Articles

International tragedies have a way of making me sympathetic to the works of Hugo Jacomet. Perhaps his works somehow anticipate the direction the world moves.

A few years ago, I started contemplating the idea of a big pair of pants. I’m not talking straight cut, or a little baggy--I’m talking voluminous.

We listened so often we memorized lyrics like the secret readers in Fahrenheit 451, at least the lyrics to the songs Stipe enunciated. Famously elusive, mumbled and indirect, many of his songs were like codes, with meanings no more than roundabout guesses. All that and more came back hearing that snatch of song, and reading Grace Elizabeth Hale’s incredible Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. In it she not only clearly and thoroughly tells the fascinating story of the Athens scene around University of Georgia that gave rise to R.E.M. and so many other acts, she captures and conveys the liberation, joy and sweetness of youth.

In the fifth smallest county in the United States, and the smallest in Nebraska, there’s a town called Arthur, population 118. Taking Fir Street, you can walk from one end to the other in about ten minutes, passing the bank, post office, and County Treasurer. At the southern end lies the old county courthouse and jail, said to have been the smallest in the United States. At the northern end, there’s a hat shop.

I’m thinking, for some reason, of the late Adnan Khashoggi and of a host of dead playboys and nabobs, shrouded in the finest custom shirts money, so much money, could buy.

Something large is crashing through the brush in front of me just out of sight. I wait half-expecting it to emerge but, keeping the mystery, snapping, thudding, it never does.

I’m in the middle of a closet embargo, only worsened by the pandemic. To that end, I’ve begun a series of little Do It Yourself projects to try to breath new life into old things. I invite readers to try this list for themselves, or make up their own.