I know I’m a few days late on this, but, shit, it’s already August. And it’s been kind of shitty non-summer for the most part around here, so I’m not thrilled at the prospect of what little summer we get rapidly coming to an end. Although hearing that there will be pig racing at this year’s NY State Fair takes the edge off it a little bit. Each year, I get a little less tolerant of the cold weather. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t have to go to work, but, well, that’s not gonna happen.
Ever since that awful day back in November, I’ve been more or less unable to watch the news – even the local news, with an occasional exception for sports and weather, neither of which have been particularly fun for me to pay attention to lately either – on the teevee. I can’t stand listening to NPR news (they’ve been pretty annoying for a long time now, but they way they bend over backwards to normalize what goes on in DC these days is nausea inducing), and if I’m going to listen to any news, it’s pretty much limited to the CBC and BBC News briefs every morning. Lots of wildfires in BC, if you didn’t know.
So today, because I’ve pretty much seen every episode of Law and Order and “How It’s Made,” I figured I’d give the lo-cal news a shot. What I learned in the brief time i could stand watching was that the local baseball team paid tribute to our local delicacy by calling themselves the Salt Potatoes for a day, and that there have been “dozens” of complaints of skunks in Oswego. It seems they’re coming up out of the storm sewers (really? Didn’t know they hung out there) and getting into people’s garbage and behaving in a skunk-like manner. So apparently the mayor is going to ask the City Council for some $8,000 in funding for skunk traps (humane ones, I hope, though I don’t even like getting a dead mouse out of a trap – pretty sure I wouldn’t want the job of collecting a live skunk).
That was when I gave up on the news and decided to do my breakfast dishes.
I then returned to the Internets, where I learned that Cynthia Nixon may run for NY State Governor. Really? I mean, nothing against her. She’s probably a wonderful person and I guess is an outspoken advocate and all that (and I’m sure she’d be better than Governor Snotball – not that he’s set the bar particularly high, even by NY standards, where the most competent Governor we’ve had in years had a rather unfortunate predilection for expensive prostitutes), but I honestly don’t think it’s a good idea to elect somebody with no experience trying to actually accomplish anything within the confines of our corrupt and dysfunctional government is an especially good idea. Plus in NY, with all its arcane election rules, you need a really good (well-financed) machine behind you just to get on the ballot, never mind win anything. And running a “celebrity” for Guv seems like an even bigger loser proposition than Caroline Kennedy for Senator was.
Besides, what’s her slogan gonna be – “Nixon. Now more than ever” (I guess you need to be of a certain age to understand that one).
But, whatever. As long as we don’t get Carl Paladino.
My brother hit the big Seven-Oh yesterday, which means he’s a mere four years younger then my dad was (his too) when he died. I find this thought disconcerting, to say the least. And not just because I really don’t wanna have to drive down to Long Island for his funeral (in addition to not wanting to drive, I have been to all the funerals I care to go to in the lifetime, and I’d prefer it if the next one was mine – let somebody else do the driving).
Well, I guess I better get my shit out of the dryer and continue to get ready to go back to work tomorrow while trying not to think about the fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow while I wait for it to be late enough to get out there on the tractor and cut the grass. Is ten o’clock late enough on a Sunday?
Just finished up watching Fearless (ITV – 6 episodes). Good show, if you’re into those leftwing, champion of the downtrodden human rights lawyer types (with some UK/US spook conspiracy thrown in).
Yeah, I can’t believe we are in the eighth month already. And I agree about funerals. This getting old thing is the WORST. I liked it much better when I thought the end was someplace other people worried about. That was stupid, eh? Speaking of eh, I didn’t know about the fires in BC. The news is uber depressing and it isn’t getting better. Trump is out of his ever-loving-mind. I’m sure the man has dementia and with his fortunes, few dare confront him. I just hope someone stops him from using the nuke codes. I can tell he’s itching to try them out.
We have 2 fat, immature, ignorant narcisists with ridiculous hair who surrounded by sycophants and crazy people and are only in the positions they’re in because of their daddys engaged in a dangerous game of egotism that could very easily get us all killed. Ideally, you’d grownup in the room that would just kiss l’il Kim’s ass a bit and calm him down (witness the Canadian pastor just released after their National Security Advisor went to NK and negotiated his release).
