I'm still alive (or, Nedrock 3)

A few years ago, as my various diseases began to pile up, my aunt—my dad's sister—asked if I would text her every morning to let her know that I was still alive. I said no. A few months later she asked again. I reminded her that I had already said no, and she said, "You could change your mind." Shortly thereafter I did change my mind. I figured, what could it cost me? Plus, I've come to learn in this world that when someone offers you their love, you consider yourself lucky and accept it.

I recently turned 60. I can't believe it; I still feel like a kid. Maybe it's because I never had children or owned a house. But my body is definitely aging. I have to constantly remind myself that people don't see a child when they see me. I have to be particularly careful around the sketch group, where all the ladies look like mother figures to me before I remind myself that we're all basically the same age.

Still, whenever I start to feel old, I remind myself that Brad Pitt and I are the same age. That Johnny Depp and I are the same age. That Eddie Vedder and I are the same age.

I've seen Pearl Jam twice. The first time, I only caught one song. We were going to Lollapalooza in the summer of '92, which featured Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Pearl Jam. One asshole who went with us made us wait in the car for nearly an hour while he got ready. Then when we got to Charlotte we had to check into our hotel rooms. We figured there was no way a band as big as Pearl Jam would be the opening act. Well, they were. We got there as they were playing their final encore: Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." 

Some ten years later I got atonement of a sort when a friend in Charlotte called to see if I wanted to see Pearl Jam. It was actually at the same outdoor venue and it was awesome. We got high and sang along to every song. I learned later that Pearl Jam didn't play "Jeremy" at every show. They played "Alive," "Black," "Even Flow," "Better Man" at pretty much every show, but "Jeremy" was special. They hadn't played it in Raleigh, but they played it for us. Eddie implored us to sing with him, and when we got to the "aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye" part I got goose bumps, as twenty thousand souls all hit it right on cue. It was a communal, cathartic experience, and I still get goose bumps just thinking about it. They also closed this show with "Rockin' in the Free World," which I'd seen Young, another of my heroes, premiere live on SNL years before. 

This was around the time that I got my first computer, and when I got home I purchased my first download: the soundboard recording of the show, the show I'd just seen a couple of nights before, from Pearl Jam's website. I still have it on both my iPods. 

As I've written before, "Alive" was the song that convinced me we were listening to the wrong radio station at the sports bar. It was all happening—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, grunge, alternative rock—but we were listening to the "classic rock" station. This morning a live video recording of Pearl Jam performing recently in a Seattle arena came up on my YouTube feed, and there were Eddie and Stone and Mike and Jeff and Matt still rocking. It was "Alive," and I cried a little as I watched and listened. Cried for time gone by, cried for memories of those magical days in the Nineties, cried for these old compatriots still bringing down the house.

And I texted my aunt the same three words I send to her every morning: "I'm still alive."

Nedrock, Pitt Street, Charleston, 1994

The cedar waxwing

I have not retained a whole lot from my childhood. Maybe it's because I was undiagnosed ADHD. I also think it might be the result of being from a broken home. Going back and forth each week between two households hindered continuity. Many of the things that I do remember are murky. But they're in there, and they pop up from the depths of my brain from time to time. 

One day I was chilling in my car in the parking lot of Bert's Market on Folly Beach, enjoying my then-favorite snack: Cool Ranch Doritos, Jack Link's teriyaki beef stick, and a Dr. Pepper. I don't think I was feeding the birds, but many birds were scavenging in the parking lot, brown birds I had seen a million times but whose species I couldn't identify. And then suddenly I said, "Those are grackles." When I got home and looked them up that's exactly what they were. I don't know where the name came from, but it was clearly in there somewhere from my past. (I call this sort of experience "mental archaeology.")

Around this time I was seeing a woman in an ill-fated relationship based primarily on a mutual fondness for marijuana and sex. One afternoon, in the afterglow of a particularly satisfying assignation, we lay on the bed in silence with nothing but birdsong audible, wafting in through the windows. It sounded like a bunch of different birds, each with its own distinctive call, but the more I listened, the more I began to sense that it was only one bird, and I figured it had to be a mockingbird.

Obviously, I had heard of the mockingbird, but to my mind this was the first time I'd ever really heard one singing. When I got home and looked up "mockingbird" in my trusty Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (this was in the early ohs, before I owned a computer, much less a smartphone), the entry sounded like it was addressed directly to me: "The mockingbird, the preeminent North American songbird, may mimic some 30 calls in succession, Ned."  

