Click here to view the video on YouTube.

by Frederike Heuer

This is a great story. Check it out here.

(Also: The English-language homepage for Spiegel International  is here.)

And Happy New Year!

Hugh Prather wrote Notes to Myself as a journal in the early 1970s; it was a surprise bestseller. Norris Church Mailer was a fashion model who married Norman Mailer when he was more than twice her age. While insisting she was no intellectual, Ms. Mailer created fine art, theater and prose that showed intelligence and spirit.

Prather came from privilege and discovered his literary and artistic talent through manual labor; Ms. Mailer climbed out of childhood poverty as a beauty-pageant contestant and became the glue in the lives of the much-married writer, her two sons and seven stepchildren.

Both artists used inner strengths to empower countless others. Prather was the first contemporary journal writer I read, and his gentle reflections helped me make the feminism of my twenties part of my heart, not just my rhetoric. Ms. Mailer I came to admire in middle age, for her ability to be both helpmeet and writer–in the shade of Norman Mailer’s massive ego and talent, yet.

The notion that writers should “empower” us is a relatively new requirement. Literature and memoir were not always evaluated for this ability. There’s a certain flimsiness to the idea, since it bases the value of a piece of writing on how it makes us feel, period. A key manner in which new books are publicly valued relies on tabulating the number of people who buy into the hype of impending empowerment, then buy the book.

There are, though, other measures of a book’s power over us. The test of time, for one. The books that stay shelved in one’s inner library do matter, often for reasons beyond craft or depth. And the “back story” of a book has power too. For all the celebrity and success around her, Ms. Mailer rarely had a real Room of Her Own. She was always a writer with a hyphen: wife-and-writer, mother-and-writer. She too was someone for this feminist to learn from, and admire.

Click here to hear Craig ‘CMOR’ Morrison’s genius.

And, some days, I just want to hear good music, not travel old roads and remember days when I was younger or happily dumber. I want to hear something new that makes me feel like I’m into something different, but not just a voyeur spying on the 20-somethings.

photo from Keegan Smith website/Portland Music Awards

I just want to feel good in the car with the music cranked up,  you know?

So, for that…there’s Keegan Smith. We heard this young guy a couple months ago at Jimmy Maks in Portland (best Jazz club in the Northwest, and maybe the West) and loved him. He’s original, but he showcases his roots. Clever, but real. A good musician who seems to love the life.

As an added attraction, this marked the first time I’d seen a rapper perform while holding an infant. (This being the time and place it is, the kid was wearing protective earplugs while Daddy got down.)

Then we went to hear him at another Portland club, where I was the oldest person in the room. It was the night after Halloween and everyone else was in costume. The guy dressed in a trash bag with a sign reading “Douche Bag” will go far in this life, you could tell.

Smith’s new CD, “Special Delivery” was just out and he performed several of the cuts. There’s some ghosts of the past in his work–you catch a few seconds of Paul Simon here, maybe a moment of Van Morrison, a whiff of Genesis in the late 1970s. With rap and reggae in there to be poetic and recreational.

I wanted the CD fast, so I downloaded it for $8.99 from Amazon. (I’m making dubs for friends, and I’ll send $8.99 a whack to Smith directly.  It is bad, bad juju to steal from a musician, my niece taught me that.)

Go ahead, get yourself some new baggage. There’s the download, used copies, or you can be a big spender and go for the new CD.