The Sunday Stealing this week is about identity, an intriguing topic.
1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?
Read: see #8 below
Watch TV- JEOPARDY, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Twilight Zone, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mission: Impossible until Landau and Bain left. See movies: Young Frankenstein, Annie Hall, Casablanca, West Side Story, 13th.
Listen to: see #4 below
2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?
He is not exactly like me – he is far more technologically knowledgeable, e.g. But Arthur is a political science guy, sometimes activist, and is open to stealing ideas from me. In fact, he’s doing his Ask Arthur Anything event, which he admittedly purloined from me.
3. do you care about your ethnicity?
Yes, and yes. Yes, it still seems to matter to others; we aren’t in that post-racial society yet. And yes, because it’s interesting to me. Ancestry occasionally recalibrates my DNA percentages. Presently:
Mister Music
4. what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?
In response to blog posts J. Eric Smith shared, I wrote a series of pieces that featured Prince, the Temptations, Jethro Tull, Steppenwolf, Johnny Cash, Steely Dan, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Harry Belafonte, plus a bunch of people also mentioned in the previous links. If I HAD to pick three, it’d be The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon.
5. are you an artist?
Suppose art is drawing, painting, or sculpting; then absolutely not. If art includes singing, then arguably yes.
6. dog person or cat person?
I had cats from when I grew up until 40 years ago. Then, a decade ago, there were two cats, one of whom was certified demented by his vet. The one dog we had when I was a kid bit me; we got rid of that dog when he also bit the minister’s daughters. There are a handful of dogs I’ve liked, especially Random.
7. inside or outdoors?
I like the outdoors when it’s temperate. I like April, May, and September. But I hate heat and fear burning. My tolerance for the cold has diminished with age.
Literature
8. five most influential books over your lifetime
I dunno. How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi regarding how I see inequity. Life Itself by Roger Ebert is about how I see movies. The Sweeter The Juice by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip is about how we’re the same. The Good Book by Peter J. Gomes is a philosophical treatise. One of those Joel Whitburn books about music – Top Pop Singles – is about how music rules.
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9. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?
By default, Hogwarts. I’ve never read any of the books, but I’ve seen all the movies.
10. list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.
Sleeping, reading, sorting through stuff, blogging, eating (including food prep or purchase)
11. have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone?
Yes, at random times. A few times on the Amtrak.
12. could you live as a hermit?
That’s what COVID felt like. If I had a phone, Internet, a source of food delivery, maybe for a year before I started going bonkers.
13. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?
Most people who know me well recognize that my outside appearance is not particularly a high priority for me. So I haven’t a clue.
14. three songs that you connect with right now.
Here are songs by artists who have birthdays in December: Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinéad O’Connor, who died in July 2023; Something So Right– Annie Lennox from her all-covers album, where she reorders the Paul Simon lyrics; Love and Affection– Joan Armatrading, which has one of my favorite first lines: “I am not in love. But I’m open to persuasion.”
made into a PBS series
15. pick one of your favorite quotes.
When I get this question, I pull a book off the shelf and randomly pick something. From The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil: “Phrases like hot under the collar and bite the dust are an everyday reminder of the powerful influence the cowboy has had on the English language. Perhaps this is because, of all of the frontier heroes, the cowboy was the beneficiary of nineteenth-century technology. The camera and the railroad exported the cowboy lifestyle and language back to the east so vividly that a New York dentist, Zane Gray, who was virtually ignorant of the real West, could create a believable picture of cowboy society from the information available to him in New York, thousands of miles from the range.”
I’ve often thought about getting my DNA checked. I am a typical blond hair, blue eyes guy (well more a lightbrown/grey look these days) so there may be some Viking in there, or perhaps some Anglos Saxon. But who knows?
It would be very interesting to find out.
:o)
Cheers
PM
I think all of life is an art, to some extent. We are all artists, just many of us do not yet know it, and may never know it. I certainly consider singing to be an art.