On Thanksgiving, We Escape All the Turkeys but One... Nov 22 2018

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So, the above is half the obvious: On Thanksgiving, we escape all the turkeys but one -- and that one doesn't escape us.

      In our last edition, we told you where you can go to join in a THANKSGIVING POTLUCK FEAST. We also gave you the info to watch "The Pilgrims," from the PBS series "The American Experience," FREE on-demand online for the next few days.

      The latter gets more important when you see how utterly bleak TV's offerings are today. Unless you have the MGM movie channel and can watch "Alice's Restaurant" (10:20 am-12:30 pm Pacific) you'll need to find that comedic ballad on YouTube to observe Folk-Americana music's most enduring Thanksgiving tradition of the past half-century.

      Lots of people will take refuge in TV in an effort to avoid conversations with the very people they invited to visit to share Thanksgiving. But it ain't gonna be that easy.

      TV for Thanksgiving is all hoopla over millionaire football players on teams owned by billionaire owners who cravenly abandon fans as they move "their" teams from city to city to maximize their personal profits.

      Oh, and everything else on TV today is at its prostituting worst as the media maximizes itself as a delivery system for advertising to make you want to spend all your money on crap you don't need at tomorrow's BLACK FRIDAY or the impending CYBER MONDAY. Because you just aren't cool enough unless you own the right trendy gizmos, designer swag, and small screen cyberspying-tracking-device whozits, gizmos, and whatnots.

   That said, we want to shift gears and offer you this for Thanksgiving. It's by Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion columnist at The Washington Post:

"THANKSGIVING IS A DAY TO STOP LEANING IN — AND LEAN BACK INSTEAD"

(from today's Washington Post, COMPLETE WITH THE EMBEDDED LINKS)

"Long before the modern age and the rise of capital, the medieval world — with some inspiration from antiquity — indulged in frequent feast days. They honored the saints and the events of the Christian liturgical calendar, and marked baptisms, funerals, pilgrimages and other occasions with a hearty laying down of work.

"For the medievals, the food and festivities associated with feasting were important, but perhaps the most distinctive aspect of a well-observed feast was the 'moratorium on everyday life' — that is, the temporary abandonment of work and its whole profane penumbra. Medievals could expect, all told, to feast for whole months out of the year , and indeed reckoned time relative to the spacing of the year’s feasts. These were the beloved days, and more important, the significant days — the ones on which real and beautiful things were exalted, and on which the obnoxious but necessary things were put aside.

"Thanksgiving may be the only bona fide American feast day. Every other holiday has some other activity or occasion to recommend it, but Thanksgiving is a feast to celebrate feasting and to express gratitude for everything that can’t be properly commodified: family, friendship, the autumn season. The meaning of it may be less distinct than your average medieval feast, but the sense that it’s about something better and truer than the ordinary grind of work is what lends it its emotional depth (and what makes the travesty of workers forced to labor on the holiday so despicable ).

"Of course, there’s always some tension that comes with Thanksgiving. There is the stress of travel; the pressure of irritating family dynamics — which, to trust the guides and articles on arguing with relatives, seems especially manifest on Thanksgiving, with whole-family get-togethers being otherwise rare; and the difficulty of peeling away from school or work, where something is always left unfinished and something else always looms ahead.

"But to my mind, all that means we could use more experience feasting, not less. Would that there were 100 days out of the year that we turned away from things that don’t matter and embraced the things that do — which doesn’t mean that the things that are real and lasting are necessarily pleasurable, only that they’re authentic and non-commodified. For their celebration of these things, feasts are unlike anything else in modern life, and all the more precious.

"So lean out, or rather lean back, into something cozy and comfortable, and feast. All the toil in the world will still be waiting when the feast day ends. But Thanksgiving is yours; Thanksgiving is for you."

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Here at the Guide, we saw the need to rearrange this. Ms. Bruenig actually began by dressing-down a certain Facebook exec who has oft asserted that WORK is the real justification for life. We found that too put-offish as an opener. But it does explain the title she gave the piece. Here's the rest of it -- or rather, how she begins:

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"How unsurprised I was, and yet how dispirited, to read of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s key involvement in the social media site’s latest political dust-up. Though Sandberg has denied it, the New York Times reported last week that she was a critical force in concealing Facebook’s role in the spread of false information during the 2016 presidential election. It makes sense that Sandberg would do something like that — not in a moral way but simply as a matter of stated habit. She wrote the book on leaning in, a frenetic philosophy of work interpreted by the strange tween-and-teen volume 'Girl CEO' as a clarion call to 'give it all you’ve got.' The trouble with giving it all you’ve got is that eventually you’ll have nothing left.

