February 11, 2024: Petrifying Springs multi-use trail.
Another Week: Number 59
The first new car Amy bought was a Subaru with a turbo and a five-speed manual transmission. I learned how to drive it by practicing alone at an industrial park across from the outlet mall where Amy worked. This gave me acres of roads, intersections, and parking lots which were all traffic-free on that particular Sunday. There was no one behind me as I tried to get the hang of first gear.
Now Amy is gone, along with about eighty-five percent of my identity, and I find myself making the same sort of trial runs.
Apparently, I’m a widower in my sixties and I live in Racine, Wisconsin for some reason. I have an old-man warmup jacket and even an old-man baseball cap that I sometimes wear. Thanks to climate catastrophe, we have enjoyed an extremely mild winter, so I have been going for walks along Kenosha’s lakefront or around the Petrifying Springs loop with my fellow fair-weather, aging zombies and their adorable dogs.
Beyond its physical benefits, walking is a helpful exercise because you are continuously pulling yourself forward through the world, spotting new sights up ahead, encountering others, turning right or left, and crossing bridges and paths. Walking is a metaphor. Moving forward trains you to move forward.
A related training I have been going through is an awareness of time — noticing when the bubble of my attention is not centered on the present but is lingering in the past. The usual indicators are my lip quivering and my eyes flooding with tears. Like flying by instruments, these signals remind me to add some throttle, come back to the here and now, and avoid a stall.
All along the multi-use loop at Pets, there are plenty of benches — most of them memorials to various locals who loved the park. One of them is the bench where Amy, winded, had to sit and rest during her last walk through these standing and fallen trees.
For now, I keep moving.
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66th Grammy Awards
As we ratchet through another awards season, it feels like the arts-bashing politics of the last few decades may be running out of gas. Perhaps this is simply because it’s hard to portray our now prismatic array of entertainment outlets as some monolithic bogeyman.
But even despite the worst squabbling about program length, hosts and their jokes, category definitions, the ethnicity of nominees, speech curtailing, and so on, I have always enjoyed the awards shows, warts and all.
The arts — even and especially the popular arts — are incredibly valuable to our civilization. They allow us to play out our dreams and our nightmares in a way that is not war. They let us see from other perspectives in a way that is not quarrel. So, imperfect and arbitrary as they may be, ceremonies to honor artists for these contributions are commendable.
Since I’m not very plugged into current popular music, the Grammy Awards offer an annual overview, sometimes surfacing songs that get added to my playlists. In recent years, the show has paired seemingly disparate musicians, erasing the lines between genres and encouraging wider appreciation.
Sunday’s show had many fine moments, but the one that reduced me to sobbing gasps was pure nostalgia — Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs performing “Fast Car,” Chapman’s 1988 hit that Amy owned on cassette and blasted many times as we drove through the night to Chicago or Carol Beach.
Jason Isbell won two Grammy awards — Best American Roots Song for “Cast Iron Skillet” and Best Americana Album for Weathervanes. Then on Thursday, news broke that he filed for divorce from Amanda Shires back in December. Had Amy known this, it would have seriously bummed her out.
Immediate Family (2023)
Back in 2008, there was an excellent documentary called The Wrecking Crew about a group of studio musicians who played on hundreds of the hit songs you love from the 1960s and early 70s.
Last year Denny Tedesco, the director of that film (and son of Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco), released Immediate Family, a sequel of sorts about another group of musicians who performed on a ton of singer-songwriter hits in the 1970s, 80s, and beyond — backing artists like James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks, and many, many more.
This group — guitarist/vocalists Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and Steve Postell, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel — not only backed these stars but substantially shaped their recordings and toured with them. They also released their own music as The Section in the early 70s, and more recently as The Immediate Family.
I digitally rented this one-hour, forty-two-minute documentary on Tuesday evening and watched it with my sister Karen.
The film is a nice reminiscence and a reminder of plenty of great songs, but it’s uniformly laudatory and lacking in surprises or conflict — unless you can count Don Henley’s sour expression. There’s a certain repetition as the various musicians and songs are inventoried, and it all sorts of blends into the same thing.
It’s worth it — if, like me, you’re a nerd for this music.
Otherwise, maybe not.
Apple Vision Pro review at The Verge
For several years now, people have been strapping devices around their faces and teetering off into our new, virtual future.
I wish them the best, but I have not been eager to follow. I’m not a gamer, and I don’t want to date an avatar or raise virtual livestock.
As of February 2nd, however, things got much more serious. Now, for a mere $3,499, you can buy an Apple Vision Pro and be on the cutting edge of facial gear. I am a fan of Apple devices and this is their long-awaited entry into fake reality, so I ought to at least learn what it is.
Happily, Google News led me to an excellent and comprehensive review by Nilay Patel of The Verge: “Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not.”
He covers the thing quite thoroughly, explaining how Apple’s approach to augmented reality differs from the virtual reality of other headsets, and marveling at the technological achievements while nevertheless puzzled by the practicality:
Sadly, visionOS doesn’t have any ability to share these windows or experiences with anyone else: two people in Vision Pro headsets sitting in the same room can’t see the same things floating in space at the same time. Apple tells me some enterprise developers are working on experiences with shared views, and you can mirror the view from one Vision Pro to another over FaceTime, but in the end, my big Safari art gallery only ever had one patron: me. It’s amazing you can do all of this, but it is also quite lonely to put things all over a space knowing no one else will ever really experience it.
It’s a great piece.
I still don’t feel a need to own this headgear — but maybe I would try one on.
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