Grand Rising from the Grand Twinkie

Maybe it’s the temporary end of the smoky air. Maybe it’s because the wind had me feeling like the heat spell was over. Maybe it was because KFAI played seven Abbey Lincoln songs in a row on Mostly Jazz.

Something has me feeling lifted up a couple inches this morning. It was good sleep last night. We had a big meal at Tono after going to temple services. I fell asleep promptly after we started a new Larry David thing on HBO and put myself to bed on the early side. Put myself to bed before Rachel which is wildly uncommon. Rachel had pulled down the blinds. The sun didn’t get through. I slept with no interruption besides for the middle age middle-of-the-night pees until maybe 7:30. After that the kids came into bed and I read a magazine out on the couch.

I fooled myself into thinking the heatwave was all the way over, but it’s a little better. My six year old daughter read me an unconscionable and uncountable amount of jokes from a kid’s joke book, I did my little round of exercises and I started on making pancakes for everyone else and potatoes, eggs and toast for me. Good coffee and music from my favorite, Dee Henry Williams aka the Grand Diva on KFAI. She plays a lot of the same songs every week. She says a lot of the same things every week including “Grand Rising from the Grand Diva”. But I can tell you that it is still fresh and timely. How does she do that? I don’t know.

Maybe all of this good music, and good energy and calmness comes from a huge cocktail of good things. I DJ’d at Berlin on Wednesday and not only did it go great, it was a great time. It's such a clarifying experience to be with your records that you picked out and you try to share them in an order, volume and energy that speaks to what is happening in the room. I also had a great brief hang with my friend Amy and then an awesome convo with Cecilia and Gabby who are both on staff at Berlin. Also, in holy-shit-the-world-is-small-but-Saint-Paul-is-way-smaller: the soundman and I worked together at Cheapo/Applause the holiday season going from 1998 to 1999. That was a different century. After I played I listened to Deltron3030 on a great set of speakers and just marveled at the instruments that Del and Kid Koala that they share with the world. I love Dan the Automator but I think of his greatness more often. I heard things in Del and Koala’s rhythm and placement I had never heard before. First time I ever saw someone do coke I was listening to that record in Colorado. I’ve never done coke but I bet you guessed that already.

Maybe the good feeling is because I received back the “Country Cabin Crapper Companion Volume Three” magazine run and I’m happy with it. I’m proud of what I wrote. I’m grateful for what Meghan, Sam and Bill wrote. And that project was one uphill after another so to see it through and done feels good. I’ll have copies up for sale on Bandcamp soon and I’ll celebrate the release at the White Squirrel on Saturday July 25 (next Saturday).

Maybe it’s completing difficult thing after difficult thing at City Cast Twin Cities including hosting a really different kind of episode that was quarterbacked by my colleague Tiffany Bui. And after all that I had a half-day on Friday and I spent a lot of it reading the New Yorker while my kids played on an iPad at Makwa Coffee while by wife got work done on her laptop. Makwa Coffee’s Ziigwan Sugar Maple is the best iced coffee in the city.

Magazines elaborate on the terrible things happening around the world in a pace I can metabolize and act upon. This one from the New Yorker laid bare the absolute barbarity of ICE detention camps are. We are painting a new stain on our country’s history methodically and inarguably. If you’re from the Twin Cities here’s one of the sentences that hurts the most:

This appeared to be one of the starker realities of the Eco tent: even by the low standards of Camp East Montana, detainees who’d been arrested in Minnesota were subject to an exceptional level of neglect, as though the unbridled spirit of Operation Metro Surge had carried over to West Texas.

Imagine living a worse life in a detention camp in Texas simply because you were abducted in the most lawless and violent of the surges happening across the country.

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Today after all the breakfast was cooked I opened up the Atlantic and read an article by Rose Horowitch about the death of literacy. I thought about all the gifts that reading has given me. All the universes that reading not only invited me into, but let me create. I think about the fact that in a workplace where more and more of the prep work is coming via Claude I was able to quickly reference an amazing summary of the creation of Heritage Park by Justin Ellis in “The Cruelty of Nice Folks”. It was the reading of the book that gave me that. I don’t know that it helped directly when I got the chance to interview him, I just know that reading that man’s whole ass book improved my life, my brain, my world. Claude can kiss my ass while stealing my style!

The one positive in Horowitch’s article was that “literacy as a subculture” is growing. We might never see John Cheever on the cover of a magazine again. Hell, we’ll never really see the cover of a magazine again in the same cultural impact way, but we can keep reading. We can keep loving books and magazines. We can love the way that our perspective broadens by reading in general and the way our attention tightens in specific when our nose is in front of one sentence and our hands are holding onto something. We can love the patience we are forced into having when a challenging song comes on a record but we don’t want to get up and flip it and we can love the focus of the record spinning, the handful of liner notes available on the Deodato record we’ve been listening to for the last 15 years in our hands wondering what happened on September 13.

I don’t know why but as KFAI DJ and culture bearer par excellence Kenna Cottman gets into the set for Mostly Jazz they play one thousand Lakecia Benjamin songs followed by a thousand of Abbey Lincoln. The sounds wash over me and I’m washing dishes I don’t even really have to wash at this very moment just to hear the original of “Throw it Away” when I’ve only heard the Terri Lyne Carrington version. I’m grateful for the afternoons of my life I spent just playing jazz records in a room in North Minneapolis or St. Louis Park and letting the music come out of the speakers, and checking the weather, and writing the news and hearing the jazz and hoping it’s all working.

Today it’s all working again. I take the dogs for a walk. Aaron and Melissa’s garden looks better than it ever has. But they tell me they are just trying to get more work done on the fence they’ve been working on most of the summer since the storms. Luis and his brother let me struggle through my Spanish while we talk about the World Cup finals tomorrow, and who might win (they are rooting for Argentina). Kenna is still playing unbelievable music and then Jon Jon takes over for Sound Verite. I’ve known these humans. I’ve bought records from Jon Jon. I’ve interviewed Kenna. It truly is community radio. Jon Jon plays Equinox, a John Coltrane song in C#m that I’ve heard hundreds of times. But I’ve never listened to McCoy Tyner’s solo quite that way. The way each idea talks to the last one but says something new. I know how the chords move, it’s one of the few songs I can play on piano. Then Jon Jon plays “Like Sonny” again by Coltrane. The band sounds insanely fresh, vibrant, communicative. And then Fela Kuti “Water No Get Enemy”. That’s the song that made the biggest move from Fela’s discography into a favorite of neo-soul stans like myself. I hear a guitar part I’ve never heard before. Never. I’ve listened to this song lots. But I’m older. I’m more patient. I move slower. My ears work better. I hear a lyric I’ve never heard before:

If water kill your child, na water you go use.

I want the moment to last forever but I’m also at peace with knowing it won’t. The new neighbors are outside, using a bench I thought they’d never use (pet peeve is people putting seating in their front yard and then never fucking sitting out there). But Ally and shit-I-forgot-her-name are outside cuddling on the bench. Ally is trying to change an appointment. I’m trying to come inside and write it down. By the time I get to this point Jon Jon is playing another Coltrane song, Impressions. The energy has changed, but it’s still good. The kids are on an iPad. They’ll read real books later. They’ll take their guitar and ukulele lessons later. It’s good to touch things, it’s good to write things, it’s good to read things, it’s good to change things. It’s good to be alive compared to the available alternatives. Grand rising from the grand twinkie.