Note to Readers
Dear readers: I love ya. (Yes, even you.)
I apologize for the tardiness of last Friday’s post—wrote down to the wire and nearly past the deadline. Literally the eleventh hour, for me, PST. For some of you, that was Saturday morning.
I’ve been running the gauntlet lately. Trying to walk the line, run the mid-lane between two rows of cudgels and switches, and I’m all bruised up for time. Experiencing separation from some while connecting with others.
I spent most of my time last week polishing a message I intend to toss up to some very admirable people on a wing and a prayer—tied to a carrier pigeon with a broken ankle. A flighty one at that, very unreliable. She’s flying the coup, coming from the birdhouse, out of that crooked rookery: Twitter.
I’m digit-illiterate so I’m a little nervous. Tend to avoid speaking on other social media.
But I made an acquaintance, one who claims to “have no friends,” yet made pals with every soul in Tulsa—a joker fulla pigeon shit. Offered to be my guide through the Cuckoo’s Nest, proposed to “retweet” something of mine to the tune of 7,000 people (or robots dressed-up like people), as soon as I’m prepared to sacrifice “American Humor” to Elon Musk’s unholy algorithm.
Very self-effacing, amusing young man named Harrison Hewitt. (Friends call him “Hew,” the ones he supposedly doesn’t have.) That post of mine might as well’ve been titled “American Hew-mor,” cause it’s mostly about him, and the people he cracked-up in Tulsa.
Professors, lawyers, provosts, famous critics, artists and musicians… maybe even a senior official at the Dept. of Homeland Security, though I didn’t spot that particular Bob Dylan fan’s face in the crowd. Versed people, who’re “very well-read, it’s well-known.” Brought us all to our knees.
So—that’s one reason I’ve been tardy and busy lately: trying to prepare something insightful and amusing without getting laughed at.
Refining “American Humor.”
On that note, readers: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from perusing decades-worth of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie material in person, it’s that they’ve changed their tune over the years. Many, countless times. Part of an ongoing creative process.
Think you know the words to “Shelter From the Storm”? There’s probably a hundred different versions of that song. And in Dylan’s case, each remains a work in progress, as long as he’s alive.
I’m going through something similar here at The Ear. Continuously editing, rewriting, updating, fact-checking: post-Post, after publication. It’s a little daunting, since there’s shoddy record of the changes to look back upon. The record is all somewhere “up there”… in the Cloud or under the Stack.
So—when subscribers do read my work, if you get around to opening the latest email from The Third Ear—I humbly request that you click “Open in app or online,” topmost corner on the right, above the banner email:
That’ll take you to the most up-to-date version of what I have to report. Otherwise, you might be missing out on some songs and stories.
Orpha’s Lounge in Tulsa
Another reason I was late last Friday is because I woke up to a dead iPhone. No battery, no signal, no pulse.
Normally I’d put this sort of mortuary predicament on ice, but I’m fixing to undertake another journey, just as soon as I finish chronicling Tulsa—to the entrance of the Underworld. And that hole in the ground where a hapless Roman fell through the ceiling of Emperor Nero’s House of Gold in the 15th century (see “American Humor”, for that story).
I’m headed to the outskirts of Naples, on a pilgrimage to Cumae, to visit the Temple of the Sybil. The house of a priestess there, who used to get high on geothermal fumes exuded from the earth, and predict the future. Inside a grotto, or cave, that’s supposedly the entrance to the Underworld. The same sort of volcanic portal where Aeneas, Pythagoras, Dante and countless others descended into Hades.
Hell was invented in southern Italy, inside a volcano.
For thematic purposes, let’s note that the mythical first musician, Orpheus, also went to hell and back. All these figures brought some sort of painful wisdom back with them upon their return.
After Hades, I’m up to Rome, to see about a dome. The Domus Aurea, Nero’s “House of Gold.” Which, if anyone’s reading these ramblings, is where the word “grotesque” comes from. When an unwitting citizen fell through the earth into the ruins of Nero’s palace, they called it a cave. A grotto. Since artists like Michelangelo and Raphael discovered hybrid human-animal-vegetable creatures painted on on the walls of Nero’s palace, such mixtures became known as “grotesques.” Cave paintings in the emperor’s palace.
Anyway, I wanna take pictures of these mythical origin sites.
