Three Things from Edmonton podcast: Episode 132: cemeteries, electricity, witness

Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness last week. 

Let’s start at the end.

1. Cemeteries 

Lyle Lovett and his Large Band played the Jube last week.  There were notes of mortality in the auditorium. Lovett talked about becoming a father of twins at age 59 and then doing the math and then realizing it’s best if he doesn’t do the math. He told the story of the family cemetery in Texas. The graveyard is in a “pretty little clearing at the edge of Sam Houston National Forest next to a little tributary of the main creek the old folks call the branch,” he said. Family graves there go back to the 1870s. “It’s the cemetery, really, that kinda keeps our family together, keeps us all associated,” he said. Lovely Lovett ambiguity, there. Is the family kept together in death? Or does the family stay associated in life by tending to the dead? Or both? Or something else again? He let the possibilities hang there before clearing it up, sorta. “We’ve always got cemetery business to tend to and talk about. Maintenance, really, is the main thing. Eligibility comes up.” That got another laugh from the crowd. That cemetery is where all the Lovetts end up, he said. 

The dead and Lovett go back a ways. Family Reserve starts with the unremarked death of Uncle Eugene on October 2, 1981. Don’t Cry A Tear For Me is from the point of view of the dead person as the mourners turn back to life, I think. The masterpiece Road to Ensenada is set somewhere beyond the borderline. 12th of June reprises the signature repetition of the closing line of the verses in Road to Ensenada, this time, perhaps, less to suggest additional haunting readings as to pay tribute to his children, the twin beings. 12th of June is also about the singularity of death. Most of it is set in a future where the narrator is looking back, looking up. He wants it remembered that he loved that day, the twins’ birthday, the 12th of June, more than any other day. Loved with a “d,” not loves with an “s.” He is dead. Of the living who visit him in the cemetery, he asks for a happy tune, just like the dead cowboy asked for a sung melody from the New Jersey lady. As 12th of June says, these dead know that 

There are those who walk above us/ 
Who’ll remember that we were

Which makes them the grateful dead.  We’ve always got cemetery business to tend to and talk about. Maintenance, really, is the main thing, Lovett reminds us. It’s nice to walk out of the Jube and into the evening air in that knowledge.

2. Electricity 

Tuesday, July 25th, was the 58th anniversary of Dylan’s going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. To mark the occasion, at a lower level, I used a battery-powered toothbrush that day. Nobody yelled Judas that I could hear.

Douglas Rushkoff tells an entertaining story about the collapse of narrative in his book Present Shock. He contends that nobody has the time or the taste for a story to happen in linear time anymore. This is because the audience will not consent, as past audiences have consented, to sit still and watch like a good captive audience does. He blames the remote control and the interactive universe of viewing options for this present state. Once upon a time, attention could be gotten and kept by a crafty use of tension and release as a future state was imagined and built and arrived at. A story is how we got home. But now the audience can easily escape from the anxiety inherent in a story, especially a poorly crafted story. Click. Click. Click. In with those clicks rushes presentism and the premium it puts on what is being felt now. The present cannot be experienced as a project or as story with realms of past and a future, but as a feeling. Once upon a time doesn’t hold us like it used to. How does it feel? How does it feel? we are constantly asked. 

Ah, how does it feel? How does it feel to be without a home? Maybe Dylan didn’t go electric as much as see that we had. Maybe he saw it was up to him to  let us know.

 

                            

3. Witness 

While the others who also witnessed the pickpocket happen sat at their tables and did nothing, Shelagh didn’t. She jumped up, confronted the neatly dressed thief, told him she saw what he had done, stood her ground when he tried to intimidate her and then grabbed the stolen wallet and returned it to the woman from whose purse hanging on the back of her chair it had just been lifted. She then reported the episode to security, who nodded. That was how the little drama unfolded at the downtown mall food court last week. What was it like to take a risk and show up and take action in the arena and not just be a spectator? How did it feel?

“At first I was like what the heck was that about?” Shelagh said. “And then I just ran after the guy and tapped him on the shoulder and said I saw that. And he said you saw what? I saw you take her wallet. Give it back. He looked at me. It was tucked under his cardigan under his arm, and I grabbed it back from him and took it away. It was the right thing to do, but then when I sat down and resumed eating my tofu curry, I felt rattled a little bit."

Bravo, Shelagh! Somebody should write a country song about it, maybe call it Try That in a Mall Downtown. 

Thanks for being out there friends.