"When work becomes life and life becomes work, the good of whatever concern you happen to serve blurs — disastrously, in Sandberg’s case — with your own good and what is actually good. And moral disorder is only one foul consequence of leaning in. Consider the loss of time devoted to one’s family, friends, personal projects and spiritual life, and the perversion of priorities that arises when life decisions such as childbirth and marriage revolve more around corporate policies than individual desires. All in all, it seems better to lean out — not to quit working altogether but to remand work to its proper place: on the boring flanks of feasts."

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☆☆ You can read other good stuff listed below, and see the above before we resequenced it, all at:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/thanksgiving-is-a-day-to-stop-leaning-in--and-lean-back-instead/2018/11/21/117f731e-edb0-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html


That link also takes you to these other articles. All are perfect as conversation-starters or avoiders, depending on your needs as you sit on the couch surrounded by the others with whom you've been cast to celebrate Thanksgiving:


☆ Alyssa Rosenberg: What 229 years of Thanksgiving taught me about America


☆ Megan McArdle: The history of Thanksgiving dinner is proof of American greatness


☆ David Ignatius: My four-word wish for Thanksgiving


☆ Tom Toles: Happy Thanksgiving. Yes, your uncle may be crazy.


☆ The Post’s View: Thanksgiving: Celebrating America’s long tradition of survival

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THE INESCAPABLE SIGNIFICANCE OF NOVEMBER 22nd

      Some of our Guide readers will note, or even vividly remember, that November 22nd is the day, 55 years ago, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open-top car in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

      That event began the unraveling of the '60s, which, until that moment, had been about a hopeful future of the New Frontier and going to the Moon and ending racism and segregation.

       Many millions of words have been written about all the events that spun out of control and all the ways that everything went wrong because of those few moments in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

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THE PAST IS ALWAYS PROLOGUE... BUT WE DECIDE "TO WHAT"

      In the end, it all serves to prove the same thing -- that no one can underestimate the ability of one, single act to change everything. 

      And it is always up to each of us to apply our creativity, our aspirations, our desire to live in a better, more just, more equitable world, where all life is regarded with dignity and awe and wonder. 

      Because each of us always has the ability to make a difference, and even to change everything. For good or for ill. And a fine place to claim as our operating base is kindness. Love, if you can. But always be kind.

    May you and yours, and all with whom you share this day, have a peaceful, kind, harmonious, melodious, and happy Thanksgiving, filled with kindness.

And if some moron inappropriately thinks your holiday gathering is a fine place for espousing toxic politics, you can establish that "I don't agree with that, and there's no need for either of us to demonstrate our depth of knowledge or the strength of our opinions, when THIS gathering on this special day gives all of us the opportunity to discuss so many other things that do not open the door to disagreements and bad feelings over politics." 

Kindness. Even if you think they're an ignoranus, you don't need to say so. (Yes we spelled it that way on purpose.)

After all, one turkey in the room is enough.

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That's all for this edition. Stay tuneful!


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We'll be back again soon with music news and more "News of the Non-Trumpcentric Universe." (c)



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♪ The ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE endeavors to bring you NEWS – and views of interest to artists everywhere – more specifically to musicians and the creative community and music makers and fans of acoustic and Folk-Americana music. That includes both traditional and innovative forms. From the deepest roots to today’s acoustic renaissance, that’s our beat. We provide a wealth of resources, including a HUGE catalog of acoustic-friendly venues (now undergoing a major update), and inside info on FESTIVALS and select performances in Southern California in venues from the monumentally large to the intimately small and cozy. We cover workshops, conferences, and other events for artists and folks in the music industry, and all kinds o’ things in the world of acoustic and Americana and accessible classical music. From washtub bass to musical spoons to oboe to viola to banjo to squeezebox, from Djangostyle to new-fangled-old-time string band music, from sweet Cajun fiddle to bluegrass and pre-bluegrass Appalachian mountain music to all the swamp water roots of the blues and the bright lights of where the music is headed now.

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