Why We Need Her: Aretha Franklin

Spoiler Alert:  Today's post is on a non-cycling topic.

The other day, the Andrew Cuomo said something that will probably haunt him for the rest of his days:  "America was never that great."

Now, I just happen to think that Cuomo wasn't expressing a lack of patriotism.  Rather, I think the utterance shows, more than anything, that he doesn't quite share his father's intelligence or eloquence.

I'm guessing that he was trying to refute Trump's oft-echoed mantra:  Make America Great Again.  If anything, I would say that America was never great (rather than "not that great") because no nation in the history of this world has ever been great.  Some nations have been powerful, have been mighty.  Others have been prosperous; still others, influential.  A few nations have combined more than one of those qualities.

But no nation* has ever been great, including my own.

To me, the proof is this:  Aretha Franklin.  No one ever would have sounded the way she did had her nation, or any other, had been great.  In fact, nobody ever could have sounded like that, like her.

If any nation in history had ever been great, there never would have been any need for someone to sound like her.  And that's why, to me, almost all of her work is art of the highest order.

Yes, I said art.  I see no contradiction between it and popular music or other entertainments.  Shakespeare was popular in his own time; so were any number of painters and sculptors who received commissions from wealthy patrons and whose works we gaze at, with awe, in museums and galleries today.

Of course, we've all heard Natural Woman and Respect.  In those songs, she combines vulnerability and strength, anger and empathy, joy and grief, need and the yearning for freedom, the need to sing and the urge to fly, better than just about anyone who's ever sung.  In other words, she captures the complexity--and the fearsome complications--of our existence.

For my money, though, her best expression of the gifts only she could bring us was on I Never Loved A Man.  On the surface, it seems like just a song that expresses--if you'll pardon my appropriating the title of an '80s self-help book--the dilemma of a woman who loves too much, or at least seems to love the wrong man.  But, to me, it's really about being beaten down and beaten up by, not only another person, but by life itself--and realizing that the only choice is to move forward. The world is excruciating, people are mean, and her man is cruel--but she cannot do anything but love:  love him, love the world.  I think it's what W.H. Auden meant when he wrote, "We must love one another or die."



That song alone would place her in my pantheon of great American artists.  To me, it's worthy of Leaves of Grass, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Kind of Blue,Christina's World, The Great Gatsby,  Citizen Kane, Blue and Green Music, the first Godfather film and Rhapsody in Blue.

Now Aretha Franklin is gone.  Well, she--her body--has left us.  But not the body of her work.  As long as there are no great nations, we'll need it.  And if there ever is a great nation, we'll have the luxury of simply savoring it.

*--By "nation", I mean geo-political entities, which are not to be confused with the cultures or peoples contained within them, which often are great.

What Did It Cost?

Whenever anyone asks what my bikes cost, I find a way not to answer.  Muttering "none of your business" is a sure signal that it's expensive; so is replying with "Why do you ask?"

Then again, I am a New Yorker who lived in the Big Apple during the '80's and early '90's, when crime of all kinds was rampant.  I remember pre-hipster Williamsburg and when the Lower East Side really was "lower" in more ways than one.  Each of those neighborhoods bookends the Williamsburg Bridge which, even before the bike lane was reconstructed, was the best way to cross the East River by bicycle.

Apparently, some criminals knew as much.  Or, at least, they knew that in-the-know cyclists preferred (and still prefer) "Billyburg" to the Brooklyn, Manhattan or Queesnboro (59th Street) Bridges.  And, they knew that in-the-know cyclists were riding the most valuable bikes.  

You can guess what happened:  A few cyclists I knew, and quite a few more I didn't know, were attacked for their bikes on either side of the bridge.  In fact, an employee of one shop I frequented had his machine stolen just days after he bought it--and that after working more than a year to save up for it. 

Somehow I don't think those riders told anyone--certainly, not random strangers-- what their bikes cost. But then again, they didn't have to:  Such information is easy enough to find.

This leads me to wonder whether the advice given by police in Roodespoort, South Africa will be helpful to the bike shop owners who received it--or, more important, customers of said establishments.

The gendarmes told the pedal purveyors--you guessed it--not to disclose the prices of their most expensive bikes with the media.   They shared their sage wisdom after a cyclist was robbed and shot for his bike in the Kromdraai area of the city.  

Medics carrying the injured cyclist.

That cyclist is alive only because of the efforts of a Good Samaritan who heard his cries for help and stopped.  "They had shot him twice in the leg and in the back," said Jon-Jon Pietersen who had only a rubber glove, a towel and box tape.  

Fortunately for the cyclist, more people stopped by and helped until the ambulance arrived, 20 minutes later.

Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words When It Gives Us Two?

As The World's Only Transgender Bike Blogger (at least, the only one I know about!), you can understand why this got my attention:

From bikechaser

Well, all right, the colors are hard to miss.   But the design is not exactly to my taste (at least, not anything I'd wear).  What piqued my interest were the words:  "Femme" (woman) on the jersey, "Homme" (man) on the shorts.

Hmm....