The mockingbird quickly became my favorite bird. I especially liked its Linnaean nomenclature: Mimus polyglottos, which sounded like a fake name coined by Chuck Jones. I found this name in a bird book I bought to support my newfound interest. There were a bunch of birds in this book that I hoped to see one day: the red-winged blackbird, the indigo bunting, the painted bunting, the Eastern bluebird, the American kestrel, and the cedar waxwing.

One day, while giving a carriage tour, I was stopped before a house on Limehouse Street when a slew of birds swooped in and alit on a holly tree full of berries, then just as quickly swooped away. I recognized the cedar waxwing from my book and I was ecstatic. "Oh, my god," I said to my bewildered passengers, "cedar waxwings! I've been hoping to see those for forever!" 

The other morning I went out to my car to find it absolutely plastered with bird droppings. I have parked in the same spot since I moved to my new apartment, underneath a tall deciduous tree of uncertain species where birds sometimes perch. There has been the occasional dropping, but nothing like this. When I got home later that day, I saw scores of cedar waxwings swooping back and forth between the big tree and the two holly trees that front my apartment building. (When I first moved here and saw the holly trees, I wondered if I would see cedar waxwings.) This was the first time I'd seen them since that day on Limehouse Street, and I watched them at intervals all afternoon from my balcony. They are gorgeous birds: a smooth back and red tips on the wings that resemble wax (hence the name); yellow belly; crested head with a black mask; and a bright yellow marking on the very tip of the tail. They must be in the process of migrating. I wonder how long they'll be here.

Nedrock 2

This post originated as an email to Julie Unruh. She had plans to jam with some friends and asked me to recommend a song or two that she could take with her, preferably post-2000.

Here's the thing about me and new music. Since the collapse of radio, I haven't really listened to new music much. I've never had a subscription to Sirius, and the times I've been on Spotify there's just been too much to sift through. I really miss the days of shared cultural experiences. As I've written about before, the last great heyday of rock music was the nineties, and in Charleston we had one of the best rock stations in the country. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Counting Crows, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Radiohead, U2, R.E.M., Kristin Hersh, Natalie Merchant, Matthew Sweet, Hole, Beck, Indigo Girls, Elliott Smith, the list goes on and on, were "alternative" artists who broke through on the national level. (Eddie Vedder was on the cover of Time magazine.) I mean, if you look at the pop charts from those days, very few of these artists appear, and yet they were well-known by the broader culture. And this is the reason many of them are still able to tour to this day, because they still have a sizeable fan base. Today, I can't name a single rock band, much less a song by one. 

A few years ago I had to work at the local Food Lion as a side hustle. The satellite radio they played was mostly pop—every once in a while you'd hear a song by Dave Matthews or Edwin McCain or Muse or even U2—but mostly it was pop music that I had never heard. In fact, some of it was so bad, so generic sounding, that I seriously thought that it was the modern-day equivalent of Muzak: pop-sounding music that was created by studio musicians. Then I heard a song that I thought might be by Katy Perry, and when I got home and Googled the lyrics I found that I was right. Gradually I began to recognize that these were all top pop songs of the day. (Thank god the manager chose this "station"; other stores played the country station, or the oldies station.) There began to be a few songs that I really liked, and when I asked one of the kids working at the store who they were by, they looked at me like I was from Mars (not really; they all liked me, they just knew I was old); most of these songs that I found I liked turned out to be by the same artist, Taylor Swift. "Trouble When You Walked In"; "22"; "Love Story"; "You Belong With Me"; "Red"; "Shake It Off"; and "Blank Space," which is my favorite TS song and one of the best songs of the decade. There's a version of her playing it on acoustic guitar at a Grammy event. For those who might think Swift doesn't have a real singing voice, this performance puts that to rest. Also, there's a D chord in the chorus that she left out of the studio recording, and the first time I heard it it knocked me out.

Of course, my favorite songs from the last couple of decades are my own! A good one for you and your mates to jam on might be "You Know What?" The verse is just two chords. The first chord is A. The second chord is the D confinguration (see what I did there!) on the seventh fret (the second dot on the neck; the note is actually something on the G scale). The chorus is D and A, finishing on E. Then back to A. I'll give you the lyrics in a Word document attached. Sorry, the video cuts off at the very end, but that's the end of the song anyway. As you'll see in the lyrics, I substitute "but it's too late" for "a little sooner." There's a live version with this ending, but I like my home version better; there's an extra couple of bars between the verses in the live version that I don't care for.

Sketch group 2

This post originated as an email to Kieran Kramer.

