Dizzubble Dizzutch

American Routes:

Check out the original video for Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus”. Frankie’s 1981 song features the first mid-song breakdown of izzles and izzos, later co-opted by Snoop Dogg and turned into pop slang. (It might also sound familiar if you’ve ever heard this song, where it shows up as a sample)

Frankie was inspired by the double dutch that he saw kids in his neighborhood playing, and Philly’s SEPTA bus system, who rejected his application to be a driver. The success of “Double Dutch Bus” actually led to a huge bust of a cocaine ring in the city, which is a whole nother story.

All that aside, the song’s a classic. Hear “Double Dutch Bus” and more Philadelphia sounds on this week’s show.

P.S. American Routes on Tumblr? YES PLEASE

"Everyone thought I was nuts when I started building the Padelford. But this river has been wonderful to me. What could be a better life than to go to the river each day and call it work?"

Captain Bill Bowell, founder of the Padelford Packet Boat Company.

Bill Bowell passed away last Tuesday, at the age of 90. After visiting the Padelford with a group of artists on Friday, David Wiggins told me about the Captain William Bowell River Library in Dubuque, Iowa. It contains over 2,000 books about the Mississippi from Bill’s personal collection. I think Shanai and I have a destination for our next weekend road trip planned.

Paul Verret, president of the St. Paul Foundation, had this to say about Bill: “He was the world’s best curmudgeon. He had the courage to start (the Padelford Co.) when nobody thought he could succeed … when nobody gave a hoot about the river. He showed people that paying attention to our riverfront was a way to help re-create this town.”

We’re sorry we never got to meet the guy, I think we would have had a lot to talk about. At the very least, I hope our little Megalops project inspires some people to keep giving a hoot about the river.

We Work Here

A letter to Charles Green Shaw from H.L. Mencken, in list form. I especially like #3:

My favorite drinks, in order, are: beer in any form, Moselle, Bergundy, Chianti, gin and ginger-beer, and rye whiskey. I use Swedish punch only as a cocktail flavor. I dislike Scotch and seldom drink it. It makes me vaguely uneasy. I also dislike Rhine wine, save the very best. I never have a head-ache from drink. It fetches me by giving me pains of the legs. When I get stewed I go to sleep, even in the presence of womeen and clergymen.

From archivist Liza Kirwin’s Lists. More lists from Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Pablo Picasso, and Eero Saarinen at The Morning News.

I’m into Simone Weil lately, currently reading her biography by Francine du Plessix Gray. Her journey from leftist labor politics to Catholic mysticism is a fascinating one.

Ed. Note: Interested readers may wish to click through to see a comment from the author’s mom.

speakingoffaith:

Prayer, Attention, and Will
Andy Dayton, associate web producer

As I was listening to last week’s program, one part that stood out to me was Krista’s question to Stephen Mitchell about the last line in his book, The Enlightened Mind, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” A quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil, Mitchell responded:

Well, that’s a marvelous definition. I love that. I think that could be as close as someone can get to a wonderful definition of prayer. In that sense, prayer has nothing religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer.

Weil has come up before at SOF, as a potential candidate in another run of programs about historical figures (we just finished the first series with our program about Sitting Bull). Intrigued, I did a bit of searching an found the quote in an essay by Weil titled “Attention and Will,” from Gravity and Grace, the first collection of her essays to be published in book form. Here’s the same quote with a bit more context:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them. To beg for them is to believe that we have a Father in heaven. Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem.  Attention is something quite different.

Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

This building used to house the post office for Mendota, MN — a little city just south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. Mendota is an interesting place with quite a bit history: not only was it one of the first locations in the region to be settled by Europeans, and before that, of great significance to the Dakota people, for a while it was also home to The Emporium of Jazz; the Twin Cities destination for New Orleans jazz.

However, the Mendota I remember visiting in my childhood is a run-down little collection of buildings down by the river — whose main attractions were a strip club, a failing restaraunt called the “Ragin’ Cajun” (in the building that used to house The Emporium of Jazz), and a post office. I also remember the scandal that ensued when people renting out the back of the post office building were busted for growing a pretty substantial crop of Cannabis.

I snapped this picture as we passed the building on Mother’s Day. Within the last 10 years the area has more recently undergone a bit of gentrification, with some fancier restaurants opening up (I joined my mom for lunch in a building that used to be the strip club). While you can’t go to the old post office building to buy stamps (or drugs) anymore, I was glad that the new owners are still using it for their own form of public service.

(For anyone interested in learning more about Mendota’s history, it looks like there’s a walking tour next Monday)