Harvesting Honey

 

Tweet

The Good, the Bad, the Throwback

WHEN A throwback station hit the Bay this summer it answered a prayer I didn’t know I had. Who’d been doing market research in my brain? Yes, I want to hear Big Tymers’ “Still Fly” and E-40’s “Rapper’s Ball.” No, I don’t want to hear another Big Sean song. Thank you for being so responsive to my needs, throwback radio! When I was driving home and “Ms. Fat Booty” came on I nearly wept for joy.

This honeymoon could not last. I knew it was over when Q 102 played “It Was a Good Day” and my car companion changed the station, saying, “I’m sick of that song.”

Sick of it? That song? The disarmingly melodious strains of Cube’s classic, emerging serendipitously from the radio, have long been my harbinger of a good day to come. This magic began twenty years ago, when my clock radio nudged me from slumber with Just waking up in the mornin, gotta thank God. I had a bangin hair day, got an A on a geometry test and smiled reciprocally at a cute boy.

Imagine my despair upon realizing that, actually, I too was sick of it.

EVEN THE best music is ruined by excessive play–in fact the best music is likeliest to suffer that fate. There were thousands upon thousands of hip hop tracks made between, say, 1985 and 2005 (the approximate “throwback” timeframe), but inevitably radio, in its maddening, consumer-tested, none-shall-change-the-station way, hones in on a tiny number and plays them to death. At least with current radio the limited selection is constantly updating. You hear “Wet Dreamz” until it’s spent and then “Hotline Bling” rotates in. Not so with oldies. They get canonized. Some stat geek determines that practically everybody loves “Hypnotize” and “Gin and Juice” and those tracks go in the Play At All Times pile. A formula is set. And we all start to hate the songs we love most.

Throwback radio is the emerging beast of the airwaves nationwide. It’s a nifty way to target us crotchety thirty-somethings (with our presumable money to blow), who hobble about, muttering, “Who is this Fetty Wap feller anyway? Play another Dre track!” Like bubblegum oldies and classic rock, throwback is a deft repackaging of old music, tapping into nostalgia with a precision both infuriating and irresistible.

I DON’T resist. I have many moments of throwback bliss. They usually come when non-robot Scotty Fox is in the mix, during high listenership hours. On a recent Saturday afternoon I vibed my way to the gym on “Next Episode” mixed into “Go” mixed into “Just Kickin It” and life was good. But I’m wary now. I hear Pac’s voice and quickly change the station, lest his soul rebellion lose its power. Some things must remain sacred.

Tweet

Dark Tunes from The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey

"Terrence Loves You"

 

Lana Del Rey sounds wet-eyed in her new single, singing, I lost myself/When I lost you. It's a far cry from the usual kiss-off playlists, whose standard message is embodied in Beyonce's classic "Irreplaceable": I could have another you in a minute. The snarling kiss-off is meant to be empowering, but that equates power with bitchy invulnerability and blame-dumping, with a little man-hating thrown in for spice.

Lana does not do bitchy invulnerability. "Terrence Loves You" is equal parts sadness and acceptance (Youuuuuuuuu aaaaaaaaaare/What you are) and no parts righteous indignation. 

Undoubtedly her critics will deride the notion of losing oneself in a relationship's end as disgustingly weak and self-misogynizing. But we do find ourselves through love. And when love ends we must find new selves, yet again. I still got jazz, she sings, a hint of triumph.

Lana lets her heart break. That's real power.

"The Hills"

The Weeknd sings about love and tenderness, but he's not really about all that. His voice vibrates most in sinful subject matter; like some evil fungi he thrives in dark places. He really digs into those swamps and excavates, using an unlikely combination of erudition, falsetto and meanness.

He plays a self-aware asshole on "The Hills," which is far more resonant than his other radio hit, "Earned It," on which he plays nice. The "Hills" beat is as bombastic as any Dirty South banger and drops into the hook like it's falling off a cliff: I only call you when it's half past five/The only time that I'll be by your side. Dude is badly using half-past-five chick and he knows it. The drugs are "feelin like it's decaf" and the hazy lyrics might be regretful, unrepentant or just amoral. But they do cop to bad behavior, which is pretty original among the heaps of lyrics in which women are badly used and it's too unremarkable to merit thought.

The only love in this song flutters in at the end with a female voice singing sweet nothings in Amharic. The Weeknd seems to be winning World's Most Famous Habeshah, and he is catching up to Drake in the category of Depressive Realness with Infectious Beats.

