1. As I have no doubt mentioned before, Gibbs and Copper and Luna can't be in the same room together at the same time. Gibbs doesn't try to hurt Copper or Luna, but he barks his brains out at them and doesn't stop until the cats go into another room.
With Debbie spending time with family in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, I've decided to take Gibbs to be with me at night and make the Vizio room Copper and Luna's hangout for the night. Luna has no problem with this arrangement, but Copper would sometimes strongly prefer to be with me at night.
Every morning, I move Copper and Luna's food and water into the bedroom, where they prefer to be, move them in there and I join them during the day. They are most content when I come in, lie down, and they can be close to me.
So, really, the deal with all three of our pets is that they crave human company. I wish we lived in an idyllic situation where the lion lies with lamb, but we don't!
So, since Copper, Luna, and Gibbs cannot be in the same room at the same time, I am committed to spending as much time as I can with all three of them and I'm understanding when Copper or Gibbs protests our situation -- I just clean up their occasional disapproval!
2. As I often do on hot days, I was indoors today. I hadn't quite entered the hallowed halls of Vizio University yet when Christy called. She, Carol, and Paul had planned on joining other All-Class Reunion Committee members for a dinner and debriefing at the Hilltop Inn tonight. I decided not to participate, but an urgent family situation (I have no details) left Lori no choice but to postpone the dinner/meeting.
Christy called to invite me to join Carol, Paul, and her for a dinner out at Radio Brewing.
I accepted.
I drove myself up so that I could shop at Yoke's after dinner.
I arrived early, wanting enjoy a Silver Mountain IPA before dinner. I enjoy this beer, but not with food.
That worked out.
We piled into a booth, ordered dinner (I had a beef panini sandwich with an Asian cucumber salad), and had rousing conversation about the reunion slide show Christy had just posted, the mystery eggs Christy found in a raised bed, and about labor unions, carrying a topic forward from family dinner.
I didn't know that Molly and Brian might be joining us, but BOOM! they suddenly popped into Radio and sat with us, making the evening even brighter and more fun.
3. I arrived home from Yoke's and decided to go to night school at Vizio University.
This month, the Criterion Channel is featuring a collection of movies called simply, Hip-Hop.
I suppose I first became aware of hip-hop back in about 1986 when Run DMC's video "Walk This Way" dropped on MTV and as time went on, I was aware of hip-hop and rap, but it wasn't music I purchased nor did I play it at home. Many of my students at LCC were into hip-hop. I used to go to the dance department's end of the term recital and I always felt energized by the hip-hop dance students' performances. I never dived into hip-hop, though, and I realized that much like many people don't have an ear for the words and lines of Shakespeare, I had not developed an ear for the rhymes, beats, and words of hip-hop performers rapping.
I've never been an "I hate rap" guy.
I've always been a "my ears are not quite attuned to rap" guy.
So, I looked over the offerings in the Hip-Hop collection and decided to watch Ice-T interviewing a whole bunch of rappers and MCs in a 2012 documentary called, Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap.
I almost finished this movie, but with about twenty minutes left, I had to get to bed.
This documentary was exactly what I wanted to see and I can imagine watching it repeatedly.
Ice-T is the perfect host for this project. Not only does he have access to all the rappers and MC's he interviewed, but he also brings gravitas to these interviews. The artists respect him, they open up to him, they take his questions about the craft of their poetry/lyrics seriously and talk to him as a fellow artist.
This documentary is not, as Ice-T tells us early on, about the cars and bling and money and the other peripheral things often portrayed as what hip-hop is about.
No -- it's about the art, the art of composing rhymes, rhymes that are integrated with the beats, and about truth telling through raw words, metaphors, hyperbole, and a range of other tropes. In one interview, Ice-T says that he sees the best raps as dealing head on with the B-side of street life. That's going to stick with me.
I've always read and been told that if we can travel to places we are unfamiliar with and learn from places and people different from what we are familiar with that we are better human beings for it.
I agree.
Although I never left the living room last night, I felt like I was, in the best way available to me, traveling in an unfamiliar world, the world of hip-hop and the art of rap, and that I'm more receptive to a world of music I have trouble understanding but that, at the very least, I can see has profound artistic integrity and profound social value.
I'll finish the movie and let it work on me for some amount of time and my guess is that other films in the Criterion Channel's collection called Hip-Hop will become a part of the unstructured, pretty much serendipitous curriculum of Vizio University.
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