Tuesday, December 24, 2002 3:18 PM
Family Christmas Party
Last year, I pretty much walked out of this Christmas gathering and into a hospital. I spent three days prodded with a stainless array of needle and plastic tubing filling my body with a modern miracle of biological soup. Parked planted and potted I sat in cold hallways with equally forlorn souls opposite me gazing at the floor or longingly out a window. Ill health like a ruthless final examination starts you to thinking. I have spent the year thinking.
I realized that what got me to this state of abominable bad health was a lifelong series of bad decision. I began to dwell with microscopic intensity not only on my physical bad decision, but those of the intellect and those of the spirit. It turned out that at every branch in my life’s path I had made grossly immature judgments and acted in equal proportion with bad faith. What a mess! Don’t worry I won’t list in front of you the egregious list of monumental blunders that I found in my life. Trust me it was a number that rivaled all the sand in all the beaches in all the world, and possibly Mars as well.
I spent dark nights of the soul searching, awake, sweating in the bed. I counted up all the bodies and finally could sleep fitfully on a mattress of gripes and sorrows and plights and hurts and sores and sickness and weaknesses and faults and failings and defects and flaws and shortcomings.
This year I feel like I have been slogging through all that same troubled sand just to get here. At every juncture something has intervened to keep me from fully appreciating the holiday spirit that I have projected on the full silver screen of my fantasy. I feel like a series of sharp stinging electric jolts keep me away from my true desires and hobbled to the “real” world. I shake my head after one year of considering, and wonder if an eternity of thinking will improve me. Changes, large and small, positive and negative, come with a series of corrections in the dark on storm chased seas.
When you begin writing a story, the first idea to develop is the main character’s “fatal flaw”. Without that flaw there will be no engine to drive the story forward. My story is driven by my flaws. So is yours! Those flaws are more responsible for our growth and personality than are our strengths, our talents, our gifts. Isn’t that what they are called? Those shining parts of us? Gifts? Like gifts they are acquired with ease and enjoyed with delight.
It used to make me crazy that gifted people could learn faster, sing sweeter, jump higher, look better, relate more easily than I can. I guess it still does bother me. That bother is one of my flaws. I cry. I rail. I gnash my teeth. I’m really getting the hang of this suffering.
But when I peer subatomically at all the problems that I had been gleefully dwelling upon with the intensity of a Dramatic Tragedy I find that they are merely shrines that I had carefully and lovingly erected on the path. When I open the creaking doors, there is nothing inside. The contents long ago had been transformed. They had been resurrected. They had been reborn, propelled, for better and for worse, into some part of my psyche that became manifest in my personality. They are some of the fuel that feeds the engine that drives me.
One day a friend and I wrote on yellow lined paper tablets lists of all the twisted awful things that we knew somehow interfered with our lives our work our selves. We then took the list, placed it into an empty trash can. Carried it down to the Mon River. Then we set it afire. It blazed in the twilight. Gray dark smoke roiled out of the container. When it remained as only charred ashes, we then kicked the hot can and emptied it into the River. As our worries, our fears, memories of ill wrought events, bad ideas, bad smells, worthless longings, our shower of flaws hit the river, a massive wave kicked a hiss of water back at us onto the shore. It flowed over our shoes and seeped the purified and transformed residue back into us.
I think that we should enjoy, praise and showcase our gifts. They are also a part of our precious selves. But it is time tonight to celebrate our flaws. Here is the challenge. Here is where we limit ourselves. Here is where we embarrass ourselves. Here is where we can dwell in groundless stupidity. Here is where we can truly cause evil to happen to ourselves and to others. Here is where we kill ourselves. And here is where we can be seen in all human splendor.
We find our true worth in the struggle, in the muck of decision that drives us forward in despair, in doubt, and with anxiety. Often we don’t measure up. We dwell lovingly with images that have long ago been raised and transformed from our hollow empty monuments. But it is here, in this slippery, confused ground of being that we can also be delivered to hope and to glory. And as we struggle on this muddied indeterminate field we can turn on nights like these to our friends and family, greater and close, past and present and get a shining smile of affirmation. Merry Christmas to you all!
