The Steve Reynolds Program - Issue #14
hey HEY hey! What's going on? Besides the systemic dismantling of the safeguards from evil? Just hot horrible weather and the attempt to withstand those who worship the green stuff but not the real green stuff.
I went to to a comedy show and got asked to go on by the headliner when I saw him before the show. That never happens in my life but my set went well. Maybe I'll hang out at casino shows and see if it happens there.
Wampus hangs out by a nondescript door. Sinbad and a very small entourage walk by him.
"Hey, Sinbad! Love that suit."
"Thanks, man"
"I'm Wampus."
"Wampus is your name? How about going out and doing 10 minutes in front of these 500 weird people who paid to see me in 2018?"
"Sure thing, Sinbad!"
Wampus goes out in the spotlight and confuses an audience
Four Thangs
1. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma - Rivka Galchen wrote the fracking article in The New Yorker that made the world notice the insanity of the oil and gas business here. (SIDENOTE: I've known Rivka since she was six-- I was friends with her older brother and told him when we were fifteen she'd be president one day. She just became a medical doctor, essayist, journalist and award-winning novelist instead.) Now she notes the insanity of the politics here. She isn't the bemused and condescending outsider reporting on the small state, nothing like the writings of old New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer, whose little column in April of 1995, a three paragraph sniffle, on the Oklahoma City Bombing was both dismissive and defensive. She writes cogently of what led us to here. It's followed by this slightly heartening dispatch. Keep fighting, all.
2, A Man Named Pearl - a documentary about a South Carolina topiarist (good companion to one fourth of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control) hits all the right buttons: awe, delight, respect. This man's garden would be my winter Mecca since there is NO way I'd go to inland South Carolina any other time.
3. Beautiful Morning Light by The Fruit Bats - Bless the shuffle when playing songs. This song came up and I got to revisit its beauty again. Eric Johnson's tenor, the sly overdubs and the encapsulation of waking up not alone. Goshers, it's neat!
4. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter- The NYRB does another fine reissue. It's Proulx's Brokeback Mountain meets Camus' The Stranger. It's Kerouac without his corny side. It's brutal, thoughtful, exciting prose and maybe the first book in a long time I'm going to reread ASAP.
Me time!
I'm going to tempt fate and not mention my shows in mid-July to get me back on track here. But if you ever wanted to see me do standup and you're in Oklahoma, mid-July is a sweet champagne jam for you. Details to follow.