Black Pumas - Colors (Official Live Session)

Black Pumas - Fire (Official Live Session)

Black Pumas. They are described as 'an American psychedelic soul band based in Austin, Texas, led by singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada' (Wikipedia). Psychedelic soul--I like the sound of that. Wikipedia again: 'Psychedelic soul (sometimes called black rock or conflated with psychedelic funk) is a music genre that emerged in the late 1960s that saw black soul musicians embrace elements of psychedelic rock, including its production techniques, instrumentation, effects units (wah-wah pedal, phaser, etc.) and drug influences'. 

I really like both of the songs, Fire and Colors, that I'm posting today. Black Pumas is a relatively new band, but I wasn't aware of them until today. I heard the song Fire and loved it. And then I listened to Colors and loved that one too. This is the music I grew up with and loved. Listening to these songs takes me right back to that time. Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Undisputed Truth, Edwin Starr, and so many others wrote songs that fell under this genre. I liked psychedelic soul without knowing that this is what I was listening to.

 

The importance of gardens and gardening

• The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. --George Bernard Shaw
• The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. --Alfred Austin
• No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. --Thomas Jefferson
• Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization. --Daniel Webster
• Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. --May Sarton
• How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. --Alexander Smith
• Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade. --Rudyard Kipling
• A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. --Liberty Hyde Bailey
• To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. --William Blake
• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. --H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• A good garden may have some weeds. --Thomas Fuller
• A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows. --Doug Larson
• Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul. --Luther Burbank
• Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. --May Sarton
• It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else. --Viggo Mortensen
• God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. --Francis Bacon
• We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough? --Wendell Berry
• When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited. --Ramakrishna

Beautiful rose mallows, coneflowers, and gladiolas in my garden

Kistefos museum in Jevnaker

One of our summer vacation day trips this year was a visit to the Kistefos museum in Jevnaker, about an hour's drive north and slightly west from Oslo. The drive itself takes you through some beautiful farmland, and on the day we made the trip, the weather was lovely. There is something about the combination of a blue sky, warm sun, and farmland that puts me in a good mood. I am reminded of when I lived in southern New Jersey in the mid-1980s; there was a lot of farmland all around the apartment complex where I lived, and during the summers, it was so relaxing to live there and to walk to the nearby farmer's market. But I'll save those memories for another post. 

Kistefos museum 'offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions and an impressive sculpture park in scenic surroundings', as they state on their website: https://www.kistefosmuseum.com/ . It is well-worth visiting, and I plan on doing so again in the coming years. The Twist Gallery alone is worth the price of admission. After we spent the afternoon there, we drove further on to Oldemors Karjol, a very good restaurant for Norwegian food (https://hadelandcatering.no/meny-oldemors-karjol-2/).   

Here are some photos of Kistefos museum, the Twist Gallery, the outdoor sculptures, and the surrounding landscape: 

Remembering Debby

I sometimes go through old photos, looking at the life that was, thirty or forty years ago. I did that a few months ago and found a photo of myself and my friend Debby from the early 1980s, taken in the lab at PHRI where I worked at that time--my first full-time job in Manhattan. She had just gotten married and had moved to Manhattan with her husband; he was starting his medical residency and she was starting her doctoral work in the same lab where I worked as a research assistant. We hit it off almost immediately, and spent our free periods in the lab talking about life, careers, and relationships. I had just finished my master's degree and was interested in doing doctoral work, but as it turned out, that opportunity came much later in my life. I worked in that lab for three years and met some interesting people working at all sorts of jobs--technicians, academics, computer experts, cleaning ladies, and secretaries. I stayed in touch with Debby after I left the lab for a new position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Our life paths diverged quite a bit after that, but we always stayed in touch. She called me on my birthday every year and we would spend an hour or two catching up on our lives. She had two children to take care of, a house to run, and in her later years she helped her husband with the business side of his medical practice and took care of her elderly mother.

