Nashville, then & now

I asked my students recently if they'd been watching the new ABC series "Nashville." No. Well, had they seen the eponymous classic Altman film?



No again.

I was surprised. If there'd been a popular show or film called "St. Louis" when I was 20 years old I'd for sure have been watching, looking for insight into the strange doings of my peers. (Judy Garland's "Meet Me in St. Louey," set in 1904, didn't quite provide that.) But I guess it's just all too familiar to them to sound entertaining.

Atlantic has an insightful piece on how pop country culture mirrors the changes in my adopted hometown. An interesting and occasionally, as they say, "surreal" place to live. I got here just after Altman, and was thrilled to discover "the city’s most eccentric civic landmark, a scale replica of the Parthenon." I love living in a place of such glittery excess, surrounding its own borrowed temple of wisdom. What would Socrates say?

More Sunday cycling

Another pleasant Sunday morning bike ride from birds'-eye perspective through the neighborhood, this time looping the Richland Creek greenway & McCabe golf course, the girls' old tee-ball fields, Nashville State (where I taught briefly many years ago), Hillwood High School... 12 miles in an hour, threading the rain. Didn't realize so many of my neighbors had pools. We need more common ground.


   

Biking in 3D

Just discovered this cool Google Earth tool/toy. Here's my bike route from this morning's spin through Belle Meade, between the Mansion and Parmer Park, then up & down the Boulevard, and finally across to the new bike lane on Post Road. Fun!

But, just for the record: it inaccurately depicts me on the wrong side of the median, weaving and veering wildly off-road onto some of Nashville's most exclusive, meticulously-manicured lawns. If you know anything about the Belle Meade police you know they'd never let anyone get away with that!


 

old man

We had to decline an opportunity to see Neil Young playing country music's Mother Church the other night, the ticket price was just out of our league-- but here's a review and a slideshow for nothin'. He's become the old man he serenaded way back when, and last June in Hyde Park.

And here he was in 1971.

Scientologists

There was already a "celebrity centre" here on Music Row, now there's another large scientology encampment in the old Fall School building at 8th and Chestnut, near Greer Stadium. A bus-bench ad spotted yesterday in Hillsboro Village encourages all to attend an "Open House" at their convenience. I may just have to drop in before my next Sounds' game, just to get the insiders' account of *Xenu and L. Ron Hubbard.

Hubbard was once quoted as saying that if you want to get rich in America, start a new religion. So he did.

Rolling Stone peeked under the Hubbardites' roof a while back.

This is the "centre" in Hollywood... not too far, coincidentally, from the Magic Kingdom.

What I find especially pernicious about the Scientologists, but possibly not qualitatively distinctive about them in comparison with the more conventional and mainstream ideologies, is the way they compromise their members' ability to think for themselves. "Cult" is the mainstream term of denigration, but we're all cultish to some degree or other... or have cultish tendencies we need to guard against. Insular, single-track, defensive, reactionary "thinking" makes fools of us all. These guys, though, really are over the top.

*In Scientology doctrine, Xenu (alsoXemu or the modern day "Emu" or "Elmo") is an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of aliens to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them aroundvolcanoes and blew them up withhydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to wreak chaos and havoc today.» — Wikipedia

"Nashville Retrospect"

Bravo! I've been a Nashvillian for nearly three decades (!) and have always been intrigued by the remnants of a fascinating but under-explored history all around. "The Nashville Retrospect" will fill a gap.

Bells Bend

The Bell's Bend to Beaman Park area, a lovely pristine part of Nashville close to downtown (as the crow flies, but far in spirit and atmosphere) is under threat of major development. May Town Center is envisioned as yet another commercial and corporate agglomeration, hard by Bell's Bend Park and the Cumberland River.

The debate between those who want to preserve this area, and those whose idea of progress entails high-density, high traffic urban commercial expansion (they don't like to call it "sprawl") without end, has now been complicated by a new study that contemplates a more recreationally-oriented 3d Way future. It might include B&Bs, conference and retreat centers, outdoor performing arts venues, and an amphitheater.

Maybe that'd be ok, better at least than May Town. All I know for sure at this point is that I spent a terrific afternoon last fall discovering delightful river vistas at Bell's Bend, and have enjoyed outstanding day hikes at Beaman. I can be there in less than 30 unstressful minutes of pleasant rural driving through middle Tennessee's finest rolling wooded hills. Ready access to such experiences, so near urban amenities but not literally next door to them, make this a special place to live. It won't be easy to improve the quality of life we now enjoy in this "recreational corridor" as it presently exists, but it will be all too easy to ruin it. Please be careful, Mayor Dean and council.

Rich and stupid

One of my favorite Nashville walks takes me to the top of a local reservoir called Love Circle, from which vantage it used to be possible to peer at my city and environs in every direction. I used to walk it every day and always enjoyed circling the overlook a couple of times while picking out memory-laden landmarks below - old abodes, old schools, the state capitol building, the Parthenon.

Now I live further out, and get there only occasionally... so I hadn't much attended to the hoopla surrounding country musician John Rich's ugly new manse on the hillside there, until an auto appointment nearby left me with some discretionary time to ramble this morning.

The damn thing dominates the neighborhood, especially when approached from Hillsboro Village to the east. It occludes part of what used to be a lovely view from the summit, and generally highlights the matching monstrosity of its owner's ego. Why do we tolerate this kind of garish abomination in our public spaces, just because some self-important guitar plucker can afford it?

But I'll continue to enjoy that walk, now supplemented with one more reminder that commercial music "success" can be one of the uglier Bitch Goddesses* on our landscape.

*William James to H.G. Wells:
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.)