I hadn't thought about this song from the musical "Showboat" for a very long time, until I heard it on the radio today: "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine." This is from the 1936 movie, considered the best film rendition of "Show Boat." Lyrics that a modern feminist wouldn't be caught dead singing. It has a controversial racial history as well. Many other renditions are posted on Youtube.com as well. The song is a real throwback to the era before civil rights, equal rights and feminist "enlightenment." And yet it's a sweet ode to marital commitment after "the bloom is off the rose."
And the mescegenation scene was way ahead of its time:
Ed Cone had a couple of fascinating posts on "Lord of the Rings" as the clash of Western and Eastern Civilizations and an allegory about the Crusades. "It's complicated, much more complicated than, say, the racist caricatures of Arabs in The Horse and His Boy from C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia." Cone contends that "the Dwarves are the Jews of Middle Earth." More on the Crusades on the Tolkien Forum.
I replied to Ed that:
"The Lord of the Rings" is very popular here in Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, especially among middle school and high school students I teach. I'm afraid the history-retold-as-myth -- the triumph of Crusaders over Muslims -- is lost on my students. Not sure I should bring it up: "It's about my religion beating your religion." ;-)
But then Turkey is a country that tends to shatter Western stereotypes of Muslims. Living here, one begins to see signs not of the ultimate triumph of The West over Islam but of Islam's reformation and modernization, so that we learn from or at least respect them as they learn from and respect us.
Back in 2003 when your post was written -- shortly after the Iraq War was undertaken -- the hope I express would probably have been seen as some kind of naive appeasement -- (phrase added) eager as we were back then to take revenge on the Islamists who perpetrated 9/11. Today, after eight years of war, Obama's election and his outreach to Muslims -- visits to Istanbul and Cairo -- one gets the impression that America would be happy to make its peace with Islam. But there are still so very few positive images of Islam in American culture that understanding will probably be a long time coming.
As modern people, do we not have an obligation to view history through a more balanced perspective -- recognizing the excesses on each side, including our own -- rather than "rooting for the home team" -- "civilized" Western Christianity vs. "uncivilized" Eastern Islam?
On Ed's blog, Ian McDowell makes my point more specifically: "Someone like Richard Coeur De Leon (Richard the Lionhearted) has his virtues, as a warrior and a man, but compared to Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Saladin) he was a vicious, ignorant barbarian, and so were most of the other Europeans who went to war in the Middle East."
Surely, continuing religious hatred needs no fomenting -- it is still far too present in places like the Middle East and Nigeria, where suspected airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab could easily have learned to hate Christians, just as many Christians are taught to hate Muslims. It seems to me we should speak out against religious war and work against easy stereotyping and prejudices.
I was honored to introduce my niece, Eve Vance Fleishman, at a concert attended by 100 people at the Storytelling Art Center in Laurinburg, NC. I said Eve emerged from the womb singing, and she has been doing so ever since. Jan Schmidt recounted the evening for the Laurinburg Exchange, calling it "perfect." The concert was dedicated to the memory of my mother, Lillian Secrest Buie, Eve's "mima," who she was very close to. Eve brought happiness to my mother's final days in 2006, and gave her the peace to pass on.
A professional singer in Nashville, Eve has a new CD, "Peace or Drama." (Eve's MySpace Page.) Daniel Dennis of Prime Cut Records says of it: "With a solid lineup of self-penned and well-seasoned songs, "Peace or Drama" marks the debut of Eve Fleishman, encapsulating the serenity of Norah Jones with the swagger of Erykah Badu....This album is a joy to listen to, and with the stellar musicians creating some serious magic, this is one album that you must own."
Previously, Eve and Mare Wakefield created a fantastic kids' album, "Daddy's Moonlight Aligator Boat Ride," based on the very real experience of spying aligators in the lake behind her parents' house near Gainesville, FL. My 10-year-old son loved this album, kept playing it over and over. (Their http://www.myspace.com/eveandmare page.)
I found some video clips of Eve on You Tube, none of which quite do her justice, but do offer some sense of her talent. Why don't you buy her albums or hire her for an event or workshop for kids?
