevada Fighter." (He did more albums including one with a Second National Band, and all of them are worth seeking out, as far as I'm concerned.)

Sept. 11, 2001 – My Day

It was sunny. When is it not sunny on a September day in Tempe, Arizona? Mostly in the late afternoon when the “monsoon” moisture builds up and unleashes a thunderstorm, but mornings usually are hot and sunny, with fluffy clouds, portents of the afternoon dust-ups, in the air.

I had just got up and was making breakfast when the phone rang. We’re three hours behind the East Coast at this time of year.

I had not turned on a TV or anything. So I answered the phone, not suspecting anything. My mother, who survived as a kid under bombing raids during World War II, was hysterical on the phone. "How could people do that?" she repeated in a trembling shout maybe three or four times. I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I thought somebody had hurt one of my siblings. I couldn’t imagine what else would make her sound so outright panicked. She was not one to cry or explode in anger all that much. It took real provocation and I couldn’t imagine what it was in this case.

I told her that it was still early out here and that I’m just getting up, so maybe she could calm down and fill me in on what’s got her upset.

That’s when she told me step by step about the planes and that the towers had collapsed. It was just unreal to us, even when we saw those damn TV images repeated again and again over the next few days. What was real was that I had an appointment at a doctor’s office that day. What was totally eerie was driving up the road to his office – our house was south of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, so driving north we would consistently see a stream of planes cross east to west as they took off or west to east in their final approach – and there was not an airplane in the sky. The sight of empty skies was real and it brought home the reality of the attack more than the televised images of the destruction.

Sept. 11, 2001: The Prequel

“Everything has changed. Nothing will be the same,” or some version of that sentiment was repeated over and over in the days after the airliners were used as guided missiles.

I didn’t feel that way then, and I don’t now.

The world – as beautiful and full of light as it is – is a fundamentally dangerous place. No one is guaranteed the next second.

Fundamentally, the only thing that had changed was that a terrorist attack against the United States shattered all previous records of success (from the terrorist point of view).

There was a magazine called Scanlan’s, published in 1970 and 1971, that survived at least eight issues doing controversial journalism. What I believe was their final issue had to be printed in Canada because it exposed how much guerrilla warfare (call it terrorism depending on your point of view) was going on in the United States. Assembling reports from across country spanning Feb. 12, 1965 to Sept. 7, 1970, the editors compiled 23 pages of about 56 instances per page (some pages had fewer some had more) of sabotage and terrorism in the United States. That’s just about 1,300 incidents, and while some seem to be more readily validated as terror and some seem like they might just be “regular” crime, the last two pages alone contained reports of 39 bombings across the United States from June 12 to Sept. 7, 1970.

You may never have heard about it. According to the editors of the magazine, they had to print that issue in Canada because unionized lithographers threatened the printing companies where they worked with sabotage if they went ahead with printing the magazine. Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one, but only if that person doesn’t piss off a group of employees it would appear.

OK. So that was a long time ago in a time that was crazier perhaps than even today. So let’s skip ahead to the 1990s.

•      Feb. 26, 1993. The World Trade Center was attacked. A van rented by Mohammad Salameh exploded in the center’s underground garage, blasting out a 100-foot crater in the structure, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others with everything from minor wounds to crushed limbs. The FBI says a SWAT team captured Salameh on March 4, 1993 “as he tried in vain to get his $400 deposit back.” An Islamic fundamentalist, he had worked with others ­ among them, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Ahmed Ajaj – according to the FBI. All four were tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. There is more to this story because the mastermind of the plot was on the run. “We’d learned his name—Ramzi Yousef—within weeks after the attack and discovered he was planning more attacks, including the simultaneous bombing of a dozen U.S. international flights. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in February 1995, returned to America, and convicted along with the van driver, Eyad Ismoil. A seventh plotter, Abdul Yasin, remains at large.” You read that right. He’s still on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrrorists list. They had wanted to topple one tower into the other, causing both to fall.

OK, Boomer, praise the Millennial attitude!

Millennials get a lot of grief from Boomers and from GenZers, but it seems to me the Millennial generation brought a change of mind-set about consumerism that is fairly important and not fully appreciated.

If you’re not familiar with demographics and especially the names popularly applied to U.S. population cohorts, here’s a quick guide:

• Remember that these definitions are porous because a generation is considered to be roughly two decades and we look at decades through our numbering system, as though somebody born in 1939 is radically different from someone born in 1940. However, that 1939 cohort would have stretched back to 1920, and there’s quite a bit of difference between the experiences of that individual and those of a person born in 1940.
• Those old enough to have served in World War II (roughly born from 1900 through 1920) are often called the Greatest Generation, after a book that Tom Brokaw wrote describing how they survived the Great Depression and sacrificed during the war.
• The generation born from about 1920 through 1940 really doesn’t have a popular name, and they would have come of age in the postwar period and through the Korean conflict. (They were sometimes called the Forgotten Generation, but that name has been more popularly applied to a later cohort.)
• The Baby Boomers are the huge population cohort born from the end of World War II (1945) through 1964. I’m part of this generation, which one demographer described as moving through time like “a pig in a python” creating all kinds of disturbances as it passes through each decade of life, including a looming health-care crisis as the Boomers become older and older seniors.
• The newer Forgotten Generation is Generation X. They were born roughly from 1965 through 1980.
• The reason Generation X is forgotten is because it was framed on either side by huge attention-hog generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials (aka Generation Y). Millennial and Boomer antipathy also plays into it. The Millennials are not necessarily digital-native, meaning the Internet and personal computing weren’t necessarily part of their early lives if they were born in the early 1980s. However, latter-day Millennials, those born in the late 1990s, pretty much are digital natives, used to having computers as, shall we say, playmates before they began using them as work tools.
• Generation Z is social-media native, which manifests today in platforms like Tik-Tok, not Facebook, Boomer!

