Phthursday Musings: Believe In Things You Don't Understand

I was in the car a few days ago with the radio turned to the classic rock station. Something started playing which was entirely familiar, but I checked myself, thinking, no, I’m wrong, this isn’t what I think it is. But it was.

Stevie Wonder was on a classic rock station. “Superstition”.

In the abstract, this of course makes immeasurable sense, because “Superstition” rocks much harder than half of what we think of as ‘70s rock. But based on how we’ve been trained to think about things, this was irregular, wild, something that immediately got filed away to my memory banks. It was like somebody somewhere had conceded something important. And, maybe they have.

Or, maybe, a DJ just said, screw this, I’m playing me some Stevie Wonder.

This is where I might jump off and talk about how we are conditioned to think of certain things in certain ways blah blah blah, blah blah. Instead, I offer you this: “Superstition” played live on Sesame Street:

Can you imagine being six years old, hanging out on Sesame Street, when Stevie Wonder showed up, and laid this down?

Can you imagine this feeling eminently normal, because why wouldn’t Stevie Wonder show up on Sesame Street?

I can only imagine the pride felt by those lucky letters who brought to us that episode.

R & K: We’re bringing you guys Stevie Wonder!

Other Letters: You guys rule!

This made me think of how silly it seems to listen to something recorded so well through such dumb speakers. This in turn made me think of Brian Henneman’s turn of phrase in “Lo-Fi”:

I love that this was recorded on the Outlaw Country Cruise. That such a thing ever existed is completely insane. That the Bottle Rockets managed to wind up on any kind of boat at all is so wonderful. I mean, any boat actually out to sea. They’ve all been on the Casino Queen.

But look here:

I’ve now heard “Superstition” on the classic rock station three times this week.

I’m just not in the car that often.

Okay, this story has nothing to do with any of the above. It also has almost nothing to do with anything ever.

This week in Pokémon GO there’s a new Pokémon named Oranguru. It is an orangutan holding leaves. None of this is especially important.

This did however make me think of orangutans.

When we were in eighth grade, our science teacher took ill and had to resign. We had a super sub for a while and spent three weeks learning about the brain? Best as I can recall the brain stuff was totally disconnected from anything which preceded it. Then we get a permanent replacement and she was a nice lady and I swear I think she gave everyone an A because she was totally lost on how to actually grade anything.

Anyway the new teacher started us on a unit on primates. Or evolution. Really, I’m not sure what the unit was. I remember that we learned about how there’s homo sapien but did you know there was once homo erectus and homo habilis, and apes are all related, and this means we get to talk about gibbons, but not Billy Gibbons, of course, and anyway there was also Australopithecus, and, and, and, there was Ramapithecus.

Ramapithecus at one point was believed to be an ancestor of homo sapien but then they decided, well, maybe not, but, hey, seems like a good bet to have been an ancestor of orangutans.

And I mention all this because Ramapithecus is just about my absolute favorite thing to speak.

What you have to do here is find your inner James Mason, and belt out, in a loud register:

RRRAAHHMM-uh-Pith-uh-kiss

and then add at the end a guttural sound kind of like this:

eUUoooOOLL

I actually wrote here “You have to trust me on this.” Then I thought, what do I mean by that? And decided to hedge the whole thing by first copping to it, then expanding upon the copping to it, then writing about how I am writing about copping to advising people to pretend to be James Mason saying the name of an extinct primate, not that the primate actually ever called itself Ramapithecus, though maybe, just maybe, the primate DID call itself eUUoooOOLL, seriously, if you were a prehistoric primate, and you stopped and thought about it, and realized history didn’t exist yet, wouldn’t you bellow out eUUoooOOLL?

My wife’s suggestion this week was to write about relationships.

I am confident that I have exceeded her most extreme expectations.

Here’s something else.

I’ve had an idea now for literally years. I want to take a canvas of some kind - though, I think, the canvas I have in mind is like an 18” x 18” Masonite board - and do some kind of modern art piece with it. I have concepts of how to do this, what paint colors I want to use, how I might pull it off. But I never seem to get around to it. I never really fully understand everything I want to do and how to avoid having it blow up. Do I just get those little tubes of acrylic paint? What happens if I’m painting over paint painted wood?

I wasn’t planning that setup…

Back to my art project. At this point it is sort of a Moholy-Nagy piece in my mind, but sort of intentionally garish… like if the Charlotte Hornets decided to commission a bunch of Bauhaus acolytes to design their inaugural uniforms.

I’m not trying to be super obscure with that last sentence, that’s just how it came out. Very sincerely, if anybody can picture anything remotely like what I just described, I’m very curious as to what you’re imagining, and how close it is to what I’m imagining.

Anyway. My deadline has arrived. Good night, Irene Road.