Winter and the Wolf Moon
Friday gratefuls: Kep in the Snow. His good appetite, his nudges. Thursday Mussar. Empathy for my situation, anger over our broken health care system. David Lieberman. Rabbi Jamie. Minnesota’s very, very Snowy year. Diane. The Rains of California. Reading Shaw. Salmon and white Bean stew. Peruvian Chicken. Going through my past. Cooking. Ramen. With additions. Pharmaceutical companies. Their drugs. Alan and his plays. One acts.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Living
An odd week so far. I’ve only left the house once. Seen nobody except Mark, the mailman. In the flesh. On zoom Diane and the Thursday Mussar group. The Origins of North America class. Otherwise. No one. Talked to the McKesson folks, a nurse from Kristen Gonzalez’s office, and David Lieberman. I can tell it’s been odd. Wouldn’t want every week to go this way, but with zoom I’ve gotten my sociability needs met. Good exercise, sleep. Lots of progress on pruning. Will talk to Tom in a few minutes.
Mary leaves Kobe, Japan in a few weeks, heading back to the wilds of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. From the subtropics to the frigid Upper Midwest. Mark remains in Oklahoma City, maybe about to become a US Postal Service employee. May it be so.
Korean study going well. I’ve learned over two hundred nouns and can now translate sentences with help. It’s gotten harder. The lessons taking longer, but I can see the progress. Satisfying.
Calculus lags behind a bit. I moved my work on it upstairs to my new office, but I have not gotten that space finished yet. As a result, I’m not using it as much. I will get back to it.
Same with How to Become a Pagan. When I get the new space finished, work on it will pick up.
Did you know the term Atmospheric River before this Winter? Not sure I did. Its effects have made it a household world in plague ridden California. Wildfires. Floods. Or, Summer and Winter. Diane has gotten back to jogging up to her hill, but she says it remains slumped. Too many sites like it for public works to contend with. Also, Tom sent a note that this is Minnesota’s fourth Snowiest Winter ever.
Still moving through South to America. Here’s the kind of lens I now have as a result. I started watching the new Elvis movie with Austin Butler. If you’ve seen it, I think he does a great job as Elvis and Tom Hanks certainly gives Colonel Parker a distinctive character. The movie makes clear the impact Beale Street in Memphis had on Elvis, right down to his signature grind.
Here’s the thing. Perry made me realize that what Elvis really did was make money out of the moves of Black performers he came to know on Beale Street. The same quality of musician, singing the same quality of music, with the same sort of performing charisma already had careers. In Black establishments. They couldn’t cross over into the popular music market where the big money was. Elvis could. And did.
This is the same lens you can find on HBO Max’s Game Theory with Bomani Jones. He’s worth a watch if you get that streaming service.
