Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Country Music’

Clear the Decks

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

As the world awaits the verdict in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, I’ve also been trying to sell two chairs on Facebook Marketplace. With the imminent arrival of a sleeper sofa to our little casita, I need to clear out the living/room/storage area. It is currently host to my sister Kay’s power recliner (she now has her NY furniture), and an old leather, French bergere chair and ottoman that worked well in Rumson in the 80s and found a temporary home at the Bride’s house until she redecorated. TWO chairs – I thought it would be easy.

This is my first try at selling something on Marketplace. One person needs to get a truck, but wait, her son can’t help until tomorrow. And another wants to know if I deliver, and how much I charge??? I listed one chair as sold, and then had to change it back and lower the price. To make matters worse, I thought I was being hacked, because apparently AI responds to people in Messenger, or maybe it was prompting me? I’m not sure. But I am sure about NOT using AI. I avoid it at all costs, and if you’re paying attention you will too. Have you not heard about the AI modules who escaped their playground?

We all know AI chat bots have been creating chaos for teachers lately. I wonder how children will learn to write in the future, and what will happen to artistic expression. Then I think am I just being Aunt Bert asking me, “Where does your blog go?”

Enter the The Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey. He is attending the G20 Summit in of all places Asheville, NC, and he issued a warning about the global economic risks of this technology. Bailey said “frontier” AI models were “showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities… Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond.” https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/31/advanced-frontier-ai-financial-stability-andrew-bailey-g20

And if that doesn’t get your attention, AI modules can also reproduce replicate themselves! Anthropic reports its modules can autonomously design and develop its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. I call it frightening. On the one hand, Meta must put some guardrails on its systems for teenagers, and on the other hand data centers are exploding in our communities the way cell phone towers once cropped up on the highest hills. I remember home owners complaining at Borough Council Meetings, and the Rumson Mayor throwing his hands up in the air about eminent domain.

While today the Commander in Chief chops down cherry trees for the DC golf course and appoints INFLUENCERS to the White House Press pool. And the Pentagon fires editors and reporters at the Stars and Stripes for speaking out about the need for editorial independence.

“It’s enough to make you crazy if you let it.”

The world is moving too fast, and for Mr T it is a strategy. Tear it down, and hey SCOTUS will let him continue to build the ballroom. But we all paused this week at the passing of an icon. Dolly Parton was beloved on both sides of the aisle, all the while quietly giving back to her community and progressive causes. This was her opening line to a reporter, “Ask me anything you want to ask me, and I’ll tell you what I want you to hear.” Well I for one would like to hear what a savvy business woman like Dolly thinks about AI. She said NO to Elvis, kept her song publishing rights and built a $650 million dollar empire.

When we moved here, I was so impressed with her Imagination Library, and remember how the Grands would love getting her books in the mail.

Dolly’s makeup artist was a drag queen, a friend of my hair stylist. She spread love and sparkled everywhere. Nashville is sorely missing her. In the 1980 movie “9 to 5,” she let women know they could be exactly themselves, fight back against sexual harassment, and look good doing it. Maybe they didn’t get equal pay in the movie, it took President Obama signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 to achieve that, but Dolly, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin gave our second wave feminist movement a boost.

We will always love you Dolly. If you’re so inclined, you may donate to her library here: https://imaginationlibrary.com/

Yesterday at the JCC

Read Full Post »

Forgotten

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

History is always written by the victors. Except in the South…

where Confederate memorials sprouted during the Jim Crow era, and the narrative changed to more “states’ rights” and less “slavery.” I remember being surprised when we first moved to Cville at all the plaques on the side of roads commemorating some minor insurrection or another during the Civil War. That, and the graphic “No guns allowed” outside some stores – which I correctly assumed to mean all other stores were fair game.

Still, I had never heard of a white woman named, Viola Liuzzo. She was a lapsed Catholic who grew up dirt poor in Chattanooga, Tennessee and noticed that her young black neighbors, also living in one room shacks, were treated much worse than her family. Later, she would ask her daughter in a department store how she would feel if all the Santas she ever saw were black? Married, and living a middle-class life in Detroit, she defied her husband to heed MLK Jr’s call to come to Alabama after “Bloody Sunday.”

Last month Viola “…was awarded the Fred L. Shuttlesworth award from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on its 25th anniversary – the only white woman killed in the Civil Rights movement.” She believed Civil Rights was everybody’s fight.

She was only 39, the mother of five, when in March of 1965 she was gunned down by the Klan; ambushed driving black voters to register to vote because she was sitting beside a 19 year old African American in her car; a “Negro man” named Leroy Moton who survived the ambush by playing dead. He later sent three of the killers to prison.

Where are her statues? Why have we heard about so many other martyrs to the cause, but not Viola? In the 1960s, there were no women’s studies, and a housewife who left her husband and children on such a dangerous quest was deemed suspect. In fact, Herbert Hoover tried to discredit her reputation by suggesting there was some “necking” going on in that car!

The fate of women authors is worse, at least film and music have left us some evidence. But publishers would discontinue certain works in the pre-internet age, and so second-hand bookstores are your last best hope of survival. For instance, before John Grisham, there was Mary Elizabeth Braddon! Nope, I never heard of her either, but she was trending in Victorian times. Obscure pioneers in literature can now be found in “The Book of Forgotten Authors,” by Christopher Fowler:

Fowler devotes an entire chapter to the women who introduced readers to psychological suspense long before it conquered the bestseller lists. These “forgotten queens of suspense”, he writes, were “ignored, underrated, overlooked or taken for granted, the women who wrote popular fiction for a living were often simply grateful to be published at all.”

One of Aunt Kiki and the Rocker’s friends will soon be teaching a course on song writing. She is a musician and a feminist and I would love to take her course at UCLA. One of the songs her students will investigate is Shania Twain’s, “Who’s Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” Now Shania has her very own room in the Country Music Hall of Fame here in Nashville, and since Bob and I gave the Love Bug a small CD player for her room, along with Shania’s latest album, I’d love to hear her take on the evolution of country music to include more of the female voice, including women of color who were rarely recognized.

Because the #MeToo movement has started something that all my marches on Washington, all my work for Planned Parenthood, could never have imagined. Women’s stories are valued, but if we are not sitting up in the board rooms and back rooms of power, if we are not equally represented in the legislature, our work can still be marginalized, forgotten in the ebb and flow of history.

Her tee shirt says, “I will write my own story.”

IMG_1870

 

 

Read Full Post »