Unfortunately, we don’t have a grownup. We have a petulant child. And a dumb one, at that.
I really hate the thought of dying when I have a ton of vacation and sick time on the books. Plus I’ve squandered a lot of time depriving myself, which I could have otherwise spent drinking beer.
It’s also a very sad day in Orange Land.
I recall after one stressful nail-biter of a game (back then, we actually won those), Coach Mac apparently went to the hospital to get checked out for chest pains or something. The news reported that he’d been hospitalized overnight.
The next day at a press conference, he said “if I was in the hospital, my wife wants to know who she was in bed with last night, because she had a helluva good time!”
I feel like I fell asleep at some point, and woke up in the 1950s. Except we have a Russian “asset” as President.
Either way, sure does look like America is great again.
Texas House Passes Bill To Make Women Buy ‘Rape Insurance’
Torch-wielding white supremacists march through University of Virginia campus
Except in the 1950s, the Nazis were still the bad guys. That they’ve become heroes to some people is a more recent development, I think.
Also, tiki torches seem a tad, um, let’s just say less than manly. But maybe they’re citronella – I’m guessing the skeeters are pretty thick at night down there in VA.
I attended UVa one year. Charlottesville is my favorite places. This is heartbreaking.
Really wish the women in Texas would just stop having sex with Republican men.They could solve these problems in a jiffy.
PS I saw people are exposing the people in the Nazi photos from yesterday. They’re linking the photos with names and in some cases giving the information to the police for assault charges.
I’m in the process of cleaning out my car this morning, and even though it’s August and the car is only sitting in my driveway, just knowing that I don’t have my snow brush, other snow brush, backup other snow brush, traction ramps, aluminum shovel, backup plastic shovel, blanket, two pairs of gloves, two hats and portable jump starter in my trunk is making me anxious.
You can tell it’s summer in CNY. Otherwise, all that shit would’ve be in the back seat.
It does feel a lot like the fifties. I wonder if the kids are learning to crawl under their desks. I always remember my teacher, Miss Looney, (her real name) getting under the teachers desk. It was hard to keep from laughing. I also remember the dog tags we all had to wear with the notch cut out. Ms Looney explained that the notch was so that the tag could be shoved between our front teeth if we died in a bombing. They said our parents would be able to identify us more easily. Neighbors argued about whether they would allow another neighbor into their bomb shelter. After all s/he could be contaminated with radiation. (Apparently hiding under a desk prevented such problems in children.) My parents went to SANE meetings. I cant remember exactly what that acronym stood for but it was a group wanting to stop the nuclear arming of the nutty world. Of course they were called commies.
I grew up assuming everyone would die in a nuclear bombing. Old age was something we need not worry about.
But Trump, with his usual grasp of issues and brilliant thinking, assured the Governor of Guam that the whole nuclear threat would increase tourism to Guam 10 fold. I guess we should all get our plane tickets before the rush.
So are we attacking Venezuala? Trump needs a war and Tillerson/Exxon want oil so it’s a win win, right? Reagan chose the South American option for his distraction. For the life of me, how does Kushner live with Bannon, Gorka, Miller, Trump and Pence? Money can smooth any moral conflict, evidently.
Trump won’t invade South America, because he doesn’t want to upset his supporters in the Confederacy.
Fare Thee Well! Thanks!
Arts
Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.
Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.
Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white America treated Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,” he said. Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.
Mr. Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to whites — a crossover star, in contrast to veteran black comedians like Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley and Slappy White, whose earthy, pungent humor was mainly confined to black clubs on the so-called chitlin circuit.
Though he clearly seethed over the repression of blacks, he resorted to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms like the Hungry I in San Francisco or the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.
He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a three-button suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror, and to laugh at itself.
“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” Or: “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.”
Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,” to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”
Mr. Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records like “In Living Black and White” and “Dick Gregory Talks Turkey.” He wrote the first of his dozen books. Time magazine, enormously powerful then, ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s “Tonight Show” host, had him on as a guest — after Mr. Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.
