It's all over now

The fifteenth periodic Tropical Depression digest post

Jun 05, 2025

Here’s your fifteenth periodic digest post reviewing the last few entries and tossing in some recommendations, tidbits, etc.

Palatka, FL racetrack, mid-to-late 1970s. Photograph via Midwest Americana

A while back, a colleague and I stopped to help an old man whose car was stuck in the ice. Eventually a woman who lived nearby came out to help, with salt and a shovel. Then another dude came to help. Finally we got the car unstuck. It was very satisfying. The guy handed a $20 bill to my colleague and my colleague tried to refuse. “Take it!” said the old man. “Take it or I’ll drop it on the ground!” He took it but immediately handed it to the lady. She immediately handed it to the latecomer dude. He immediately handed it to me. I pocketed it.

Then a few days later, my family and I went to go see the Chris Comer Trio play as part of Outside the Spotlight, a series here in Lexington, which hosts experimental jazz and improvisational music. The events are free but have one of those suggested-donation boxes. My wife asked me urgently if I had cash. I did: the same $20 bill from earlier. I dropped it in the box and felt good. My son Cosmo, 3, and daughter Marigold, 7, are surprisingly game for experimental jazz. The trio—Fender Rhodes piano, cello, drums—debuted their improvisational piece “MUSIC FOR SPACESHIPS,” a trippy-riffy spin on the loose, ambient vibe of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Cosmo kept his eyes on the drums and drummed along on his sister’s leg. When we got home, he told me, “I’m glad we’re concertgoers.”

My children like graveyards. Cosmo will announce: “I want to go where the dead people are.” So we go. Marigold likes to read the inscriptions on the tombstones. Cosmo riffs and improvises his own material because he can’t read yet. They talk over each other and get frustrated.

Every day, they are one day older, same as me. One time, Cosmo woke up from a nap distraught that he didn’t have a tail. Another time, he was dreaming and talking in his sleep, just one word: “Decorations.”

From the archives

Here’s a March 2023 post about paintings I like. It was a reader favorite and one of my faves, too. Check it out if you’re a new subscriber, and of course there’s lots more in the archives.

Paintings I like

David Ramsey

March 24, 2023

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Strange Vibrations from behind the Iron Curtain

Woah. The cover of this album, Melodiya Enemble’s 1974 record Labryinth, does not prepare you for the music, which to my ears occasionally sounds closer to metal than “jazz-funk,” as it’s labeled on YouTube. Maybe some wacked out Frank Zappa energy? Mike Watt? Caper movie soundtrack? Art Ensemble of Chicago forced to get reckless with Phillip Glass? Lightning Bolt accidentally gets double booked with a jazz quartet? I don’t know. Melodiya was the Soviet Union’s state-run music label, and the band here is a supergroup of musicians from all over the Soviet empire. This is some bombastic, ferocious, sludgy, hypnotic bass-heavy, Doom-adjacent groovy stew. With very pleasant brass—repetitive, minimalist, melodic. A revelation.

Churches of Lexington, Kentucky (1)

Second Presbyterian Church, 460 E. Main St.

The congregation was founded in 1813 by James McChord, a young minister who got his start by preaching in a home, which was against the by-laws of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. McChord thought he should high-tail it out of Lexington given the transgression but his sermons were popular and he was convinced to stick around and start a church. This is the congregation’s third building; the first two were on Market Street. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln attended a Thanksgiving service shortly after the second church was dedicated. When the Presbyterian church divided during the Civil War, Second Presbyterian was the only local Presbyterian church to side with the North. In 1917, a fire broke out on the block, and wound up igniting the church tower’s pigeon nests. The church was totally destroyed and the congregation conducted services in a 1,500-seat movie palace downtown for the next seven years. The current building began construction in 1922 and was dedicated in 1924. Cram & Ferguson Architects, based in Concord, Massachusetts, designed the church, in the Gothic Revival style for which they were famous (Ralph Adams Cram has been called the “preeminent American Ecclesiastical Gothicist”). Look at those gabled buttresses. Wonderful work. This style conjures the Princeton University campus to me, and sure enough, Cram was the supervising architect at Princeton from 1907 to 1929. He was a man misplaced in time, perhaps (he was a reactionary monarchist in his politics). He made the cover of Time magazine in 1924 and the New York Times wrote that he was “one of the most prominent Episcopalian laymen in the country.” Last January, I took a walk in the snow and walked by the church and stopped just to look at it for a spell. I thought it was very nice indeed.

The ecumenical memorial service for Lexington was held at Second Presbyterian following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968. Via the Second Presbyterian Church in Lexington.

Been here for years

I’m not going to do the periodic request for people to sign up as paid subscribers because this is the longest stretch of dormancy Tropical Depression has ever had. I feel pretty bad about that. It was just one of those stretches of time, between teaching two classes and an epic seven-part investigative series, and some grant funded research at Berea College—the fruits of which I hope to be able to share with y’all soon. Plus the remnants of life logistics left over from moving. We are just shockingly, embarrassingly behind on the normal bits of middle-class-ish American obligation. You don’t want to move to another state with small children but we just keep doing it. Anyway. I am very excited about various material I have in the hopper for Tropical Depression. I would be so pleased if you could spread the word about this spot.

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a man talking to a batman with the words " i want you to tell all your friends about me " below him

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