Getting back to the Millennials not being fully appreciated:

Sal's Aug. 15, 2021 "Live" Online Concert: It's About Time

Thoughts on POV courtesy of NBA Finals

I got into the Lyft on my way to pick up my car, after a new fuel pump was installed. The driver was playing a Phoenix sports radio station where the gabbers were gushing over the Phoenix Suns' win in Game 2 of the NBA Finals. Since the team had won the first two games on its home court, things looked good for the team that had never been an NBA champion. 

I figured this was an easy entry to a fun conversation with the driver. 

"Are they talking about the game last night?" I asked him. 

"Yeah, they are," he said. 

After some back and forth, I did one of those let's find a good omen that augurs a win for the home team observations: "You know, the Diamondbacks brought a World Series win to Phoenix right after 9/11. Maybe the Suns will bring a win after this COVID-19 hell." I wasn't expecting his response. 

"Well, if that's what it takes for them to win, then I hope Phoenix teams never win again," he said. 

That took me aback. After all, I wasn't serious. It was the kind of harmless, semi-superstitious speculation that sports fans make all the time, as though saying these things will have some effect on the outcome. His comment made me think about the death and destruction that the terrorist attack and the pandemic had brought. We, meaning the Phoenix fan base, could sure use a lift after these horrific events, but so could everybody else. A Phoenix win had no meaning in all the NBA cities that were't Phoenix, right?

Turns out the driver was from Los Angeles, so he wasn't invested in Phoenix sports. I'm glad he wasn't because I never would have thought outside that silly box without his challenge. You can't assume that someone you've just met shares your interests, and the significant patterns you think you see are most often just the product of your point of view Not wrong exactly, but not universal mostly. 

Now that the Suns have lost, the pattern I suggested never came to be. Win or lose, it's the drama of the contest that matters and gives us respite from the real troubles of the real, troubled world. 

Le Club Bon Bon

In "Shadow Kingdom," Bob Dylan and band rule the mythical Club Bon Bon in Marseilles. 

I have watched  Bob Dylan's streaming "Shadow Kingdom" performance a couple of times and plan to watch it at least a couple of more before the streaming "ticket" expires on July 25 (as Veeps.com, the provider, announced today). 

It's one of the better performances I've seen from Mr. D and he's in relatively good voice, with a lot of hand gestures and emotion showing in his face - something that either doesn't happen much on stage or we sit too distant to see that stuff in a live concert. Beyond the questions Rolling Stone's Andy Greene asks about the show, I want to point out that this film portrays an alternate reality where the music business isn't the way it is. A performing artist of Dylan's reputation really can't go out and play a little blues club with a postage stamp dance floor, but in this shadow kingdom, it happens, and people dance, smoke and drink to it, all in black and white as though this Dylan guy was just a working the clubs in a Steinbeck novel or a noir detective story or maybe on the outskirts of town before the giant gila monster attacks the teenagers in their hot rods. The visual representations of Dylan's music have been residents of Noirville for a long time, going back at least to "Time Out of Mind" and probably back to "Oh, Mercy!" 

The time warp involved here is interesting. This is subtitled "The Early Songs of Bob Dylan." Well, yes, this 2021 and so it's been 32 years since "Oh, Mercy!" was released. That album includes the most recent of the songs included in this video, "What Was It You Wanted?" However, to me, the EARLY songs of Bob Dylan might include anything from his first three albums or before. It's hard to think of "Queen Jane Approximately" (from "Highway 61 Revisited"), just for instance, as an early song of Dylan's, since it came after his electrification, when he actually charted singles such as "Like a Rolling Stone," the hit from that same album. That being said, I recognize that this is a personal perspective. To my children and granddaughter, anything before they were born was pretty early, I'm sure. 

On losing a soul

I have lost my soul. I don't know where it went.

Before I go on, it might be a good idea to define what I mean by soul. It's a word that comes from religion, but I personally am not talking about a dogma or set of canonized beliefs here. I like the Italian word "anima" because it pretty much wears its meaning in the open. It's the animating principle. Without it, you're a doorstop, a statue, a rock. Stock-still as the universe churns.

So there you have it.

I don't know when I lost my animating principle. I think it ebbed away, so I didn't notice it until it was gone. I keep hoping that when I call out, it will respond and come back.

How does it feel to lose my soul?

Not very good to tell the truth.

According to the timestamp, I wrote the words above back on Dec. 28, 2019. Little did I know what was coming. What had happened just a few weeks before was an attack of sciatica that made it almost impossible to get out of bed and walk. At this point looking back and not journaling about what's going on in my head, I can't tell you what was so soul-sucking. I'm glad it's over. 

One thing is for certain, the COVID-19 years have forced a focus on what's most real. Ambition, etc., all the usual markers of success are a poor substitute for living. That's not to deny the place of ambition and action in life, but reflection and connection with family, friends and people in general - something many of us have starved ourselves of over the past year or so - is top of the list of activities, and when you've lost your soul, you've forgotten that. That's my story, anyway.