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Monday, December 16, 2002
Monday, December 16, 2002 8:50 PM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Dreams of ExtraTerrestrials - Three
Falling swiftly across the frigid north, high above the DEW line geodesic domes painted pure white snow; further blurred white by frequent blizzard came the bright glowing sphere. Some say yellow, some say green. Esquimaux waved as it streaked across the sky. It paid little heed and plowed a heated furrow in the upper atmosphere. Saber jets from nearby Prudhoe AFB scrambled but could not match the incredible speed of the fiery ball. Nations went on Option One Alert Red Red Red. Two youngsters, call them Tommy and Johnny pitched desultory soggy soft balls to one another, whap! and let two or three gather in the outfield before one boy or the other would hop the distance and retrieve them with a weak overhand throw to the pitchers mound. Newscasters with wide banded hooked down brim Stetsons sweated in front of hot studio microphones and announced with a growing foreboding the impending doom. Somewhere above Manitoba the thing did a hard left turn and headed toward our boys in anytown everytime US of A.
Johnny, or Tommy, laid down at the base of the pitchers mound. Tommy, or Johnny, joined him. They shaded their eyes with their heavy hooked hands and looked into the hot pale blue summer cloudless sky. The heat wavered around their bodies. They used the webbing of their catching mitts , expended more work than purchased, to cool sweat rivulets that ran the contour of their faces. A long cool shadow and a low pitched throb that shook the roots of Tommy’s new silver fillings settled over them. The low pleasant throb started an ascent to a high howl and slowly, a slowness that expended massive impressive quantities of sheer power, the, some say yellow, some say green, globe settled earth ward. Eventually landing dead concentric center in the pitchers mound. By that time both youngsters were sitting, one in a blighted elm the other in a sticky maple about ten feet above the ground at the edge of the field.
The Civilian Guard came first with comfortably armed, 50 mm rounds dispensed from an air coiled platform, open half-tracks. Shiny green hard helmets over admirable young shaven heads and khaki green fatigues. They set up a perimeter of fire and drank tin cups filled with sloppy coffee made in large silvery commissary pots. Several shook brown papered cigarettes from government issued packages adorned with green targets. After about two hours decks of playing cards came out of field packs, and from under front vehicle seats and wagers consisting of cans of water packed fruit, tins of spicy ham, three by five photographs of bathing beauties began to madly change hands. Johnny, and Tommy, timidly came down from their perches and ate a can of peaches that was offered to them. The glowing object on the pitcher’s mound throbbed and twinkled. Finally the press was granted entry to the area by General Higgenbottham..
At a little after midnight a hatch making a sound like a man hole cover twirling down the spiral of entropy opened and out popped, quicker than any one eye could see, later photographs, taken by Jim Schneider who was walking the dog and had a camera complete with infrared scan, revealed in time lapse a radiant red dot that grew and finally filled the 35 mm frame with a fearful iridescence, a large metallic, smooth as the gleam on a mirror, robot. Ten feet tall if it was an inch. The Guard sprang to attention and bristled a fairly large array of rifled barrel at the creature. It stood, impassive in the moonlight. David clean features chiseled by some alien Michelangelo. “Hey. Kids, stay back!” barked Corporal Henry Baker IV Corps press liaison. Tommy, and Johnny, moved forward slowly toward the solid monument in the grass next to the sphere sitting on the pitchers mound, Grand Memorial Park. They had their baseball caps in their hands and moved in a dreadful unison. As if in a daze.
The large tin man bent slowly and picked both of them up and quick as a nod up the chimney disappeared back into the vessel. Oh Dear! The growing throng of listless people flared passed the phalanx of the Guard and beat on the sides of the space, if that is indeed where it came from, ship. Time, parallel time was another possibility. Eventually a governmental gent from Project Blue Book showed up but by then all the evidence was trampled into the deep recesses of the playground and Tommy, or Johnny, was in the engineering program at MIT. So issued another case of inconclusive evidence by the Air Force experts Possibly, suggested Gustav Holstbinder, Doctor of somethinghighorother, it was just a case of burgeoning master hysteria caused by the psychosociopolitco temper of those times. Most of the crowd pounders got bad ruddy blisters and lived to be a hundred and seven.
9:01 AM The church bells at St Benny’s began to clang and several of the volunteer fire crew present felt the irresistible urge to fire up the sirens down at the hall on Borgman Road. Tommy or Johnny appeared in front of the crowd. The globe began to flash a pastel rainbow of noise that changed to a fine garish neon display and gently, with stealth ease lifted to about twenty feet, then disappeared into an arc of light that reached the ionosphere in 2.34578 seconds, but who was really counting and finally it was coasting on a solar wave into the depths of intergalactic space. After the blush of wonder wiped off the faces of those present, Tommy, or Johnny, were questioned. “What was it like in there?” breathed ace reporter Carol Sajak, for Channel Seven, Canal Broadcasting, the News Team.