Newspapers in those days routinely put Mr. Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.
It was Mr. Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lies power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, achingly poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children in his neighborhood.
“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,” he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,” he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.”
He titled that book “nigger,” lowercase N. The word — typically reduced these days to “the N-word” — figured prominently in his routines, even as he shunned the obscenities that casually littered the acts of other comedians.
“I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,” he said in a 2000 interview with NPR. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ ”
In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.
Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”
He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”
In 1965, he was shot in the leg (the wound was not grave) by a rioter as he tried to be a peacemaker during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.
Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. Club owners became reluctant to book him: Who knew if he might fly off to Alabama on a moment’s notice? As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.
“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” (2003). Some pillars of the movement, like Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, who died in 1971, believed that Mr. Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Mr. Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.”
In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin mustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.
There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.
His fasting led to a keen interest in nutrition. Working in the 1980s with a Swedish health food company, Mr. Gregory developed a weight-reduction powder called Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet. The partners had a falling-out, and the business swooned.
Still, Mr. Gregory remained a fervent health-food advocate. In late 1999, he learned he had lymphoma but rejected chemotherapy, relying instead on vitamins, herbs and exercise. The cancer went into remission.
His activism came at a price, however. For one thing, the cascade of cash that he had once enjoyed turned into a trickle. His family paid, too.
Mr. Gregory moved to Chicago to build a comedy career in the late 1950s. There he met Lillian Smith, a secretary at the University of Chicago, and they were married in 1959. They had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.
In 1973, when cash was still rolling in, they bought a 400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. (Why Plymouth? “I think the white folks is coming back, and I’m going to get a handful of Indians and stop ’em there this time,” Mr. Gregory said.) But by the early 1990s, the strapped Gregorys had lost the farm and moved into an apartment in Plymouth.
Over more than five decades of marriage, Lillian Gregory said, she understood her husband’s need — some called it an obsession — to wander off on behalf of this or that cause, typically earning nothing except attention, and sometimes not even that. But Christian Gregory, a chiropractor in Washington, said to The Washington Post in 2000: “He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family. It was a hard pill to swallow.”
Father absenteeism was a familiar phenomenon for the man born Richard Claxton Gregory in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He was the second of six children. His father, Presley, disappeared after the birth of each child, and finally left for good. The Gregory children were reared by their mother, Lucille, who scraped by on welfare and a meager income as a maid.
“Kids didn’t eat off the floor,” Mr. Gregory said of their Depression-era poverty. “When I was a kid, you dropped something off the table, it never reached the floor.”
Mr. Gregory graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, then attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. At both schools he was a track star and enjoyed local fame.
Not that the acclaim was free of complications. In 1961, by then a national figure, he received the key to the city from the mayor of St. Louis. Yet in his hometown he was denied a room at a leading hotel. “They gave me the key to the city,” Mr. Gregory said, “and then they changed all the locks.”
He left college in 1954 and joined the Army, where he was able to work on comedy routines while attached to Special Services. He then returned to college, only to give it up again without graduating.
In 1956 he headed to Chicago, where he worked in small-time clubs at night and at odd jobs by day. He even tried running a club of his own, but that venture failed.
In one part-time job Mr. Gregory sorted mail in a post office. His pattern, he later said, was to toss letters destined for Mississippi into a slot marked “overseas.” That job did not last long.
His real break came in January 1961, when he was asked to fill in for the comedian Irwin Corey, who had canceled a gig at the flagship Playboy Club in Chicago. On the big night, club managers had misgivings; the house was packed with businessmen from the Deep South. No matter, Mr. Gregory said. He insisted on performing.
“I understand there are a great many Southerners in the room tonight,” he began his act. “I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night.” He so won over the crowd that Playboy’s Hugh Hefner signed him for three more weeks, then extended the contract.
Despite having sworn off nightclubs in 1973, saying he could no longer work in places where liquor was served, Mr. Gregory returned to them on occasion in later years, a thin presence wreathed in white hair and beard. Though his best days were well behind him, his approach never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:
“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.”
Tough weekend for comedians.