JON.

Eleven years ago, Jonathan Long (Jonny) and I invented a communication process known as the Sixty-Second Phone Call (footnote below on who he is). But this is not about Jonny. It is about Jonathan Ponder, also known as Jon.

The movie Chinatown is not a Christmas movie. It takes place in California. It is considered by some to be the finest screenplay ever written. I don’t agree, I met Jon there. Not in the town of Los Angeles, but in a city a short seventeen-hour drive away, in College Place, Washington, where he was attending college, as was I. We studied Odysseus, but not together, and then ran into each other randomly in a city adjacent to Los Angeles much later, so the college part above is largely irrelevant. Also, he played bass guitar.

He was friends with my sister and friends with friends (see: tagged people), but then I stole him so we could hang out without intermediaries.

Sometimes, good friends talk every day.
And sometimes, good friends talk every several months.

Along with Jeremy Long, whose relationship to me is difficult to simplify in a single post, although he also has played bass guitar and knew Lance (see footnote below), Jon has been the most fun Radiohead deconstructionizing conversationalist I have known in the past 26 years (I am older than 26). I have a vivid memory of riding in the passenger seat of a blue car (I think) with him driving (reasonably certain it was him) and discussing Amnesiac (possibly was Kid A). I can remember with great clarity the neighbourhood we were passing through; it was in California, or a neighboring state, and it was definitely a hot day.

He introduced me to a group of film and book geeks who met weekly to watch, break down, and discuss Westerns. I saw Once Upon a Time in the West for the first time there, which is my very favourite Western ever and will change the way you think of Henry Fonda, but Jon was not there. I don’t know where he was that week. I’ve always wondered. He he may have been writing poetry or playing guitar at Jazz ‘n Java. If the NSA ever releases all their surveillance and drone footage (of course it exists), I’ll check to find out.

When I moved to Montana for grad school, and me and Becca’s apartment had concrete floors, then Jon said: I’m coming too.

He did not say that. But he did come visit, and it snowed, we hiked, and he bought the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Munki on CD and then left it at our apartment, where I accidentally copied it before mailing to him. Birthday is still my fourth favourite song of theirs. I do not know what he would rate the album at this point, but it’s much better than the atrocious and disappointing one they released last year. But I don’t know, Jon might love it, we haven’t texted back and forth about it yet. We might never. He collects and invests in vinyl treasures and is focused on more roots music at this point, although we still have great texts about The New Pornographers and other shared poppy faves.

I got a package awhile back from him that contained books. He is one of the remaining friends I have who loves books more than myself, and possibly more, occasionally. They were some of his picks to share, that I will not divulge, except to say that Jonathan Franzen was in there twice and one of them is not the book you might think it was. I slowly savored and worked my way through them, and I especially loved How to be Alone.

He gave me a collection of LPs when he visited several months ago. He had been slowly assembling them, along with the coolest and greatest accompanying handwritten liner notes, and it is one of the most meaningful and awesomest presents I have received. A reason for every one.

Sometimes we exchange voicemails instead of actually talking, and I will say that we are both very, very good at leaving well-crafted voicemails that you would not ever want to delete. We do not talk every day, but I think I am going to call him next month, or in a month soon thereafter. And we will pick right up where we were last, which was something important to do with literature or music or philosophy, and someday he will have listened to Sharon Van Etten and I will have watched The Wire and we can compare notes.

Until then, I will look forward to ignoring his phone call and letting it go to voicemail so I can listen to it at my leisure, and prepare to call him back with a call he can ignore and let go to voicemail, and...

...that is a friend I am happy to have be a friend. A good friend for a long time in the past and far into the future.