“Like a big baseball stadium.” said Johnny.
“Yeah, but the balls were in the stands watching as people went rolling around the bases.”
They never, Tommy or Johnny, said another word about the experience.
Monday, December 09, 2002
Monday, December 09, 2002 5:26 PM Joe Coluccio
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Everyone who’s heard of Groff Conklin raise your tentacle!
One of the ways, as I chronologically fight with more and hardier resources, sagging skin, loss of hair, couch potato ness and a decided degree of angst in the face of all that I have not achieved, I move, somewhat mentally and mostly spiritually, against ever present entropy is via my own personal time machine. It is a simple mechanism really. No “way back machine”. No Delorian. Hardly new technology. Invented mid-fifteenth century, born royal folio size by hands and design of a German in Mainz, Rhineland, 180 volumes strong of which only 48 remainder pieces are extant, and none of those at the mall in B.Dalton Booksellers next to coffee table books about Hitler’s SS, Marionettes in History and Quilt Making. I refer to Moveable Type! The Gutenberg Bible, the referenced work. Over the centuries the presses have become more efficient, influential and pervasive. Put that in your e-reader Mr. Virtual!
I have been a collector of many peculiar books most of my life. Witness the wall to wall profusion in the basement where I presently sit. Filled as it is with “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
So, find me, if you look and will, frequently in thrift stores hidden behind rows of hand me down clothing and partially damaged appliances, looking at the eclectic tattered normally plebian selection of magazines, paper backs and hard backs. It is nothing less significant than the conquest of time that I seek. Or maybe just something good to read.
Now, take a trip with me if you will to 1533 Maple Avenue circa 1957, Rosedale. There I sit with old Fezziwig. It’s Fezziwig alive again!…ooops wrong story…on the front door stoop between the rhododendron plants and the damaged pink flamingos that survived a return trip with my family after a visit to Uncle Augie in Miami Beach. That blue plastic Arvin transistor radio in my lap with the 360 degree AM antenna has no FM band. Frequency Modulation has not debuted. Out of the speakers this wonderfully warm Saturday morning is Al Noble counting down the top 100 hits on KQV. Still 1410 AM. I am personally hoping that the Bobbettes and Mr. Lee make it to number one this week. ..three, four, five, look at him jive.
Next to me three or four garish, lurid science fiction pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction and atop those an anthology of SF stories called Omnibus of Science Fiction. Compiled by none other that Groff Conklin. I was certain that Groff was his real name all these years until a small doubt crept into my thinking the other day and I looked it up, dub dub dub. O me of little faith, it is his real name, and what a moniker for the man who is as influential in the history of SF as many of the more luminous bodies. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Healy and McComas, Rod Serling even. (Admit it you don’t have a clue except for Serling.)
The doubt was occasioned by a first edition dust jacketless copy of the aforementioned Omnibus set behind the endless scratchy rows of LP 33 1/3 RPM Phonograph Records. I paid my seventy five cents, less I might add than the original cover price, and jumped (this is real time travel terminology here) back to young Joe. The hard head paid scant attention to my advice. Indeed, he paid no attention to me at all. Youth is wasted, I sighed, on the wrong people. Lest you think this is a fantasy. I am well aware that the Omnibus was published in 1952. I will only point out that the copy with me five years later was from the library. Verisimilitude restored!
I spent time (all the time in the world) in the introduction. Groff Conklin was an Aristotle of Science Fiction. He categorized with endless invention his compilations of stories: Worlds of Tomorrow, From Outer Space, The Best of Science Fiction, The Atom, Adventures in Dimension, The Super Science of Man, Far Traveling a smattering of the groupings cataloged. All of the great, optimistic, golden age science fiction writers are represented in the first five or six of Groff’s anthologies. (Andre Maurois? Jack London? I guess everyone tries Science Fiction.)
I slip back each evening, while I eat some dread natural food and sip some low level dose of alcohol. I laze the lazy day on the stoop, look out at the somnambulant traffic patterns on Maple Avenue (RD1, Verona, PA), wave to relations and friends, listen softly to Come Go With Me, Johnny B. Goode, Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu, I wonder wonder who wrote the book of love, and read the wonders prepared for me by Groff.