I missed a chunk of the live broadcast of Prairie Home Companion in Durham, NC, so I'm gratified to find a podcast online. Listen to the full broadcast, complete with jokes about the region's overly polite people, its tobacco history, barbecue, lush green trees and green grass, and the rivalries between Duke, UNC, and NC State. Meanwhile, Keillor recently wrote a funny column about two quite foolish Domino's Pizza employees in Conover, NC who posted a nasty practical joke to Youtube that caused a national sensation. He concludes: "I call on all Americans to
stand up for the Conover Two and for our national sense of humor that
has served us so well for so long boopboopbadoop. People have been
grossing each other out for centuries and this is no time to stop. Is
this a felony? No, it's snot."
I spent the weekend in my native Scotland County, NC. For several years, this county of just over 36,000 people has had one of the highest unemployment rates in the state (still an awful 16.6 percent). But I sense that after years of decay and despair, Scotland County, located about 20 miles south of Southern Pines and 30 miles south of Fayetteville, may be bottoming out. "We're resilient and we're coming back," one former neighbor told me tentatively. The unemployment rate has actually dropped two-tenths of a percent from its peak. The county has lost a lot of industry over the last two decades -- manufacturing, textiles, agriculture. But instead of looking to big corporations to come to town and magically fix the local economy, the county finally seems to be discovering unique assets from its own deep-rooted sense of place.
The annual storytelling festival is just one project of the Storytelling Arts Center of the Southeast, located in an old department store in downtown Laurinburg. "The mission of the Storytelling Arts Center of the Southeast is to preserve and enrich storytelling arts for people of all ages through education, performances, research, workshops and writing," according to the website, which outlines the center's various strategies.
Pinehurst, a golf, equestrian and retirement community for the wealthy, is only 25 miles away in Moore County. Benefiting from proximity, Scotland County has already established its own golfing, equestrian and retirement communities, much cheaper than what's offered in Pinehurst.
Scotland County's resilient spirit is generating some tangible byproducts. After years of losing industry, it now has some new industry to trumpet. Nature's Earth Pellets, creators of animal litter, animal bedding, and fuel pellets from recycled wood waste, has announced that it plans to invest more than $12 million and create 98 jobs over the next three years.
The county's resilience is obviously fragile, and it is still a long way from restoring the relative economic vitality it experienced decades ago. But positive steps are clearly being made, with lessons for other small communities that are hurting economically.
The James Taylor concert in Chapel Hill Monday night was lots of fun. There are a lot of clips on Youtube.com of the concert. The free tickets were "sold out" but we went anyway and had no trouble hearing or seeing him. On the way to the soccer field where the concert was held, I struck up a conversation with a freshman who did not know who James Taylor is, calling him "that guy."
JT sang a lot of old favorites from his first albums, as well as "Wichita Lineman," "Mexico," and of course "Carolina On My Mind." His voice has not deteriorated at all, though he looks his age. I was kind of shocked that some, perhaps many, of the students did not seem to know who he was. They listened politely, but did not even ask for an encore. A lot of popular music seems not to survive from one generation to the next, except among the WISE kids who realize the music of our generation is better than the music of their generation.
More than a year ago, my wife and I cut the Cable TV, because our son tended to vegetate in front of it. We subsist on rabbit ears, and two consistently clear and crisp channels (PBS and CBS). "How can you be that disconnected from popular culture?" Appalled friends ask.
We order movies, and television series such as Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (which aired on HBO) from Netflix or download movies from Netflix.com. A surprising number of television shows, from the best skits of Saturday Night Live to The Office, to my favorite news programs, are streamed online, on demand. And we can find most games we're interested in watching, such as the exciting NCAA final between Kansas and Memphis (including overtime! Kansas won its first NCAA title in 20 years), streamed live on CBS Sportsline or on the NCAA web site. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for inspiring me to blog about this.)
So now we curl up together with the laptop, or occasionally squabble over who gets to use it to watch something. Thankfully, my son no longer vegetates in front of the television. He only vegetates in front of the computer now. His latest obsession is Maple Story, an online role-playing game. Isn't that an improvement? Not sure.
Utilizing the "political compass" we discussed earlier on this blog, writemyline reflects on the political philosophies of various composers of classical music. "I would have thought that Stravinsky (whose Rite of Spring started a
riot) would have been extreme left. Wagner, too. (Every time I hear
“Ride of the Valkyries” I think of Coppola’s “Apochalypse Now”–the only
movie that almost made me throw up.)," she writes. More.
Couldn't believe the lyrics to this song when I first heard it on the radio, but since I live in a tick-infested county where a walk from the house to the car can seemingly lead to a tick bite, I find this song humorous.
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