Phthursday Musings: Horses

Monday night Conifero and I had the pleasure of seeing the legendary Patti Smith, touring for the 50th anniversary of her debut album Horses. I tried last night to explain what it was like but I don’t think I got it right. I don’t think I’ll get it right here either, but I won’t let that stop me!

At one point she talked about having done a residency at CBGB with Television (this was in early 1975) and I tried to imagine how this band, fronted by a 78 year old woman, could have been more or less the same band doing the same songs in a grimy punk club before I was born. And I couldn’t visualize it, exactly, but I could still sense it, because she didn’t present the songs like they were fragments of nostalgia, she delivered them like they are still live and passionate and relevant for today, like the crucible of two sets night after night had simply made the songs not merely her creations but part of her very being. And if you dig deeper into what the songs are ultimately about, I actually think that’s what they’re about: the metaphorical crucible. It is, dare I say, all very meta.

I left thinking, that’s how I want it to be when I’m 78. I want to be dancing on whatever stage I can find, and if I can’t find one, I’ll just make my own.

It is but isn’t easy to try and riff on the theme of Horses and come up with a lot of otherwise related things. It’s easy because I can just be random and insert pictures of pommel horses, but it’s also kind of hard because I as a kid had almost no actual exposure to horses. Horses were about as real as anything else from an old western. Even if somehow I wound up on a farm and a horse was standing around, it’s not like I was riding or feeding the horse. These magnificent creatures are sort of magnificent abstractions to me.

Speaking of magnificent abstractions, it’s been a minute since we’ve had a Phthursday Flag… so let’s do it!

Here’s the flag for Sharqia Governorate, Egypt:

Governorate is to Egypt as state is to America. Sharqia has a population of about 7,860,000, close to Washington state (#13 in the US), but an area of only 1,610 square miles, which is barely larger than Rhode Island (#50). Sharqia is in the eastern Nile delta region, and its capital is the wonderfully named Zagazig.

Sharqia is an agricutural area (though how could it be when it’s so densely populated?) and this is apparently why the flag is green. And Sharqia, it seems, is the Kentucky of Egypt, known for the breeding of Arabian horses, and hosting the annual Authentic Egyptian Arabian Horse Festival.

The people of Sharqia are not horsing around when it comes to their flag. There’s no words, no stars, no extraneous symbols, no need for more than two colors. They picked a background color and slapped a mighty Arabian horse on the front and said, yeah, we’re good. Gotta respect that.

The thing about Egypt is that everybody knows about ancient Egypt and nobody seems to know anything about modern Egypt. And yet Egypt is the 15th largest country by population (3rd in Africa) with well over 100,000,000 people. Zagazig sounds like a cool Pokémon but it’s actually a sizable city (430,000, just between Oakland and Minneapolis) (also the Pokémon in question is named Zigzagoon).

Even though I know about the existence of Arabian horses, I simply wouldn’t have associated Egypt with horses. Camels, maybe. Come to think of it, Lexington, Kentucky should really reach out to Zagazig or some other city in Sharqia and become sister horse cities. I’ll get someone on this right away.

Doesn’t this thing look like it could talk?

Many years ago ESPN was doing a countdown of greatest athletes of the 20th century and you can guess who a lot of the names near the top were: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, etc.

For some reason I was watching and an episode came on and they named as one of the greatest athletes of the century… a horse.

Here’s what you need to understand: Secretariat had won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, both after being well behind and having to furiously catch up. No horse had won the Triple Crown since 1948, at the time by far the longest drought since the Triple Crown had come into existence. People thought Secretariat could do it.

Chances are you’ve never had occasion to watch the 1973 running of the Belmont Stakes. They showed the entire race in the ESPN series, and it was truly mesmerizing. Pushed early, Secretariat simply… summoned the spirits:

Secretariat broke the course record in all three races and still holds those records.

When is the last time you sat back and thought about how there are only two animals considered athletes: humans and horses? Isn’t this a bizarre world?

I feel very fortunate to have seen so many legends, so many legends-to-me, and so many maybe-one-day-legends. As I get started on the META-FIFTY in upcoming weeks I’ll be writing not just about records but about some of the legends and my experiences seeing them.

There is something about that 70s New York City scene though… I keep getting pulled back every few years and immersed a little more. I think it’s because CBGB and the associated scene was the epicenter for so much of what has come to define my taste, in part because that’s the time I was born, in part because my parents were to different extents in tune with what came out of that scene, but I also think because the punk and post-punk scenes remain important politically in ways that earlier scenes really don’t. There is something about the grand American contradiction demanding both conformity and nonconformity that is crystallized in the nascent punk scene and in the earliest post-punk scene.

That deep, deep contradiction is also present in how we think about… horses. Think of the bold, muscular stallion racing across the plateau, its flowing mane gleaming in the sunshine, an impossible combination of power and grace that represents the very pinnacle of the beauty of nature in flight… and how thoroughly we have sought to domesticate that wildness. We use the very word break to mean the verb tame.

Patti Smith, and so many of her peers, seemed to understand this contradiction, and so much of what I think is great about the art they created is in the struggle to try and keep the horses wild and tame all at once. And isn’t that the wonderful struggle we all endure?