When I first heard about the sketch group and decided to join, I went all in! First I went to llbean.com to find just the right chair. My first thought was a straight-back camp chair, mainly because I figured this was the only kind they made, but I thought I'd never be able to sit upright like that for two hours. I figured I'd have to set it against a wall, but I knew there wouldn't always be a wall. But then I saw this reclining chair and it is perfect. It's funny. Most everybody either uses the straight-back chair or even just a stool, but I have broken the paradigm, and I think it's just one of the reasons they think I'm cool (if I may say so myself). 

Then I started thinking about my wardrobe. I haven't done anything socially for a while, so I thought maybe I could spruce up my look a little bit. You've seen my new T-shirts. I also bought another pair of Adidases, white leather with black stripes, and some new jeans to go with them. When I got the first notification of the week's location, they said to bring your own seating, water and hat. The only hats I had were baseball-type caps. There's an outdoor outfitters-type place just a couple of blocks from my apartment, so I walked down there and found a hat. It's a Tilley, which evidently is a well-known hat among outdoorsmen and hat aficionados. They had about thirty, all different styles and sizes, and I feel like I got a good one. I know it's rude to talk about money, but this hat cost a hundred dollars. The hat cost more than the chair!

One of the ladies in the group recently took my picture and I didn't even realize it until she sent it to me in an email:

Sketch group

This post originated as an email to David Summers.

Hi, David. I just wanted to share a couple of things with you. I recently joined a sketch group. It happened completely fortuitously. I was in the waiting room at the auto mechanic's when another person waiting on her car walked in and started sketching. I struck up a conversation with her and she said she was a member of a sketch group here in Staunton that meets once a week around town for two hours to sketch. The more she told me about it, the more I thought to myself, "Yes, this is what I need." I've been wanting to sketch for years but never got up the gumption to do it. Having a group to do it with at a set time makes it easier to commit.

I took a drawing class in college (at the College of Charleston), and I was kind of the "artist" in my family as a kid, working mainly in felt pen and copying MAD magazine covers! I don't have any innate talent, I'm mainly doing it for the therapeutic benefits, and for the fellowship. It's nice to get out and meet some new, like-minded people!

Like Vincent, I have to "wrestle with nature," looking closely at my subject and focusing on drawing what I see (not what I think I see). My basic method is to draw one small element at a time, making sure that each next element is in proportion to the last. The fun part is seeing if things match up when I get back around near my starting point!

I hope you and yours are doing well.

View looking south from the corner of N. Washington and W. Frederick streets.

The view from Bluestone Vineyards outside of Bridgewater.

Along Church Street. I'm obviously not real pleased with the way I drew the power lines!

Looking south down New Street, from E. Beverley St. Here's an example where things don't quite match up. The two front buildings, left and right, are on the same plane in reality.

Cars, for some reason, are a challenge! Fortunately, that's not what this picture is about.

Thanks for looking!

Click on images to enlarge them.

Bicentennial tour

This post originated as a series of postcards to my nieces.

In the summers of 1975 and 1976, my mom and her then boyfriend, Phil Porter, took my brothers and me on a couple of road trips, first to St. Augustine, Cape Canaveral, and Disney World, then on a two-week bicentennial tour of the Northeast. In August of 2020, I sent my nieces a picture of their father (my brother, Charlie, who died of cancer in 2013) and me feeding pigeons in a park in St. Augustine. I told them about that road trip, about how we'd stayed at campgrounds, and I sent them on a scavenger hunt to find a particularly memorable photograph of Charlie in our tent, which they found! I told them that the next year we went on the bicentennial tour, but that that was another story.

At that point I didn't have a plan as to how I would tell them that story. Then, earlier this month, I was hunting for vintage postcards for a potential future project when I found a postcard depicting "The Little Church Around the Corner" in Manhattan, which I'd always remembered from that trip. After a couple of days, my brain told me that I should send this postcard to the girls, and then it occurred to me that I could relate to them the story of the road trip through a series of postcards. What follows are the texts I wrote on each of these cards, verbatim, which I mailed to them at roughly three-day intervals from December 4 to December 27.

The Little Church Around the Corner

"On our bicentennial tour of the Northeast, we took a bus tour of Manhattan, where the tour guide pointed out to us 'The Little Church Around the Corner'. I've never forgotten it! I found this vintage postcard at a flea market recently. Ask Uncle John if he remembers it next time you see him. Love, Uncle Ned"

Colonial Williamsburg

"Our first stop on the bicentennial tour was Colonial Williamsburg. This was the first time I heard the term 'book', as in 'to leave'. We were chatting up some girls from Boston. At one point Mr. Porter walked down to where we were, to say it was time to come back to the tent. The girls said they needed to book as well. We told Mr. Porter we'd be there anon. When we didn't return anon, he came back to get us in his car, screeching to a halt and yelling, 'Now!' Before that, we had thought he was soft."