Debby passed away this past Tuesday. She was sixty-four years old and had been sick for about four years with a rare disease called progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). PSP is a degenerative disease involving the gradual deterioration and death of specific volumes of the brain that control balance, movement, eye movement, and cognition. Loss of balance, falling, the inability to focus the eyes, and dementia are often the outcomes. There is no cure for PSP. Her condition progressed very quickly; I understood that the last time I saw her. Even though we did not see each other much during the past thirty years, I count her as one of my close friends. She was one of the kindest people I've ever known. I don't think I ever heard a mean word come out of her mouth. She gave up her research career to focus on her family. In her later years, she admitted to me that she missed the lab, and I think had she not gotten sick, that she would have gone back to work in the lab in some capacity. But she never got the chance. I am glad that I sent her the photo of the two of us a few months ago. I wrote that it reminded me of our good times together. We look happy and carefree in that photo, and that's how I want to remember her. 

Reflections on the pandemic

Pandemics seem to bring out the stranger and hitherto hidden sides of people. Visions of a dystopian world or even an apocalyptic one have created paranoia on the one hand and an intense need for control on the other. Some people walk around with a simmering rage, as seen in the many news stories of late about people who deliberately spit and cough on others or become violent toward others for either wearing a face mask or not wearing one. Others have sunk into a low-grade depression, convinced that nothing they do will make a difference one way or another. I’ve watched enough apocalyptic sci-fi movies to know that the word ‘control’ loses all meaning when mankind is faced with extinction of one sort or another. Or perhaps more aptly put, control becomes more about creating a kind of order in one’s life rather than trying to create order and control in society at large. Because the truth is that the idea of ‘control’ is an illusion in the best of times; chronic illness can wipe away that control over our own lives in no time. Just ask any patient with a chronic degenerative neurological disease, or terminal cancer. The diseases make the rules, patients don’t. We are lucky to live in well-ordered societies that function because there is a modicum of laws that keep it functioning, but it doesn’t take much to wipe a law-abiding society away. All you need is an emphasis on ‘me first’, ‘my rights’, ‘I am entitled to’, ‘my freedoms’ when the health authorities ask people to maintain social distancing, not travel, and to wear masks. The latter hasn’t occurred yet in Oslo, but it will, mark my words. The emphasis on ‘my freedoms trump your rules’ is paramount in our society. You just need to look around and witness the large numbers of young people who ignore the social distancing rules, who party and carry on as though there was no pandemic. Or the people you meet on the city sidewalks, mostly young but some old, who walk three abreast and don’t budge an inch as you pass. More often than not, it’s me who moves to the side to create distance between us. My best guesstimate is that two of ten people follow the suggested rules for social distancing. Even some of the elderly seem not to care about social distancing. One nice exception was a middle-aged couple that began to walk single-file when they saw me coming, and we acknowledged each other as we passed each other. It’s as though those who ‘get it’ are part of a secret club when we meet each other; we exchange knowing glances. Because we know that the rest of society doesn’t get it. I’ve watched and read enough apocalyptic sci-fi shows and books respectively to know that this is how the world really is. The majority of people carry on as though nothing has happened, or that what has happened doesn’t really affect them personally. Until it does. And by then it’s usually too late. If people could at least follow these simple rules, we could maintain some semblance of control—the idea of control in any case. The coronavirus doesn’t care about any of it; it will continue doing what viruses do, infecting hosts and making them sick, until it is stopped in one way or another.

I try to follow the advice given by the health authorities. I have purchased face masks in the event that we are asked to use them. Come autumn and winter, I will use them when I go grocery shopping or out to any crowded place. Right now it’s summer and I’m in my garden, alone for the most part. That God-given haven disappears in wintertime. I will continue to work from home, shop online, and grocery shop once a week. I am not sure what winter will be like in the psychological sense; every now and then I get inklings of what a world plagued by a long-term pandemic could really be like. I know there are a lot of mentally-fragile and anxious people in the world, and their needs cannot be ignored. I fear sometimes that the healthcare systems will be overwhelmed not only with virus sufferers but also with people who cannot cope with the current restricted life, especially if that type of life continues for another year or two. I don’t know the future, but I can imagine it. At present, a second coronavirus wave is building in Europe and no one knows how deadly that could be. Without a vaccine, I cannot see how we are going to get past this pandemic. Until that time, we can keep the virus in check by abiding by the rules laid out for us by the health authorities. One can hope that we have learned something from the first coronavirus wave.