I’ve been using the stories behind them to argue for human connection, intercultural mingling, grotesque laughter, a sense of humor and democracy, and so forth.
Since my phone was older than Orpheus and deader than Hades himself, I was due for a new one. One with a good camera. So I took myself downtown, to the Apple Store in Portland.
Which is a little like a sanctuary of commercial technology inside the ninth ring of hell, if you’ve ever been to Portland on the wrong day, or read Nancy Rommelmann:
Thankfully things have calmed down just enough for the Apple Store to remove it’s protective barrier—the kind of mesh-wire fencing that, along with Patrick Swayze, keeps the house-band safe from flying beer bottles in the movie Road House.
When I sauntered out of Steve-Jobs-land with my new Apple of wisdom in hand, past some nodded-out soul drooping over his fentanyl foil in hand, this is the first picture I took with the new camera phone.
Note the advertisement for Cartier luxury, and the sign for the boarded up “Hush Hush Cafe.” In Portland, this is something we don’t like to talk about.
I won’t zoom-in on the peripheral human suffering in the background, but here’s a closer look of this barrier.
This used to be an office building. Then it became an open-air meth market on the shuttered office steps. Until a few weeks ago, when a certain reporter was in town and the barrier went up. Now the market’s a few blocks away in a different location, a moveable feast.
Since I’m traveling with my son, and noticed I was standing in the doorway of a luggage store when I took this picture, I thought I’d turn around and look for a proper suitcase for my kid.
Or not.
The doors were locked, and no one answered my knock. Damned if I was gonna call the safety hotline to get into a suitcase store, new phone or not.
So that’s Portland, around eleven ‘o clock on a bright sunny morning. On a relatively calm day in hell…
When I got back to Portland, I read Nancy’s Rommelmann’s article above, and recalled my first night in Tulsa.
It was late, and I’d wandered into the first open door I could find, looking for some local flavor and Oklahoma suds.
I remembered the name of the bar being “Lesbah’s,” for some reason. (Had a lot of fun combing the search results for “Lesbah’s Bar in Tulsa” this morning.) Guess I was thinking of the wrong ancient singer, Sappho of Lesbos instead of Orpheus.
Turns out the place was called Orpha’s Lounge.
It embodied everything I’d been looking for and writing about recently, grotesque humor and human connection. In the dead of night, I crossed the threshold of a lively dive, under the feminized name of a mythical musician who descended to hell, and found heaven inside.
Tell it the way I told
(by the time I was in sunny Portland, she was in Tulsa during a terrible storm, so I thought I’d share my experience of each):Please keep up the local coverage. I live in this town of stumps and puddles, and half of what you report is news to me. The other half is high & wild, and I'll write about that soon enough.
Still hesitate to frequent certain dark corners in the heart of this city at high noon.
I's just in Tulsa (where I caught this damn Woody Guthrie accent), and while people rightly acknowledge that city’s horrific racial past, even worse than Portland's—you can walk the streets of Tulsa downtown after dark.
And mingle with people of different backgrounds.
Saunter into a random dive at the eleventh hour, find three white dudes in baseball caps stooled across from a worldly-woman barkeep, [whose name may be Orpha]. Shoot the breeze and billiards, first with a nice guy from India, then with a friendly roomful of Afro-American brothers.
Knockin’ balls, crackin’ jokes, slipping a quarter in to hear “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” and not knowin' whether one of the younger guys standing next to the jukebox is pulling my leg when he tells me HE’S NEVER HEARD OF OTIS REDDING. (Til his older buddy beating me at pool laughs and assures me he is, and has.)
Ironically, I often find, it’s in cities and states with terrible racist pasts where cultures actually intermingle in the present—except for Oregon. (1.89% black, due to racial exclusion laws finally repealed in 1925.)
Elsewhere, we’re all just trying to get along, buy each other a few beers, pass the illegal pen, then wander safely home round midnight… A stranger from out of town, his best night in years.
Tulsa’s doin’ alright. Portland is not OK.
And that about sums it up.
Got two more pieces of Tulsa left to get out of my system. Trying to crank one out by Friday about Church Studio—been talking to the owner—while I nudge “American Humor” out of the nest. And we’ll end at the beginning, with the Woody Guthrie Center.
Then I can get rid of this goddamn accent and start speaking Italian.