Plucking Around: Oliver Sacks, Joan Jett, Nitro Gal, and Didion Donuts

For the week of April 3rd

This week has dissolved in my memory to a single boring rainy day. But the sun’s out, and there are Muffler Men and Nitro Gals to share:

Say hello to Nitro Gal. She’s one of a series of promotional statues for Uniroyal Tires, and was modeled on Jackie Kennedy. (Thanks to Kim Parkhurst for the research.) I follow @americangiants on Instagram, a serious aficionado of these kitschy bits of history, best known as “muffler men” because those are the most common; there’s even one in the opening credits of The Sopranos. There are at least four variants within a half hour’s drive of my house—including a Viking and a “happy halfwit,” aka an Alfred E. Neumann clone—so I’ll be visiting them, and sharing here.

With the rain, I will be careful in my Pine Barrens explorations this weekend. I’m thinking of visiting Apple Pie Hill to see if the fire tower is manned (there was a big fire last week before the rain; when it’s manned, they will let you climb it for the spectacular view). Calico and the Nash cabin are on roads better faced when dry.

A good documentary on the Pine Barrens and the struggle against off-roaders, both local and out of state, who come to do mudding and make roads impassable. The State seems to be doing very little to patrol this. The doc, $2.99 on Vimeo, focuses on a local naturalist who has been fighting to protect private land for someone, and there’s just no way. It’s a million acres, and you can’t watch it all:

I’ve been a fan of Joan Jett since I saw the video for “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” on MTV as a kid. I’ve seen her twice in concert, once at an outdoor stadium as part of a group tour, and from the second row in a smaller venue, an all Blackhearts show. She is a quintessential rock-n-roller, from when it was counter-culture. She’s also incredibly modest. After the Runaways broke up and she went solo, she got 23 rejections from record labels, so she and Kenny Laguna started their own label and sold records at shows. MTV had a big impact, and they still own the label and produce records, like “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. This is a great interview with Jett and her career, and how from day one, she refused to answer questions about sex, because “then it would always be about sex, and not the music.” And yet someone who’s recorded covers of “AC/DC” plus her own songs “Alright with the Boys,” we know where she stands. In these days of categorization, it’s refreshing. (And nothing against labels, if they work for you).

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were featured in the 1982 music documentary Urgh! A Music War, which I have been trying to see for years. It was difficult to find and has a great reputation. It’s on Kanopy streaming, which is available through many public libraries. I finally watched it after Kim P reminded me of it, and while it is like one long concert film spliced together, there are some great performances from the dawn of new wave and the dusk of punk. Dead Kennedys play, and it’s their peak; Plastic Surgery Disasters is a masterpiece concept album of retro-‘50s anti-nostalgia, when Reaganism had us worshiping the era. Gary Numan sings from a futuristic bumper car; the audience is very fashionable and white, and looking back, it’s quaint that they called this a “music war,” when most of it is just rock with some synthesizer. Devo is up there doing their thing, and Klaus Nomi, the tuxedoed opera mime-robot, sings a marvelous set. If you like Nomi, or want to learn more, The Nomi Song documentary is free to view, and depicts his brilliant, brief career, before he died of AIDS.

Another interesting read was this short trip to a natural history museum with neuroscientist, author, bon vivant, and powerlifter Oliver Sacks. He really was a Renaissance human; at Muscle Beach in Venice in the ‘60s, he could squat 880lbs, no small feat; he writes wonderfully, swims like a champ, and is an accomplished neuroscientist as well. His memoir On the Move is a wonderful read, if his tales of mental calamities are too much for you; Uncle Tungsten is another great read, a coming of age tale of a gay Jewish boy in England in a family of scientists, including the eponymous uncle who runs a lightbulb factory.

I finished reading Italo Calvino’s whimsical fantasy The Baron in the Trees last night, and enjoyed it much. He has a lot of fun with the premise, and the setting, in Italy before the fall of the monarchy, is enjoyable as well. It’s not a love story to trees like The Overstory by Richard Powers, but it’s an amusing diversion. Now I’m reading Joan Didion’s The White Album, and I found this bookmark inside it:

I hope Marty got some donuts.

Upcoming: A deep dive on that pinnacle of television, BJ and the Bear; the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy vs. Wisconsin Death Trip; and the story of the month, which will either be the rest of the Joey Cucuzza tale I started, or a weird tale I’ve been playing with for years, inspired by the story of Gef the Mongoose.

The nifty new email banner is by designer extraordinaire Sarah Bennett Pluck. I love the Jersey Devil hiding in the trees. That’s all her. I contributed nothing!