On this sad anniversary of John Lennon’s passing, I’m refusing to mourn. Instead, I’m remembering why his insistence that we stop our mad rush to kill each other was a good idea.  Imagine…

“The cyclops woman squints at them, those who deem themselves unlovely, and knows that no one would look at them twice in a crowd.” - “The Cyclops” by Teresa Milbrodt…

We live in an age of integration. We mainstream, accommodate, and in other ways try to make up for the cruelty of much of human history toward humans whose physical, mental, and emotional characteristics fall outside the range of that which we in our blissful ignorance have long called “normal.”

Teresa Milbrodt’s new book, Bearded Women, is the writer’s attempt to make “otherness” part of “normal” human experience. This group of stories takes human characteristics which we would normally associate with “freak shows” and weds them to narratives about “normal” human problems. It’s a brilliant conceit – and Milbrodt executes it so well that the reader finds him/herself following each story not with the voyeur’s eye to the main character’s “otherness” but with the sympathy/empathy that we would show to anyone we encountered who was struggling with problems that we’ve either faced and solved ourselves or helped friends or family members face and solve.

A few examples from the book will serve to make my point here clear:

* In “Bianca’s Body” the main character is a woman with two lower torsos – surely freak show stuff. Full story »

Here’s the brilliant duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel with the beautiful and poignant “America” – a song for the wanderer in every American:

Happy 4th, all….

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea; Full story »

Rockingham County, North Carolina

November 1962

“Go call your daddy and Uncle Kenneth,” Papa says, taking his big thermometer from the scalding trough.  “This water’s near hot enough.  We need to get to killing these hogs.”

He gestures toward the pen some thirty feet away.  The hogs grunt and start away as if they understand him.

“Yes sir.”  I rise from my crouch.  I have been tending the fire, making the water hot enough for scalding the hair off the hogs after they are slaughtered.  I trot up the hill to the house and stick my head in the back door.

“Water hot?” asks my uncle.  I nod.  He gets to his feet and pulls on his jacket.  Daddy puts down his coffee mug and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Full story »

Jared Featherstone is developing a long history as a musical artist, first as a member of D.C. indie darlings Washington Social Club, and more recently as leader of Starlight Drive, a project he pursues when he can spare time from his “day job” as writing center coordinator at James Madison University. The Starlight Drive project has yielded two albums: 2005′s Beautiful Accidents and this 2011 release, Are We Dead Yet?

Featherstone’s approach on this album is darker than either his work with Washington Social Circle or on Beautiful Accidents. The material explores the problems of relationships – romantic, social, and professional – from an existential position somewhere slightly bleaker than Sartre’s. Full story »

Jeffrey Dean Foster and Friends

Review – Concert Performance: An Evening with Jeffrey Dean Foster and Friends featuring Special Guests Greg Humphreys, Sam Frazier and Snüzz (Britt Harper Uzzell). April 29th, 2011. Hanes Brands Theater, Winston-Salem, NC. Photo Credit: Merch Mike.

As we become a distributed culture, one of the things that, instead of being eviscerated as I’d once hoped, has become perhaps more pronounced is the “siloing” of artists. Writers, visual artists – and especially, musicians – get categorized by some aspect of their artistic vision that more often than not is either idiosyncratic to the categorizer or, worse, convenient for “marketing.” Full story »

It’s been a big week for the USA.

First, American troops raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed al Qaeda’s leader.

And today is the 50th anniversary of America’s first manned space flight. On May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard lifted off from  Cape Canaveral for a 15 minute flight that got America on the board against the hated Soviets, whose hero Yuri Gagarin had not only already flown in space but had orbited the earth some weeks earlier.

While Shepard’s flight was only a jog compared to Gagarin’s, it had plenty of drama. The US was trailing the Soviets in rocket technology and the previous two launches (one with a dummy astronaut) had gone off course and subsequently  had to  be destroyed.  No one at NASA could say for certain that Shepard might not go the way of his mannequin predecessor.

In fact, Shepard’s flight was delayed three days as NASA technicians tried to solve potential flight problems. Full story »

If you’re a Boomer, particularly a Boomer male, the “space race” resonates with you as much, maybe more than JFK,  Beatlemania, or Vietnam. You spent a lot of Saturdays wishing the most recent Mercury/Gemini/Apollo mission would release its hold and that all systems would be go so the spectacle of the launch itself could flicker on your TV – and you could get back to watching cartoons.