Tweet

Beautiful Agriculture—and Fiber Rabbits

I GOT rabbits. And thus have I graduated from average urban farmgirl to full maniac. These are farmstead animals, employed members of my backyard system. I'm not going to eat them. They're fiber rabbits.

Fiber rabbits! A few years ago I didn't know there was such a thing. Fiber rabbits belong to a special category of utilitarian farm animals that are adorable and don't have to die. That would be along with milkers, egg layers, bees, guardian animals and non-rabbit fiber animals like sheep. As a sensitive wuss vegetarian and farmstead enthusiast I really appreciate this category.

Even with the egg layers and dairy animals some loss of life must take place. Boy goats and roosters don't make eggs and milk, but eggs and milk cannot be produced without their existing at some point (as breeders or offspring) creating a conundrum most readily solved by someone--not a sensitive wuss vegetarian--eating them. Fiber animals of both sexes give humans something nice without anyone having to die. 

THERE ARE those who believe using other animals for any selfish human purpose is wrong. Animals exist for their own reasons, they say, suggesting we leave them to it. And I fear these presumable vegans are right, though I selfishly hope they are not entirely right. The thorny fact is that laying hens and milk cows and fluffball sheep would not exist without our having bred them into existence. So I think maybe technically, for better or worse, they exist for reasons inextricably bound to us. Same goes for dogs, cats, roses and most things we eat. 

All this human selection is a tremendous responsibility. There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is cruel to breed sheep and rabbits so heavily furred that they depend on us to regularly relieve them of their coats, or poultry who cannot survive the wild. I don't know yet whether I can adequately justify taking advantage of such breeding, but nor am I convinced of its inherent wrongness. 

Animal rights sorts aren't the only skeptics of agriculture, of course. It is rather hip in certain circles to pine for hunter gatherer days--paleo eating and squatting to defecate and all that. Some people find it more honest to hunt or trap a wild animal than befriend, cohabit with and take advantage of a domestic one. I respect that way of thinking, but take a different view. And not just because I love cheese and bread and tomatoes and wool and a bunch of other things agriculture makes possible.

I THINK agriculture is beautiful. Done right. Joel Salatin is fond of saying that good agriculture should be 'aesthetically and aromatically, sensually romantic.' Good agriculture can give its participants bliss. I recently grew a buckwheat cover crop on one of my raised beds and watched my hens tear it up. In that moment was bliss--theirs and mine. They clucked self-actualization as they turned the soil for my fall crops.

Agriculture is a millenia-long collaboration among humans and other species. It's bold, messy and morally complex. It has the capacity to be epically destructive: to the land and to the lives of all who work for or eat from it. So even when you have a postage stamp city homestead, producing piddling quantities of anything, there is much to consider.

And consider I do! The ethics, the economics. I fret myself silly until I decide to go ahead and see if I can, say, keep a pair of Angora rabbits happy and healthy in my yard, and make clothes from their spare fur without ever hurting them, and actually come out ahead when I crunch the numbers. I weigh the costs of housing, organic pellets, grains for sprouting fodder against the benefits of making myself and everyone I know dope luxury scarves and hand warmers of absurd softness. From my own freaking bunnies! I think the numbers look good. We shall see.

My buns are two months old now, learning the ropes along with me: when to hop about the yard and when to rest and digest in the safe hutch, how to relax into my grooming attentions, why collaborating with my wishes is worthwhile (treats!). I was at their conception. I met them hours after their birth.

Luckily I have had about six months to practice on my neighbors' English Angoras, one of whom birthed my own bunny bairns. They have taught me rabbit ways, rabbit treat preferences, how not to offend. (I did not realize this, but rabbits are easily offended.) They shed, I brush them, I accumulate luscious heaps of Angora wool. I watch Netflix, I spin the wool on a drop spindle, I knit the yarn into items of clothing, I wear the clothing. Every part of the process is meditative and gratifying.

THERE ARE other perks. I take very seriously my role as a curator of cuteness in this world. And goodlord: it's almost unbearable how plush these wooly bunny bodies are. The creatures themselves are wonderful much like Angora scarves are. Fluff comfort. The purest kind of soft.

The rabbits eat things neither the chickens nor I particularly care for, like kale stems. And they love to chill in shady nooks neither the chickens nor I can squeeze into. They produce tidy, round fertilizer nuggets that can be applied directly. I am starting to see their niche in the backyard ecosystem.

