Disillusionment, Pete Townsend on

I had a big, big problem because I had been the big rock idealist and now it was all letting me down. The industry hadn’t fulfilled its promise. Rock ‘n’ roll had changed the length of men’s hair and very little else. I felt like a fool because I’d waved the banner so aggressively. And what was really worse, I felt that I was being used by journalists.

I hated the feeling that I was in a band on the downward slide that was killing people in Cincinnati, killing off its own members, killing its manager. We were into making big money and anybody who got in the way or had a problem, we dropped. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to think this was a particularly bad thing, or we pretended it wasn’t, anyway. I felt it start to kill me. Something was getting its teeth into me. I should have stopped doing what I really didn’t want to go on doing. I should have stopped working with the band. I should have stopped and had another look at rock ‘n’ roll, the thing that I loved and cared about so much, which I held above all other things.

Pete Townsend, from the book:
The Courage to Change: Personal Conversations about Alcoholism
Dennis Wholey
Note – the book is from 1984.

Umberto Eco Re-Lives First Night

Several months ago I was invited to visit the Science Museum of La Corufia, in Galicia. At the end of my visit the curator announced that he had a surprise for me and led me to the planetarium. Planetariums are always suggestive places because when the lights are turned off, one has the impression of being in a desert beneath a starlit sky. But that evening something special awaited me.

Suddenly the room was totally dark, and I could hear a beautiful lullaby by de Falla. Slowly (though slightly faster than in reality, since the presentation lasted fifteen minutes in all) the sky above me began to rotate. It was the sky that had appeared over my birthplace, Alessandria, Italy, on the night of January 5-6, 1932. Almost hyperrealistically, I experienced the first night of my life.

I experienced it for the first time, since I had not seen that first night. Perhaps not even my mother saw it, exhausted as she was after giving birth; but perhaps my father saw it, after quietly stepping out on the terrace, a little restless because of the (to him at least) wondrous event which he had witnessed and which he had jointly caused.

The planetarium used a mechanical device that can be found in a great many places. Perhaps others have had a similar experience. But you will forgive me if during those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning. I was so happy, that I had the feeling—almost the desire—that I could, that I should, die at that very moment, and that any other moment would have been untimely. I would cheerfully have died then, because I had lived through the most beautiful story I had ever read in my entire life. Perhaps I had found the story that we all look for in the pages of books and on the screens of movie theaters: it was a story in which the stars and I were the protagonists. It was fiction because the story had been reinvented by the curator; it was history because it recounted what had happened in the cosmos at a moment in the past; it was real life because I was real, and not the character of a novel. I was, for a moment, the model reader of the Book of Books.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
Umberto Eco

Loneliness – Health Issue

Americans have become increasingly lonely and isolated, and this lack of social connection is having profound effects on our mental and physical health, the surgeon general warned in an advisory on Tuesday.

Advisories from America’s top doctor are typically reserved for public health challenges that require immediate attention. This is the first time one has been used to highlight the issue of loneliness.

More than half of Americans are lonely, according to a 2021 poll, which also found that young adults are almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over age 65.

How to Feel Less Lonely, According to the Surgeon General
America’s top physician, Dr. Vivek Murthy, offers advice on how to build meaningful social connections in an increasingly lonely world.
Christina Caron

Trumpet Player on the Roof – Flea anecdote.

I spent the most peaceful and light hours practicing trumpet on the roof. Our sweet landlady was a tripper who’d come up there to sit and listen to me play; she told me it was beautiful, and I once saw a soft tear roll down her painted face when she said it. I had two different friends later on, Maggie Ehrig and Ione Skye, both who told me they would hear the trumpet sounds flying through the neighborhood, not knowing the origin, and it brought them joy.

Acid for the Children
Flea

Note – good stuff, recommended.

Sudden Light – Dante Gabriel Rosetti

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti

Truman Desegregates Military – Anniversary of

Truman presided over the onset of the Cold War in 1947. He oversaw the Berlin Airlift and Marshall Plan in 1948. With the involvement of the US in the Korean War of 1950–1953, South Korea repelled the invasion by North Korea. Domestically, the postwar economic challenges such as strikes and inflation created a mixed reaction over the effectiveness of his administration. In 1948, he proposed Congress pass comprehensive civil rights legislation. Congress refused, so Truman issued Executive Order 9980 and Executive Order 9981, which prohibited discrimination in federal agencies and desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman

UPS Workers Win New Contract

The union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, reported in June that its UPS members had voted to authorize a strike, with 97 percent of those who took part in the vote endorsing the move. The tentative agreement will now go before the membership for ratification.

“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” the Teamsters president, Sean M. O’Brien, said in a statement. “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”

UPS handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of packages that are shipped daily in the United States, and a strike could dent economic activity, particularly the e-commerce industry.

UPS Reaches Tentative Deal With Teamsters to Head Off Strike
United Parcel Service faced a potential walkout by more than 325,000 union members after their five-year contract expires next week.

Three Ways to Answer a Question

FISHER: Over 50 percent of Americans do want a partner who shares their political views. About 43 percent want a partner who is of the same ethnic background. About 46 percent want somebody of the same religious background. What’s interesting to me is the huge percentage of people that don’t care.

DUBNER: Is it that they don’t care, or they say on a survey they don’t care because they may want to appear to be the type of person who would say that they don’t care when, in fact, they may care?

FISHER: You never know, Stephen. I do a lot of questionnaires and you can answer a questionnaire in one of three ways:
with who you really are,
with who you want to be,
or with who you want others to think you are.
But because we have so many thousands of people, and there’s a bell-shaped curve, we can be pretty confident of what we’re doing.

Why Did You Marry That Person?
Sure, you were “in love.” But economists — using evidence from Bridgerton to Tinder — point to what’s called “assortative mating.” And it has some unpleasant consequences for society.

Ingmar Bergman’s Greenroom in the Sky

A few years ago, when Lars Lofgren was still head of the Dramaten, he and Bergman walked past the greenroom, a spacious place full of oil paintings of the theater’s old luminaries and big pieces of well-upholstered furniture, which five it the cozy feel of a gentleman’s club. The greenroom door was open, so Bergman walked in. Nobody was there. Lofgren recalls, “‘Listen!’ Bergman said. I couldn’t hear a thing. ‘What is it?’ I said. Bergman said, ‘They’re all here.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The actors,’ Bergman said. ‘They’re not finished with the theater.'” Lofgren continues, “He looked around the room and turned to me and very lovingly said, ‘One day, we will be with them.'”

Joy Ride – Show People & Their Shows
John Lahr