Bye.
_____
FOOTNOTE:
The easiest way to frame who Jonathan Long is in relation to me is this: Jonny (his nickname) had a basketball coach in high school whose name was Lance. Lance has gone to see the Los Angeles Dodgers in L.A. (a.k.a. Los Angeles). They are a baseball team apparently. Jonny used to play baseball in a town I also grew up in - Tillamook, Oregon - which is north of Los Angeles. The California Los Angeles, not the other one. When Lance saw the Dodgers play in Los Angeles, he did not see Jonny, but before that, he had stayed with Jonny’s brother Jamey in Arizona, which is where certain baseball teams practice their spring training baseball practice to be ready for baseball. Jamey also played baseball, but not basketball for Lance’s basketball team in Portland, Oregon, which is north of Los Angeles, east of Portland, and west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The first time I met Lance, I don’t remember, but the second I met him I do. He is a fine fellow, and I had known Jonny before that, and before he played baseball, as we had grown up in adjacent bedrooms in the same household, as we shared parents, although my room was on the bottom floor. So Lance is the connecting thread, aside from Jonny being my brother (and Jamey’s). I never played basketball for Lance, but I have known people who did, and some live in states east of the Mississippi now, which is east of Los Angeles and Portland. Jonny and Jon Ponder have met as well, though never played baseball together, to my knowledge.

8 Miles High

Hiked Beacon Rock yesterday. A sunny oasis amongst weeks of wet. Magdelana split time between walking and bouncing on my shoulders. Becca, eight months knocked up, kept turning heads with her beautiful belly, and received half a dozen admiring comments about her Amazonian babeliness. So we huffed and puffed and made the top.

So many shades of green. Thick, dense, delicate, beautiful green. I love it here. Kept thinking that the toppa the rock would make a great concert backdrop for Colorblind Soldiers. They gotta get some better roadies first.

Mr. Ponder

My buddy is visiting. You will never guess what state he comes from.

We have played tennis (a bloody tie), wandered Portland streets and zoo (hi, polar bear friends), devoured film (Book of Eli, you make me want to read the Bible again), and listened quietly to the thudding rain that has flooded down for two solid weeks.

It has been good.

And it is difficult to believe that Little Boy arrives this month. Becca is a trooper. A sexy, strong trooper.

GUEST POST : MUSIC TO DRESS FOR CHURCH BY (Jon Ponder)

One of my buddies and fellow music aficionados sent me a CD and notes. Love this so much.

___

Dear Joseph,

Ever since you sent me a mix CD of Saturday Morning Spirituals (is that what it was called?), I’ve meant to put together a mix of songs that in some way have spiritual significance to me.  That’s what this is, for the most part, but I’ve also thrown a few other things on that I’ve come across that seem to fit with the Saturday morning theme.  I call it Songs To Dress For Church To, vol. 1.  What follows is a new form of correspondence I’ve been practicing recently that I call the annotated playlist as letter.  Feel free to read or ignore.  The songs will be just as good, maybe better, if you don’t read my comments and ramblings.  I hope all is well with you and Becca and Magdelana.

God Yu Tekkem Laef Blong Mi—The Choir of All Saints, Honiara
This and two other songs like it on this list are from the soundtrack to The Thin Red Line, that beautifully quiet war movie.  I need to see it again because it’s been awhile, but I remember it being almost boring because of its slowness and length but also riveting.  By the time it reached the end, after its recording of slow, quiet life punctuated by bursts of war violence, it had earned the right to muse the way it did on the meaning of life, death, and war.  These songs are a beautiful counterpoint to the violence and death of a war movie, and they also are meaningful to me because they take me back to island singing and island life.

Given To Fly—Pearl Jam
This song came along right at the time in college that I was noticing and looking for correspondences between religions and evidence of the spirit in the world outside of church and religion.  Somehow this song and other songs on the same album filled that seeking in a satisfying way.  I played it for a friend once who asked me if I thought the song was talking about Jesus.  There are definitely similarities in the stories (although I doubt Jesus would smoke, even though he wasn’t an Adventist), but I don’t like to think about it that way.  The song and the unnamed character are mythological and archetypal and the story is moving because it speaks the truth, whether it’s factual or not, whether it tells about a “real” person or not.

Don’t Panic—Coldplay
The first time I heard this song was on a quiet Friday night at River Stones.  You know from experience such a night is rare, a gratefully welcomed anomaly.  The boys were mellow, polite, helpful, in a good mood.  And I was able to listen to this song and others on the album uninterrupted as I prepared dinner for them.  From the moment I heard it down to this day I’ve thought it a perfect song and it helped me that night to see the sacredness in the work I was doing at an often thankless, stressful, and downright difficult job.

Instant Karma!—John Lennon
The voice, the echo, the melody, the urgency.  I just realized I have a strong visual association with this song, though I can’t necessarily describe the visual with any clarity or vividness.  I see black and white swirling images that are both moving sketches of people and our earth and at the same time the unimaginably huge and beautiful universe we call the sky.  Either the song taps into some subconscious existential knowledge and sense of awe and urgency within me OR I am recalling the visuals from some cheap commercial that used the song as its soundtrack.  I can’t say which.  (Damn you advertisers for colonizing my brain.)  In any case, the song is great.  I prefer to believe it is the first-mentioned phenomenon that is going on as I listen to it.

Have You Ever?—Brandi Carlile
I saw Brandi Carlile at The Ark in Ann Arbor last spring.  Great performer.  And The Ark is a tremendous venue to see anyone in.  So small.  It was a great show.  This song reminds me of a Robert Frost poem.  Not that the lyrics are as great as Frost’s, but it has that Frostian feel of woods and winter and wandering lonely and satisfied with the self in an incomprehensible but somehow right world.

Ezekiel Saw The Wheel—Woody Guthrie
This takes me back to Adventist youth group and camp meeting singing.  Same song but it sounds a lot different here.  Guthrie’s mostly monotone melody line becomes hypnotic.  Just now listening to it I’m remembering what I visualized when I read Emerson’s essay The Circles which is an interesting abstract essays on the circles of existence, something he never really defines but just talks about wheeling and gyre-ing through the world in a very Transcendental way.

Box Of Rain—The Grateful Dead
I recently read or heard that whichever member of the band wrote this wrote it for his father when his father was lying in a hospital bed dying.  He was able to sing it to him before he died.  As if this song needed anything to make it better, but I like the level that this personal story of the song’s beginning brings to it.

Go Tell The Congregation—The Black Crowes
This’ll get you up and going!  Go tell ‘em!  Preach it!  Confess!  Get up on the stage of your local Adventist church and wail raw-ly your joy, like Chris Robinson slithering barefoot across a carpeted stage.  Harness that energy but leave the weed and pills out of it.

Do You Realize?—The Flaming Lips
Okay, it’s getting a bit exhausting trying to come up with new ways to sing the praises of great songs.  This one just sounds so good.  Its simple lyrics leave me with the feeling I have after a funeral of someone who has died too young.  Sadness, of course, but also gratitude and urgency toward life.  That seems to me to be a pretty powerful effect for a song to have.

Exiles Among You—The Weakerthans
This is a song I picked up in Yosemite.  It reminds me of foster kids lost in the world, of the brilliant and wonderful kids hiding out from life in Yosemite (and other places), and, in the last quiet verse, of the interesting paralysis within that comes from knowing exactly what it is you’re supposed to do but being unwilling to do it.

Do You Feel Loved—U2
“Take this tangle of a conversation and turn it into your own prayer.”  I think that’s the line that most gets me in this song, though there are many good lines.  This album has some of the most complex and intricate poetry I’ve heard in popular music in the way that it weaves together different strands to speak at multiple levels with the same words.  I think a lot of lesser lyricists think they’re doing that, but this album actually does take the tangle of influences in the world and turn them into meditative poems and prayers.

God Loves His Children—Flatt & Scruggs
This song is just goofy with that high-voiced break “God will protect you…”  I think that’s the reason I put this song on.  The delivery of that one line always cracks me up.

Ready To Go Home—Hank Williams
From the goofy to the raw and sublime.  Hank Williams mesmerizes me.

Always Love—Nada Surf
So many have sung about love that it’s almost become trite to say things like “All you need is love” or “God is love.”  But the most fundamental, deepest truths often sound trite to say out loud.  This is one of those.  In my struggle and difficulty to believe in God, I have come to the place currently where I believe that God is not a being who is perfectly suffused with love, not a being at all, but actually, literally is love, is the way that we treat each other.  God exists in that.  Other things as well but largely in that.

Until The End Of The World—U2
I once played this song in a Bible class with Ernie Bursey at Walla Walla College in which he asked everyone to bring in a piece of music that had spiritual significance to them.  I admit I was partly trying to be a little iconoclastic, but at the same time this song really did have spiritual significance to me.  I love that it tells the story of Judas through Judas’s voice, but like Given To Fly, it masks the story, making it more universal and archetypal.  What I did not realize until Bursey asked me to read the lyrics and I was reading them out loud to the class was that the song contains some pretty overtly sexual language, going beyond a simple kiss on the cheek.  Well, I wanted to be an iconoclast.

Pray For Us—The Melanesian Brotherhood, Tabalia
Another of the Thin Red Line island songs.  I love the birds singing in the eaves and corners of the thatched huts of these songs.

People Get Ready—Aretha Franklin
A wonderfully slow-moving and robust train of a song.

When The Saints Go Marching In—The Kingston Trio
Another throwback to youth group singing and guitar playing.  My youth pastor was down with the old loud rollicking blues and folk inspired praise songs.  There’s not much that’s more fun than really going off on a song like this with a bunch of musicians and a room full of singers.  It’s the kind of experience that makes me say that no matter what my theological beliefs (or lack thereof) may be, I believe in the songs.

Jesus, You Are Here—The Choir of All Saints, Honiara

People to Know, pt. 001

Number 001 of 149

I have decided to begin another three-digit series that I may or may not finish.

Probably won't.

Malcolm Gladwell describes the "Principle of 150." Without going into details, the idea is that 150 people is the ideal group size (something about ratio of the neocortex to entire brain, I don't know, I'm not really a geologist). The gist is that 150 is the maximum number of people a group can have before its members cease to have a genuinely social relationship with each other. So I have decided to assemble a list of 150 people my daughter will need to know when she shows up in, uhh, about EIGHT WEEKS!

More to follow on the primary criteria. These are the no-brainers. If there is anyone out there worried about not being on the list, well, you should worry. Feel free to submit an application to me outlining the reasons you should be part of my daughter's 150 circle.

These are people she NEEDS TO KNOW, regardless of whether I like them or not. In fact, there may even be people on here I can't stand.

Actually...actually there won't be.

_______

TO MY DAUGHTER: YOUR 150 LIST :
001: Jon "Ponderosa Pine" Ponder.

Relevancy: literature fiend, poet, music wonker*, existential travelist, listmaker, real good spellist, Radiohead conversationalist, believes in libraries, sometimes laughs at your dad's insights, thinks your father is cool, will probably visit you out of the blue if you consistently bother him about it, will introduce you to poets your dad doesn't know about.

*if Mr. Ponder ever reads this, please submit a list for "Top Five Albums to Listen to in the First Six Months of Existence."

Predictions, pt. 2 : Ponder's Pick

If it's a boy, it will be born on July 1.

If it's a girl, it wil be born on July 18.

However, if it comes on any other date, it will be either a boy or a girl.

If it's a boy or a girl, it will be born on one of the dates I predicted, or on some other date.

If it's not human (and I'm not talking deformity here but rather meta-physicality), it will be beyond our lowly conceptions of space-time and will be born at a time and in a space that is neither time nor space but spiritual experience, which is to say eternity, and it (by this time "it" is the only appropriate pronoun the English language has for such a being), it will haunt our waking dreams and sleeping consciousness with love and bliss and ultimate meaning. Am I blowing your mind yet? Or am I creeping you out?

In the above eventuality, the child shall be named Om, but you'll actually spell it with the Sanskrit symbol.

The metaphysical scenario is not very likely, however, so I predict that if you settle on the name Orvis or Celester before knowing the gender, which I would completely understand and support, it will lock in the gender to male or female, respectively. It's an old folk way of choosing gender and really works. Unfortunately, the child has to live with one of those names, but, hey, "with great power comes inevitable sacrifice." I said that. And there's no "changing your mind" and changing the name after you get what you want. Don't mess with folk magic.

Final prediction: Orvis and Celester are the super-secret names you have up your sleeves and my mocking them will cause a serious rift in our relationship.

Jon