As I look upon my yard these days--hens laying, bees foraging, bunnies furring, corn looming, beans working the pole--I am amazed at all the creation. Maybe humans love agriculture because it makes us feel like God. But I'm not sovereign over my yard. I'm just semi-competent designer slash manager. I'm in awe of what is going on back there, the crazy way all of us creatures are making something together.

Tweet

The Good Old Thug Love Duet

REMEMBER the video for "I'm Real"? JLo in hoops, bun, pink velour jumpsuit, smiling over how real she is. Ja Rule in a white do-rag, growling Ja Rule-isms. It epitomizes a classic rap sub-genre: the thug love duet.

Turn-of-the-millennium thug love duets have a bubblegum quality that predates the darkly complex sex-love relations of the Drake era. Think of Cam'Ron's bouncy "Hey Ma" or Jay and Bey's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," from before she was Ms. Carter.

IT'S A WORLD where men rap hard and ladies sing nice. The guys are wild and profane, but the women are endlessly sweet, holding them down with smiling hooks. Down to ride to the very end. Thug love duets are about badboys and the good girls who love them; only the earnest heart of the good girl can melt a thug. All I need in this life of sin.

Undisputed princess of the genre is almond-eyed Ashanti. She mighta been singing "Foolish" over these fools later, but she made an ideal thug lover, her innocent smile the perfect foil for rapper grimaces.

The ladies aren't just relegated to hook duty these days; they rap hard as the dudes when they feel like. Thug love bangers may be naughtily retrograde, but they are so delicious. It's that polarity of masculine and feminine, hard contrasted against soft, plus a notion of love that's wonderfully simple: opposites attract.

Listen to my Thug Love Duets playlist

Tweet

Homesteady

I SOMETIMES feel strange for loving homesteady things like I do. I chill in my backyard recliner for hours, watching preening hens and homebound bees, scheming how to grow cucumbers on the coop roof. And my love does not always express in sweet, reasonable ways; it frequently veers into obsessive fiend territory. Storey guidebooks and goat kid YouTubes are my bedtime porn.

I might be crazy. But maybe my fixation is rooted in wholesome earnestness. I think this stuff touches depths in my soul.

Nothing satisfies me quite like producing something in collaboration with soil and plants and fellow creatures. With enough health and space I think I'd enjoy producing a significant portion of my own food. In such case I would treat my homestead chores as a job, one I love, one that has clear meaning and is as basic and necessary as work can be: the work of providing for oneself.

The usual model in our time is to pay various someones to provide all or most of our vital needs. We specialize in some niche, earning money to fund our food, clothing and shelter. This model is effective, of course, but it's so ingrained that providing for your own basic needs can seem like a cute lark, while the Serious Business of Life is assumed to be designing apps or distributing parking tickets or whatever one's specialty happens to be. Apps and parking tickets are important, but still.

On the spectrum's other end are the Preppers, whose doomsday expectations seem both paranoid and reasonable. They seek self-sufficiency in preparation for imminent system collapse, when we'll run out of oil or be hit by a mega-earthquake and only those milking their own cows shall survive. They do have a point about the fragility of the systems we take for granted. But I suspect their world-bout-to-collapse alibi partly serves to justify to themselves and others why homesteadiness is urgently valuable, when some Preppers simply feel compelled toward that way of life for less articulable reasons. I bet they're kinda in love with it, like I am.

HOMESTEADY THINGS may seem like a lot of unnecessary bother. I've often felt like I should think of it that way, open my eyes and realize I can just buy honey at the store and save myself the bee suit hassle. 

But my homestead chores don't hassle me. They ground me, and tie me to the non-human world. Sure, they're a pain in the ass sometimes, but I love the steady discipline they require and the calm routines they create. Plus I dislike the notion of household duties as drudgery to be avoided. I think you can take pride in mucking a chicken coop. That's how you know you're doing the damn thing. If I'm not cleaning up after chickens (or scrubbing a toilet, or washing dishes) someone somewhere is doing it for me. I think that's worth remembering.

Far be it from me to preach, like, Everybody should grow their own food! Just try to do one small thing! Grow potted herbs on your patio! I don't like to presume that what is good for me would be good for anybody else. If you work long office hours and eat only takeout, hey: do you. There are plenty things I prefer to have other people do for me (like, say, plumbing). This is not a "you should" diatribe. I just don't want to feel like a weirdo for prioritizing this stuff so much. I don't want anybody to laugh when I start churning my own butter.