But the astronauts themselves were rock stars – before there were rock stars. They were real, live American heroes – and while I and many of my generation found ourselves torn between widely varying (although not so different, we now know) heroic types, no one doubted the courage – sometimes tragically expressed – of our space explorers. We lost  some of our guys (including my personal favorite, Gus Grissom) – but we had to beat the Russians. If they took over space, life as we knew it would be over. Over….

And they had the first space hero – Yuri Gagarin. Full story »

SPRING, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king ;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo !

The palm and May make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo !

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a sunning sit
In every street, these tunes our ears do greet,

Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo !
Spring, the sweet spring!

- THOMAS NASHE

It was 30 years ago today.

The above line can be sung to the tune of the opening theme of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The irony of the above phenomenon is lost on a culture focused on relentless self-pity and proving that anything is snark-able – or who are as certain as Evangelicals are of going to Heaven that they are better arbiters of taste in good music and the right way to do politics than all those stupid Baby Boomers.

They (those dumb-assed Boomers), apparently, would (and still do) listen to and think about The Beatles with reverence and awe when it’s clear to those who really know that The Beatles are a) overrated; b) old fashioned; c) less visionaries than clever imitators with access to world wide distribution of the ideas they stole from others….

And their leader, John Lennon, was a pseudo-intellectual poseur with a penchant for cruelty – and bad taste in women. After all, he committed the ultimate wrong in this more knowing culture’s estimation – he chose someone he loved over someone hot…. Full story »

You have to start somewhere, so I’ll start here.

There was a guy in my elementary school named Lee W. (I’m leaving out his last name in case he’s out of prison – which is where he was in the last gossip I heard about him – oh, 30 years ago). Lee had “failed” a couple of grades, so by the time we were in the sixth grade (the last year of elementary school in those more innocent times) he was about 13 or 14…or 15. He was huge to the rest of us 6th graders – both physically and psychically.

I attended one of those old schools made of red brick that had huge windows that the teacher had to climb up on a stool to close. Those windows had ledges – and Lee would climb up on one of those ledges while the teacher was writing on the blackboard then leap out the window into the shrubbery below (usually a drop of 4-6 feet) and head off for the neighborhood store down the street where he would “buy” pockets full of candy. He would then come back to school and by guerrilla tactics make his way back to class.

Sometimes the teacher would notice he’d gone and he’d get into trouble. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice. Those times made him loom large in Burton Grove School myth. Full story »

The arrival of The Beatles in February of 1964 and the subsequent cultural changes they fostered (whether consciously or not) paralleled momentous changes in the American social and political landscape. From 1964-70 Boomers found themselves awash in powerful cultural currents coming from, it seemed, every direction:

• The civil rights movement, which had reached its zenith with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial after the March on Washington in 1963 had seen some fruition in the passage of landmark legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. But that movement had begun to move in a more radicalized direction, partly as a result of police brutality. Even as a “loyal opponent” such as Malcolm X was assassinated by members of his own religion, younger, Boomer-aged black leaders emerged such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton calling for a new approach to race relations that reflected more the beliefs of Malcolm X rather than Dr. King – an approach based on a concept they called “black power.” Full story »

The Boomer generation’s view of war and the purposes of war was and is the result of United States involvement in Vietnam. Unlike subsequent generations, Boomers (at least males and  tangentially females) were directly touched by the conflict. And almost every Boomer, male or female, is drawing upon memories of how Vietnam divided our generation from our parents.  And, how its memory eventually divided our generation and our nation against itself. Whether Boomers participated in the war, protested against, the war  tried to avoid the war, or later turned radical (either liberal or conservative), it almost all came in response to memories of Vietnam.