Washington, D.C.

"Our next stop was D.C., where we stayed with some friends of Mr. Porter's, in Maryland, I think, possibly Northern Virginia. One of the boys in the family who was about my age taught me how to spit properly. We went to the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, but my favorite was the Smithsonian, especially the Air and Space Museum (not pictured)."

Philadelphia

"I honestly don't remember much about Philly. Independence Hall. Liberty Bell. We stayed in a hotel there. We had also booked a hotel for two nights in New York City, but it was out by one of the airports, so Mom + Mr. Porter canceled that one and booked two nights in Manhattan, at the Times Square Hotel."

New York City

"You have to understand, Times Square in the '70s was a seedy, dangerous place. If I had known what they were, I would have seen prostitutes. Craning my neck to look up at the skyscrapers, I got turned around and walked backwards into a cop, who bopped me on the back of the head and told me to watch where I was going. Mom thanked him. Our last night there, a woman jumped to her death from our hotel, which seemed apt."

Niagara Falls

"Mr. Porter's parents lived in Buffalo, so we went there instead of going on to Boston. When we got there, his mother showed us where our bedrooms and bathroom were, telling us we could 'wash up' if we wished. So I took a shower! Right then! I thought that's what she wanted us to do. I don't think we were dirty, I think she was just being hospitable, and I took her literally. I was twelve. We went to Niagara Falls the next day."

Gettysburg

"We came home through Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry and Monticello. Of course, we listened to the radio in the car the entire trip. It was a great summer for music: Shower the People, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, Magic Man, Silly Love Songs, Oh, What a Night, Crazy on You, You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine, Kiss and Say Goodbye, and many more. Love, Uncle Ned"

Re: Beeple

This post originated as an email to my friend Maura Hogan, in response to her email asking my thoughts concerning the Beeple affair. Maura currently serves as the arts critic for the Charleston Post and Courier newspaper.

I'll start by reiterating my general theory of art, which is that all man-made objects are works of art. We currently live in a culture that privileges "art world" objects as the only "art," but this is an anomaly of history. Before the nineteenth century, there was no separate category for "art." "Art" comes from the Latin ars, meaning "skill," and even great masters like Michelangelo and Raphael were considered skilled craftsmen whom you would not have allowed your daughters to marry. The vast preponderance of all artifacts created over the course of human history were created by craftsmen, usually working in large workshops. The twenty-first century equivalent of premodern painting is not modern painting (or "contemporary art" in general) but film and television. The twenty-first century equivalent of a Renaissance altarpiece, for example, is the video screen behind the musicians at a rock concert. The twenty-first century equivalent of a Neoclassical history painting by Jacques-Louis David is not an NFT but a cable news broadcast, a documentary, or even a feature film. The art history textbook of the future will end with painting sometime around 1970 and double back to pick up the history of film and television. It is simply impossible to give a credible history of the visual arts in the twentieth century without acknowledging the significance of The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Jaws, etc. 

Beeple's work, and the sale of it, should be regarded within the narrow context of the "contemporary art world." I've seen a few of his images, but I haven't observed them very closely or given them a lot of thought. From a historical perspective, they do not appear to be having any kind of meaningful impact on the culture at large, nowhere near as impactful, for instance, as Donald Trump's performance art and the media outlets that aid and abet him. Beeple is working within the narrative of contemporary art, exploiting the art-world apparatus of trading certain types of artifacts as commodities. Another recent example of this is “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan (the banana taped to the wall). Cattelan knew that there was a certain cohort that would gladly play into his cynical ploy, and he made some money off of it. More power to him. The art world can do whatever it wants, of course, but it is high time we stopped considering "contemporary art" as the only example of what art is.  

So, I agree with your comment that "the whole enterprise [is] an exercise in cynicism, vis a vis commodification, bidding wars, pandemic vagaries." I'll push back a little on your statement that "it is shining so much light on the art world and inspiring such raging debate that makes art relevant in uneasy times" and that you "welcome any art in Charleston that does a smashy-smashy to the increasingly problematic 'moonlight and magnolias' connotations of Charleston arts." I definitely agree that the whole "moonlight and magnolias" theme has to go. But, as you also note, Beeple's work appears to have very little to do with Charleston. And, again, whenever anybody uses the term "art," I have to ask, "What is art?" As far as I'm concerned, the most prominent artist from Charleston today is Stephen Colbert, whose work is much more relevant and has a much greater impact than Beeple's "art."

Portions of this post have been redacted at Maura's request, for privacy concerns.