Self-sufficiency seems old-fashioned--why do such things when we don't need to anymore? Maybe we don't, practically speaking, need to provide for ourselves, as in we won't otherwise starve. But homesteadiness satisfies the soul. It grants a deep sense of accomplishment. Providing my sustenance is the realest feeling I know.

WHEN YOU provide any portion of your own foodstuffs you also realize how uncertain a game that is. Disaster abounds. Man plans and God laughs, as we pessimistic Yids say. Weather is cruel, pests merciless; your own body betrays your intentions. Coworkers of other species are no more reliable than human ones. And sometimes you just screw up. 

This winter I had two disasters. My original bee colony succumbed to some combination of ailments, ant invaders and my own mistakes. Then Mrs. Darcy, my big, bitchy, beautiful Wyandotte, fell incurably ill. Two friends with an axe ended her miseries. To the extent such failures are my own (and it is impossible to quite know the extent) they make me feel almost unbearably guilty. I question whether any living thing should be entrusted to my care. But I always dust it off and try again. I still trust myself to take better care than a great many food producers would.

Most of us are far enough from the rural life that we imagine it as fundamentally peaceful, but it so is not. I don't ever plan to be a farmer, not least because it's hard. But then hard is real. Sometimes hens quit laying and lettuce gets coated in aphids; any insistence that it be otherwise leads down a road most of us dislike, paved with chemicals and animal abuse. Managing the constantly churning series of backyard catastrophes teaches me a lot.

Peace comes in those glimmery moments when the whole thing is mostly working. When the systems I have painstakingly devised actually allow plants to grow heartily and creatures to live a cushy lifestyle, all harmonizing to give me sustenance and earthly beauty, it seems like a goddamn miracle. But peace comes too in mid-disaster, when I'm burying a hen or taking swarming bees from a high branch, thinking, This is the business of life.

Tweet

A Brief Poetic Analysis of Weezy's “Truffle Butter" Verse

THE FINAL lines of Lil Wayne's verse on "Truffle Butter" are magic. Not the words, of course; they're just a grab bag of oft-perverse rapperly braggadocio (e.g., paraphrasing, Beware my city is so hard people die over sneakers). But the SOUNDS. What use of language for mellifluous effect!

Goes like this:

I'm so heartless, thoughtless, lawless and flawless
Smallest, regardless, largest in charge and
Born in New Orleans
Get kilt for Jordans
Skateboard I'm gnarly
Drake, Tunechi and Barbie


Why is this so delightful? My poetry terms are rusty, but I think the delight results from a complexly intertwining rhyme scheme with assonance (which, as you may recall from a bygone English class, means repetition of vowel sounds.) 

He opens with two internally-rhyming lines (heartless-thoughtless-lawless-flawless/smallest-regardless-largest), and simultaneously begins an assonant pile-on of 'ah's that carries through the end of the verse (thought-law-flaw-small-regard-large-charge-Orleans-Jordans-gnarly-Barbie). Course you gotta say 'Orleans' and 'Jordans' the proper Tunechi way for it to work.

At line three the structure changes utterly, in mid-sentence (enjambment!), without any break in flow. The phrases shorten, the lines start to end-rhyme, the meter shifts. The first two lines are roughly trochaic tetrameter, so four sets of stressed/unstressed syllable pairs; the assonant 'ah's are stressed and the rhyming 'ess' endings are unstressed. Lines three through five are dactyl-trochee pairings: SKATEboard I'm is a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed) and GNARly is a trochee (stressed-unstressed).

In the final line he lets Drizzy and Nicki be the stressed syllables, leaving his own moniker humbly unstressed. Perhaps an acknowledgement of his semi-emeritus, godfatherly role in today's rap world?

Tweet

On Pain

III. Appreciation

I love to complain about how Pain fucks with my life. (And lately it sure has done so.) But in rare, shining moments, I appreciate certain things about it.

I resent the Pain 96% of the time. It makes me dull, tired & stupefied. It makes my dreams seem beyond reach, because you can't reach for shit when you're lying on the floor. And Pain is self-centered, demanding you forget Wellness.

That 4% though. Moments when I appreciate the teachings of Pain make me feel calm and wise. If I can imagine that Pain gives me something worthwhile my perception of the Pain experience changes. Hardship can enrich your soul if you look at it right.

Tweet