During the summer of 1964, while most Boomers were tweens and teens awe struck with Beatlemania or dancing their little hearts out to that Motown sound, LBJ and his military advisers were trying to find a way to increase America’s presence in South Vietnam. LBJ, despite his better angels (he was pushing the Voting Rights Act and other important civil rights legislation through Congress and his “Great Society” was already on the  drawing board  – Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, VISTA, anyone?) had bought LeMay and Westmoreland’s bullshit about the communist threat in SE Asia and the need to “save” South Vietnam to prevent a “domino effect” of government overthrows by communists in countries such as Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Full story »

Ceci n’est pas Pink #@#@^&%$ Floyd…

Historians often argue that dates should not be the focus of history. Hell, much of the last quarter century has been dominated by intellectuals arguing that history doesn’t matter.

To understand the Boomers, however, it’s essential to focus on both history and significant dates in history. Truth is, two dates in the personal histories of Boomers matter so much as to have become mythic:

• November 22, 1963: Boomers lose the president they most closely identify with, John F. Kennedy, to an assassin’s bullet;
• February 9, 1964: The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, on television (see Boomers, part 2 for discussion of  TV’s validating power) and proceed to take the generation by storm, unleashing pent up emotion and energy that will spin out of control over the next ten years and change America profoundly – for both good and ill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah…. Full story »

America’s First Family, Boomer parents’ edition

The Boomers are the first TV generation. We’ve been intimates of television since its infancy as the mass medium of choice for Americans.

Because of television’s limited options in those days, most Boomers, at least as children, lived with fewer than 6 channels and only 3 networks (although there were nascent public television systems, many viewers were unable to receive their signals).  There was also the old Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters. This set limits on the material presented on TV – and also served, good or ill, as a unifier of messages.

We Boomers learned a lot from television. TV was  quasi parent/sibling/best friend during the maturation of the majority of Boomers.  Families watched TV together – and the messages of television programming were designed with families both as subject – and as message.  The early years of Boomer television watching were dominated by shows with wise (if often exasperated)  fathers, nurturing ( if occasionally scatter-brained) mothers, and children who learned lessons. Boy Boomers and Girl Boomers received different lessons – both from the shows’ texts and from their subtexts. But lessons there always were.

Gee, Wally…. Full story »

Not Mr. Jones….

Everything starts somewhere.

This series of posts starts from a thoughtful post by Sara Robinson over at Campaign for America’s Future that our colleague Russ Wellen alerted us to. This sparked some discussion among the writers for this blog and led to a passing comment by our esteemed Dr. Slammy that made me see red – and write an email that I never sent:

It’s a great piece and fundamentally right on so many points. The odd irony, of course, is that the upstart educated middle class rampaging through the streets in the ’60s turned out to be the most able cohort of would-be aristocrats in US history.

If there’s one meme that pervades A LOT of blogosphere chatter (both here at S&R and elsewhere), it’s one that goes something like this:

Boomers have fucked everything up and now we’re all going to hell in a hand basket and it’s the Boomer generation’s fault over under sideways down… Full story »

Scholars & Rogues honors JD Salinger as our 32^nd masthead scrogue.

J.D. Salinger is dead.

If you want to know about his lousy life or how he treated his kids or his ex-wives and girlfriends, or any of that other People Magazine crap, look somewhere else. I just don’t feel like going into it. Too many jerks spend all their time reading that shit anyway, and it’s just not worth recounting it when you could read it all at TMZ or some place like that and besides Salinger himself was pretty touchy about people talking about him and he’d probably sue from the grave. I mean, the guy sued every goddamn body who ever said boo to him for the last 50 years or so.

Some stuff just isn’t worth the trouble.

So I’ll just talk about driving to town last night…. Full story »

Today is the birthday of our original scholar rogue, George Gordon Byron, sixth earl of Newstead Abbey.

I have been thinking a lot about Byron in the last week, partly because it used to be a ritual of my misspent youth to celebrate his birthday each year by engaging in as much debauchery as my financial and physical health could stand, partly because I wasted four hours of my life last week watching the mini series Byron on Ovation Television even after I’d realized that the narrative construct focused almost entirely on Byron’s scandalous love life. (There were passing references to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and I think The Corsair was mentioned, too, in relation to Edward Trelawny who makes a cameo near the end of the program, but perhaps I mis-remember).

This Byron – Byron the scandalous celebrity – is the Byron the media believes the public wants. Full story »

Since it’s Halloween, just thought I’d remind everyone of 70′s rock band Bloodrock, whose sole contribution to rock history is this nightmarish ditty, D.O.A.: