18-Year Anniversary

The Milky Way

Back sometime around 2005 or 2006, I managed to download a copy of the 1993 album Namlook I: Astrogator, the first solo album by the Frankfurt electronic musician Peter Namlook.  Namlook passed away in 2012, and it wasn't until today, almost 10 years after his death, that I finally managed to snag a copy of Namlook II.

Not to worry, though. Namlook was famously prolific, and as previously documented in the other blog, I have over 100 LPs of his.  But not Namlook II, his second solo album.

But callooh, callay! Oh, frabjous day! Today I found Namlook's Bandcamp page, maintained by the label Silent State Recordings.  They've posted only a small fraction of Namlook's prodigious output, but fortunately for me, their selection includes a number of albums that I don't already have.

So today I purchased a copy of 1993's Namlook II: The Dutch Side of the Milky Way, as well as the compilations The Definitive Ambient Collection, Vol. I and Vol. II.  The compilation albums contain a lot of material that I already own, but it's interesting to hear the tracks mixed in a different order. Besides, most of my prior Namlook acquisitions were back in the days of Napster and usenet and aren't exactly what you would call legal, so the Bandcamp purchases were a small token of restitution for my previous piracy.  

The title The Dutch Side of the Milky Way is an obvious reference to Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.  Even though his music doesn't sound anything like Pink Floyd, Namlook apparently admired the English psychedelic band.  He named a series of collaborations with the recently departed Klaus Schultze The Dark Side of the Moog, and other Floyd references pop up in his album and track titles.

The Dutch Side of the Milky Way was recorded live in Amsterdam at the Melkweg club, pictured above.  "Melkweg" is Dutch for "Milky Way."  Melkweg is one of the most important music venues in Amsterdam and was a hangout for hippies in the 1970s and 1980s.  The club is mentioned in Cracker's Euro-Trash Girl, and The Church's Under the Milky Way is a reference to Melkweg. The club is still active today and hosts a variety of musical genres, including electronica, hip-hop, indie rock, reggae, and pop, as well as movies (Spike Lee's 1989 film Do the Right Thing is playing there tonight).

The album captures a 1993 performance by Namlook at Melkweg.  It's really one long improvisation, divided into mostly ten-minute tracks, each of which are titled Part I, Part II, etc.. According to Namlook, he had no preconceived composition for the performance - it was just an exploration of the effects the various electronic sounds of his instruments had on the room.  The show apparently employed a lot of very low frequencies that aren't audible in the recording; to hear the low end, your equipment would have to be capable of producing sound in the 20-45 Hz range (20 Hz is generally considered the low end of the human audible range). In his liner notes, Namlook says the reason for the very low frequencies "was my intention to let the audience feel the music instead of pure listening."

Even without the low end and despite the fact that it was recorded nearly 30 years ago, Namlook II is still an interesting listen.  Namlook's ambient recordings hold up today much better than his techno and dance music.   

And to address the obvious, yes, I did stumble across Namlook's Bandcamp page while web-surfing Klaus Schultze's music.

RIP Klaus Schultze (August 4, 1947 – April 26, 2022)

Impermanence is swift.

Another Example of My Shitty Poetry (It Sounds Like the Thunder Is Sitting on Top of the House)

Whenever there's a thunderstorm, a friend of mine has to comment on it on Facebook.  "Three loud strikes!," she'll note.  "The cats are already under the bed!"  

"OMG! That's the loudest thunder I've ever heard!"  "Big thunder in the evening!"  "It sounds like the end of the world!"  "Haven't seen the cats since the lightning at dawn!"

I don't know what she thinks will happen if thunder and lightning arrive and she doesn't comment on it.

A couple weeks ago, after a typical Georgia mid-afternoon thunderstorm, she posted "It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!"

That line got stuck in my head. The words "It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!" kept repeating themselves over and over again in my mind.  Lying in bed, I couldn't sleep as my mind kept parsing that line, trying to figure out why it was so compelling.

I think it's the rhythm - there's an urgency to it.  It's not quite iambic pentameter.  For one thing, there are seven feet (sets of two syllables) to the line, not five, and the emphasis isn't always on the second syllable.

There are 14 syllables to the phrase, and sometime around 2:00 a.m., I realized that in musical terms, the syllables comprised two bars.  They're in 7/8 rhythm, expressed as 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4.  To make it more complicated, the emphasis is on the 2 beat in the first line and on the 1 beat in the second, as follows:

it-SOUNDS-like    the-THUN-der-is 

SIT-ting-on        TOP-of-the-HOUSE

Sometime around 3:00 a.m., I decided that it wasn't 7/8 rhythm with shifting emphases after all, but five lines of three beats each, emphasis on the middle beat and a rest on the last line:  

it-SOUNDS-like    

the-THUN-der

is-SIT-ting

on-TOP-of

the-HOUSE (rest)

And what is that?  3/3 rhythm?  14/15?  Musicians, or those with any sense of music theory or notation, will clearly recognize that I have no idea what I'm talking about musically.  Writers and literary students will likewise recognize that I have no idea what I'm talking about with regard to poetry.  But anyone repeating the words to themselves will realize that something in the phrase gives it a kind of flow and urgency.  Say it out loud and you'll see what I mean.

"It sounds like the thunder is sitting on top of the house!"

"It SOUNDS like the THUN-der is SIT-ting on TOP of the HOUSE!"

"IT SOUNDS LIKE THE THUNDER IS SITTING ON TOP OF THE HOUSE!"

Whatever the time signature, whatever the poetic meter, my mind began thinking to that rhythm.  "Da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH-da da-DAH." Sometime around 4:00 a.m., I started to compose a poem in my head to that beat.  I altered the first line a little just to make it more genuinely and originally my own, and then stated thinking of words that rhyme with "house." "Mouse" immediately came to mind and seemed like it would come in handy when talking about frightened cats, but that also seemed a little too obvious.  What else rhymes with "house?" Louse? Douse? Grouse?

Any time I thought of a rhyming word, that rhythm, now so ingrained in my mind, would almost immediately come up with a line ending with that word. After I had several lines composed in my head, I got up out of bed (it was already starting to get light out outside) and wrote them down, not because I thought they were so great but just to get them out of my system so I could finally relax and get to sleep.

It worked.  When I finally got up late the next morning, this is what I found written:

The sound of the thunder is almost on top of the house

I can't feel the moisture but water has soaked through my blouse

I'm enchanted of course - the spell of a cat on a mouse

Or the conjugal ease of a wife enjoyed by her spouse

Imagine my disappointment. I hadn't expected to find greatness, but I thought that I'd at least have found something that made sense, not the doggerel scribbled above.  

But here's the odd thing I realized - while those lines absolutely do not work as poetry, if they were sang as the lyrics to a song they'd probably hold up, at least if the vocal performance and melody were even halfway competent.  I tried singing the lines and found that they fit very neatly to the tune of the classic David Bowie song Queen Bitch from the album Hunky Dory (1971). 

My late-night poetry might be lame, but is it really any worse than:

I'm up on the 11th floor and I'm watching the cruisers below

He's down on the street and he's trying hard to pull sister Flo

Oh, my heart's in the basement my weekend's at an all-time low

'Cause she's hoping to score so I can't see her letting him go

Now, I'm not saying that my poetry is equal to Bowie's songwriting, I'm just pointing out the magic that music and performance add to lyrics. If my late-night lines somehow appeared in Bowie's song, would it really have been any worse?

When Your Child's First Word is "MAGA"

 

Unpacking Big Ears, Part 2: Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble

After almost 2½ years of retirement, including two years of covid stay-at-home self-isolation, I was clearly out of shape.  Overweight and under-exercised.  Therefore, after performances of live music started again, part of my criteria for selecting sets to catch at the 2022 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville was the distance between venues.  Unlike years past, I wasn't going to attempt marathon speed walks up and down Gay Street between sets, from, say, the Bijou up to The Mill & Mine, a distance of nearly a mile.  

As previously documented, my first Big Ears set, as well as my first live show in over two years, was at The Standard for the band 75 Dollar Bill.  Based on the festival schedule and my understanding of Knoxville urban geography, the next set I wanted to hear was Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble at the Tennessee Amphitheater on the old (1982) World's Fairgrounds.  The Standard was on the northern side of the Big Ears map; and the Amphitheater was near the middle, although somewhat off to the west. As soon as 75 Dollar Bill wrapped up their set, I started to hoof it towards the fairgrounds.

It wasn't an easy walk, and the Google Maps app was deceptive.  Because Henley Street, a limited-access road feeding onto highway I-40, crosses between The Standard and the Amphitheater, roads with pedestrian access on both sides tend to turn away from Henley, making what appears on a map to be a direct route from Point A to Point B relatively impassible.  I wound up following a small group of people who looked like they might have been coming from the 75 Dollar Bill show and might have been heading to Damon Locks and presumably knew the way.  If they were in fact heading home to supper, I would have had to change my plans and eat dinner at their place with them. We crossed roads at seemingly random spots, climbed up and over the traffic at several pedestrian walkways, and eventually the Sunsphere, Knoxville's phallic remnant of the World's Fair, came into view.  I navigated toward the Sunsphere and from there I spotted the Amphitheater, and finally arrived with time to spare for Locks' set.  

My legs were already sore, the walk tired me out, and I was not even halfway through the first day of the four-day festival.

What's more, the whole thing was a leap of faith: I didn't know the Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble  - never heard them - although I had heard of some of the member musicians.  Clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid is affiliated with the AACM and has performed with Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra.  Cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, another AACM affiliate, has performed with Joshua Abrams, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Jeff Parker, and Tomeka Reid.  So I knew to expect jazz, and free, avant-garde jazz at that.  But mainly, the set filled the available time slot and was located roughly half-way between The Standard and St. John's Cathedral, the venue for the next set I wanted to see.

As the Ensemble took the stage, what I wasn't expecting to see were four vocalists taking center stage. I had assumed the band was an instrumental-based jazz ensemble, not a song-based vocal ensemble.  But I set my predilections and biases aside and opened my mind to their set, and was completely captivated by what I heard.

Someone recorded part of the set and uploaded it to YouTube.  Here they are, performing From A Spark To A Fire and Solar Power.

One note: absolutely no fault of the Black Monument Ensemble, but the quality of the Amphitheater sound system was atrocious.  The Tennessee Amphitheater is run by the Knoxville Parks Department, and the PA system is apparently intended for speeches and public ceremonies, not for live music performances. All of the sound - the four singers, Locks' electronics, the drums, and Dawid and Gay's instruments, was all channeled into a single speaker, which poorly broadcast the sound to the audience.  But despite this impediment, the Ensemble still put on a magnificent set, even using the limitations of the PA system to sonic effect.  The sound you hear isn't limited by the recording and YouTube upload - it sounded that compressed live.

The gamut of my emotions: I went from I-don't-like-vocal-jazz-and-won't-enjoy-this-set, to this-isn't-too-bad to this-is-the-greatest-thing-I've-heard-in-years, despite the sound system.  Angel Bat Dawid in particular was a joyous force of nature, both in her playing and her playful stage banter between songs. By the end of their set, I was up out of my seat and on my tired feet, clapping hands over my head, and swaying with the music, like most of the rest of the audience.

From what I understand, Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble have two albums out - 2019's Where Future Unfolds, which includes both songs above, and 2021's Now, which is arguably even better.  Here's the title track from Now, subtitled Forever Momentary Space, powerfully realized with animation by Rob Shaw, footage by Brian Ashby, and art by Locks himself.  The song is a masterpiece, from Dawid's Rahsaan-like opening lines through the Sun Ra-like vocals and beyond.

This is the beauty of the Big Ears Festival - you can go to a set about which you know nothing and can still pretty reliably have an astonishing experience.  It's all good - what you know and what you haven't yet heard.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a disappointing set.  

At this point, I was halfway through the opening first day of the festival, and the shortest day at that, and had already heard an incredible set by an expanded version of a band I knew, the 75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band, and a revelatory set by a new-to-me group, Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble. I still had two more sets to go that night, plus three more days of the festival. I was off to a good start.

Meanwhile, In Cartersville, Georgia

 God help America!

Unpacking Big Ears, Part 1: 75 Dollar Bill

The last show I saw prior to the covid pandemic was a set at The Earl by indie-pop singer Mattiel in late February 2020. The show was okay and the sold-out audience was enthusiastic (Mattiel is an Atlanta native), but not even remotely suspecting what was coming down the pike, it was hardly what I would have chosen as my last show for two years (possibly forever for all I knew).

All music venues in Atlanta were shut down for most of 2020 and although some limited shows started again in 2021, I for one didn't feel comfortable enough to go back into little sweaty crowded clubs to hear live music yet, especially considering Georgia's low vaccination rate and cavalier attitude toward mask wearing.  

During those two years (2020 and 2021), I attempted to satisfied my thirst for music by exploring the web - scouring Bandcamp and Spotify, searching music blogs for new artists, and following the YouTube algorithms down whatever rabbit hole they led. One of my discoveries was the French drone band Natural Snow Buildings, and in my research into them, I found some videos of their rare live performances on the Archives-Live Ben Lx YouTube channel.  I then watched several other videos on the Archives-Live Ben Lx YouTube channel, and discovered another new (to me) band, Brooklyn's 75 Dollar Bill.

This 2016 performance by 75 Dollar Bill at Paris' Espace en Cours was my first exposure to the duo of guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown.  

There are clearly drone elements to the band's sound, but the attraction to me was the improvisational aspects of their performance and the sub-Saharan tone of Chen's guitar.  I watched several other videos of their performances and explored their Bandcamp page. I liked them.

Fast forward to March 2022: The umpteenth wave of covid infections had seemingly passed and I bought myself a VIP pass to the 2022 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The first performance I caught there, an early-evening set on Thursday at The Standard, was by 75 Dollar Bill.  

I went into The Standard, not only my first time inside a music venue since the February 2020 set by Mattiel at The Earl but also my first live show since then, expecting to hear a duo performance like the 2016 set in Paris.

This video isn't their Big Ears set (it's a 2019 video of a set in Brooklyn), but this is what they delivered in Knoxville:

The "Little Big Band" in the video isn't exactly the same as the one at Big Ears, but it's similar. The Big Ears set didn't have Joshua Abrams on acoustic bass, although Abrams' Natural Information Society played The Standard the next night (missed them - I was at the Danish band Efterklang's set at The Bijou).  Andrew Lafkas was on bass instead, but both sets included the string section of Karen Waltuch (viola), Talice Lee (violin) and Sue Garner (electric bass). There was no harmonium, but the 75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band at Big Ears had Cheryl Kingan on sax, Jim Pugliese on congas, and Barry Weisblat on cowbell (don't worry if you don't recognize the names - they're new to me as well).

Over two years had passed between Mattiel at The Earl and 75 Dollar Bill at The Standard.  It was good to finally hear live music again, and what a way to start!

Odwalla

What the chicken-fried fuck is wrong with the people at Spotify?  Their stream of the 1973 album Bap-Tizum by the Art Ensemble of Chicago doesn't include the climactic composition Odwalla, even though the song title is listed under the album.

Bap-Tizum was recorded live at the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, and it was many people's first introduction to the Art Ensemble. It was my first encounter to the trail-blazing quintet. It's a significant recording documenting the transition from the fiery and often angry free jazz of the 1960s to the more exploratory and world-music focused free jazz of the 1970s, as well as an introduction to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that still promotes and supports jazz music today.  Several of the acts that I saw at the 2022 Big Ears Festival had AACM ties.  In 2018, I overheard the Art Ensemble's Roscoe Mitchell play the song Odwalla from Bap-Tizum as he was warming up for his performance at the Big Ears Festival.

On Bap-Tizum, the Ensemble was introduced by the political radical John Sinclair, one of the founders of the anti-fascist, anti-racist political collective The White Panthers (his voice can also be heard at the outro of the closing composition, Odwalla).  His 47-second intro is listed on the album's set list as "Introduction" and segues directly into the all-percussion opening track Nfamoudou-Boudougou.

But although Spotify doesn't list the Introduction track, it includes it as Nfamoudou-Boudougou.  What is actually Nfamoudou-Boudougou is then listed as the next track, the all-vocal Immm.  Immm is then included as the following track, Unanka, and so on.  Finally, the last track on the album, Odwalla, the composition that gently brings the listener back to planet Earth after the alternate states of consciousness induced by the previous tracks, is omitted altogether.

Listening to the Bap-Tizum album for like the 300th time, I find myself anticipating Odwalla nearly halfway through.  To my ears, the whole 1972 set was just like an extended prelude to Odwalla.  That closing cut defines the album.  Listening to Bap-Tizum without Odwalla at the end is like listening to King Crimson's first album without hearing In the Court of the Crimson King. It's like Animal Collective's Spirit They're Gone, Spirits They've Vanished without Alvin Row at the end. It just doesn't work.

Spotify doesn't allow comments on their app, so it's not easy to point out the error.  There is a "Report" feature to complain about copyright infringement or obscenity, but not to point out they messed up the track sequence.  We'll just have to learn to live in a diminished world without Odwalla closing out Bap-Tizum.

 

From the Gaming Desk

It's been a while since the Gaming Desk posted anything here.  Last told, the Retired Old Man had just wrapped up playing Mass Effect 1 back on January 15, and was looking forward to playing ME 2 and ME 3. By mid-February, the entire Mass Effect trilogy was completed, and the ROM had found the sci-fi games quite rewarding, especially for the intelligent and well-written storyline.

Valentine's Day found the ROM celebrating by launching the game Horizon: Zero Dawn.  It was just about on that same date that the game's sequel, Horizon: Forbidden West, dropped to much critical acclaim. Frankly, the ROM thought Zero Dawn was a masterpiece, and would put it in the top pantheon of games played, right alongside The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.  Zero Dawn didn't hurt itself at all with the storyline (especially the voice acting of the great Ashley Burch), but what really drew him in were the incredibly beautiful graphics and the gameplay mechanics.  Rarely has he enjoyed killing enemies as much as he enjoyed taking down the big mechanical beasts in Zero Dawn.  The Gaming Desk could go on, but we've come to understand that no one really cares what a 68-year-old ROM thinks about a video game, and with the release of Forbidden West, the praises of the Horizon franchise have been pretty well documented lately.

We'll add this note in praise of Zero Dawn, though - unlike a lot of other games, where the initial weapon you receive is no more effective than a pea-shooter, you're given a fairly efficient bow and arrow right at the beginning of the game and are taught how to take down at least some of those mechanical beasts with a single shot.  It's encouraging to be good at something right at the start of a game and be able to one-shot your enemies, and while the challenges rise throughout the game, your skill sets do as well.  Some of the latter bosses are quite challenging, but the game gives you confidence from the outset that you can figure out a strategy to beat even the gnarliest beast under the most challenging of conditions.  It's a refreshing change from so many other games that seem to want to beat you down and break your spirit at the start, only to slowly allow you to rebuild and develop from there.

It took the ROM 183 hours over about 30 days to finally beat Zero Dawn, putting it between Far Cry 4 (177 hours) and Assassin's Creed: Origins (190 hours) in terms of hours played.  The ROM didn't record the exact day he wrapped the game up and moved on to the next, but his Steam statistics indicate he finally reached Level 60, the highest level (we think) on March 14, and got his first "achievement awards" on his next game, Days Gone, on March 18, so you do the math.

The ROM didn't like Days Gone at first.  That's not unusual - he often finds a new game to be awkward and unsatisfying during his first several hours of playing. The controls are different from the last game played and therefore seem "wrong," the look and general aesthetics are different, and it's simply not the same game experience. This perception is especially acute after completing a game as fulfilling and satisfying as Horizon: Zero Dawn.  

Days Gone is the story of an outlaw biker surviving a zombie apocalypse in rural Oregon.  If you think Sons of Anarchy meets The Walking Dead, you're not too far off the mark. While the ROM enjoyed at least the first couple seasons of both shows, Days Gone didn't look or feel like Zero Dawn, and the ROM had concluded that after a streak of highly enjoyable games (Far Cry 6, the Mass Effect trilogy, and Horizon: Zero Dawn) he had finally downloaded a dud.  He didn't have nearly enough ammunition to fight the first of the zombie enemies (Only three bullets? Really?), his motorcycle ran out of fuel and had to be walked over a kilometer back to base camp, and he kept dying at every hostile encounter. It was the direct, polar opposite of the initial Zero Dawn experience.

But he soon realized that Days Gone is as much of a stealth game as a shooter game, and that foraging for ammo, fuel, and parts is a major component of gameplay.  He was soon drawn in by the beautifully rendered Oregon scenery, and as it developed, the storyline wasn't too bad, either.  The game's not perfect - it's not in the pantheon with The Witcher and Zero Dawn, but it's at least on par with any of the Fallout games (which, despite its post-apocalyptic setting, it doesn't at all resemble). The ROM soon found himself anxious to start playing again, to go back to that Pacific Northwest countryside and become that biker character again.  He's probably about halfway through right now, and as of today, he's finding the game most enjoyable.

Days Gone is played from the POV of a male character and most but not all of the significant NPCs are also male.  It's a fairly macho game to be sure, but the female characters are well portrayed and are free from sexist stereotypes.  Unlike, say, Red Dead Redemption, where it seems like all the women are either prostitutes, alcoholics, or both, the female characters in Days Gone have fully developed characters with well-formulated back stories, and don't exist merely as eye candy for adolescent male players or for the gratification of the main male character. It's a decidedly non-sexist game, even if you don't have the option to pick your character's gender.

So the Far Cry 6, Mass Effect trilogy, and Horizon: Zero Dawn streak of enjoyable games continues after all.  Here's a list of games the ROM has already purchased but not yet started.  

• A Plague Tale
• Fallout 3
• Tomb Raider (2013)
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Cities Skylines

Anyone have any recommendations on which game to play next after Days Gone?

A Modest Proposal

"Best Scenic Overlook #2" by Lindsey Lee, Google Maps

Richard Brevard Russell Jr. was born in 1897 and was the Governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933 before serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 40 years (1933 until his death in 1971). A staunch segregationist, Russell was a leading opponent of the civil-rights movement for decades, and with Strom Thurmond co-authored the so-called Southern Manifesto, which opposed school integration and civil rights. He strongly defended white supremacy and apparently did not question or ever apologize for his segregationist views, votes and speeches. For decades, he was key in blocking meaningful civil-rights legislation intended to protect African Americans from lynching, disenfranchisement, and disparate treatment under the law.  In 1964, he boycotted the Democratic National Convention along with Herman Talmadge and Russell Long in protest of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act.

In short, he was a racist piece of shit who carried 19th Century racial biases way too long into the 20th Century.

But due too his long tenure in the Senate, as well as the popularity of his views among a certain portion of the Georgia electorate, his name has been memorialized on various buildings and other structures in Georgia. A bronze statue of Russell stands on the lawn of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, and the Richard B. Russell Federal Building is the primary home of most federal offices in Atlanta (in Washington, D.C., the Russell Senate Office Building is the oldest of the three U.S. Senate office buildings). A Richard B. Russell Dam and Lake, part of the Richard B. Russell Multiple Resource Area, is located on the upper Savannah River, and a Georgia state park on the shores of that lake also bears Russell's name. There's a Richard B. Russell Airport in Rome, Georgia, and the USS Richard B. Russell U.S. Navy submarine served from 1975 to 1994.  There are Russell Elementary Schools in Warner Robins and .Smyrna, Georgia and a Richard B. Russell Jr. Middle School in Winder, Georgia.

In 1939, the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway (GA 348) was constructed in the Chattahoochee National Forest in the North Georgia mountains.  Today, it is part of the Russell-Brasstown National Scenic Byway.

There is nothing much that can be done about a long-term Senator's name appearing on numerous roads, schools, and buildings.  But in the field of geology, rock formations are named for localities where the rocks are prominently displayed.  The Clairmont Formation is named for conspicuous exposures of the rock on Clairmont Road, and the Zebulon Formation is named for the town of Zebulon, Georgia.  There are numerous bedrock outcroppings along the Richard B. Lewis Scenic Highway, and in the early 1980s, geologists coined the name "Richard Russell Formation" (later the "Richard Russell Gneiss") for those rocks and described the terrane in which the rocks occur as the "Richard Russell thrust sheet."

I don't ascribe racism or any other sinister motive to the naming decision.  The geologists were merely following standard geologic convention in the nomenclature, naming the rocks exposed along the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway the "Richard Russell Formation."  It's a sparsely-populated, wilderness area, and there weren't that many other geographical names nearby.  Besides, after serving as a Governor and Senator for some 40 years before finally passing away in 1971, the name "Richard Russell" was familiar to Georgians and probably lacked the "shock value" to geologists in the early 80s that it has to folks today.

Since that time, the name "Richard Russell Formation" has appeared in geological maps and various reports, academic theses, and professional journals.  It's entrenched in the geologic literature, and it wouldn't be easy to replace the name.

But it wouldn't be impossible either.  From time to time, geologic formation names are changed.  For example, sometimes it's realized that the rocks at the type locality, the place for which the rocks are named, are actually part of a different formation, and a new type location is designated and the name changed to something more appropriate.  There are other reasons, too, but to my knowledge names have not yet been changed due to political correctness or sensitivity with regard to offensiveness (although some USGS topographical maps have been edited to remove the notorious "N-word" from geographic place names).   

I dislike Russell being given legitimacy by having his name continue to appear in the geologic literature some 50-plus years after his death, and I don't like parts of Georgia carrying on the legacy of his hateful views.  So I would like to propose a face-saving compromise that allows for a name change without opening the Pandora's of political correctness.  

While it may seem logical to name the rocks along the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway the "Richard Russell Formation," it's also a bit vague.  Where along the 17-mile highway are these rocks?  Well, it turns out the rocks are most dramatically exposed at Hogpen Gap, where the Appalachian Trail crosses the Highway.  One of the identifying characteristics of the formation are the numerous fractures from which groundwater seeps, and in winter the exposures at Hogpen Gap are commonly photographed for the picturesque icicles and ice flows emanating from the outcrops.

Since the rocks along the You-Know-Who Scenic Highway are well known and something of a tourist attraction in themselves, I propose that the rocks be more accurately renamed the "Hogpen Gap Formation" (or "Hogpen Gap Gneiss" is you prefer) for geographic accuracy, rather that the vaguer "Richard Russell Formation" (or "Gneiss").  By extension, the name for the underlying tectonic terrane should also be changed to the "Hogpen Gap thrust sheet."  

It's up to someone other than I to formally propose the change, and I won't even ask for attribution or citation. It's also up to others to change the name of those office buildings (in 2018, Charles Schumer proposed renaming the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington to that of the deceased Senator John McCain).  And someday, someone will take down that statue at the Georgia Capitol.  But meanwhile, can't we just call the Richard Russell Formation the "Hogpen Gap Gneiss"?

Nest Up: That Georgia lake and National Recreation Area names for Trail of Tears commander Winfield Scott.