You scoff? Don’t think it happens? Well then, look closely at that picture taken the following summer in front of the house. The Coca Cola Brown and White ’55 Buick in the drive to the left. Isn’t that me? In the picture? Well?
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Sunday, December 01, 2002 7:20 AM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.
Dreams of Extraterrestrials Version 2.0.0.0
If you go up into the mountains along Rt. 62 and wind down the two lane blacktop with stands of trees that reach past the sky and keep the world green and cool yet on the hottest august day. You come, eventually, after a bridge that crosses a narrow strip of the Allegheny to a double A frame country style store that was equipped with a couple display glass door coolers, filled with milk and sparkling beverages, so the blue and red magic marker sign said; an ice cream novelty case; a small meat locker; a counter the runs the back wall loaded with newspapers some day or older; a dirt brown cash register; beef jerky hung in proud profusion from a pictured placard; furry notions and trinkets fashioned of soft wood sporting outhouse jokes.
Next to the store is a small office mostly abandoned, except Saturdays in the morning, that has gilt painted Justice of the Peace, Roy “Mad” Hatter on a glass frame in a heavy dark door. At the far end of the strip of building is yet another small office.
“The place has been abandoned and dark like that for nearly fifteen years now. Since Gregory Lukacs died and his daughter moved the Ohio Indiana border.”
Around back in rustic disuse the remnants of chicken wire cages stapled to the long bark stripped poles that once organically graced the clearing in a less civilized day.
“They used to keep the skunks in that one!”
Weathered sign over an entry that would with its large log arch do the great wall of Skull Island, burned as Selznick conflagrated Atlanta in ’39, proud, painted in crude red letters, Petting Zoo. Cage, the rabbits, after cage, a doe and her bambi, after cage, once a bear, but no one would pet it, after cage, two raccoons, an opossum nearly blind crazy from the sun.
“Dolores, that was the daughter, tried to keep the animals, but old Greg was really just a scratch farmer and when cold weather came and tourists left their camps, well…the girl really did the best she could. She was a pretty little thing. Would break your heart. Some would have liked to see Greg sitting in a cage.”
The empty room at the far end was just really four bare wooden walls, a picture of President Eisenhower in general attire with a smile, a log hewn table with matching chair and a plastic covered single pane glass window at the rear. One lighting fixture turned on with a pull chain that clanged like a dull bell against the bare bulb when you used it hung down from the ceiling.
“It made the papers all the way down to Pittsburgh. Not the headlines or nothing like that. There was a picture of Old Greg holding that twisted rock. And people started coming like it was a pilgrimage to something holy. Father Daniels gave us a sermon the first Sunday after, saying that he didn’t think the church was doing such a good job any more of filling our life with the spirit when a piece of a flying saucer could replace Jesus.”
Farmer Discovers Part of a Flying Saucer. The rock was still warm to the touch when Gregory Lukacs traced down the flaming streak in the sky in the woods south of his back porch. Harry Danton picked up the story from Greg at the barber shop the next day and ran it in the Gazette. No one made mention of the little round eyed aliens that surely must now reside up on the Ridge.
“Eloise Cutter seen one, when she puttin’ an apple pie to cool on the sill, across the back yard. Cute little thing. She left the pie hot and shimmering there figurin’ it was hungry.
The Arcadia down on Mulberry Street started running factual movies about “lights in the sky” and the high school dance committee made Flying Saucers the theme of the Spring Dance. Hung cardboard replicas silver painted with gold sparkles outlining the border from the rafters of the gymnasium. Two babies were conceived that night at the Ford high across the river under the dark night glittering with stars.
“Greg did a pretty good job with the empty back room. He hung a bunch of heavy black cloth, donated by Fay’s Fabrics on the walls, over the window, got a spotlight from the hardware that beamed down on the rock sitting on a brick covered with a piece of dark purple crushed velvet.”
It was Delores who took people in. Greg was just too happy collecting the two dollars, five per family no matter what the size. People stood, hats in their hands, contemplating the marvelelous artifact that had come from across the universe.
One small boy, holding his mother’s hand, longing equally for Delores and the gnarled lump of heavy metal stared silently as the dead room air recognized his thoughts. He twisted his head skyward penetrating the confines of the room soaring out into a deep black hostile familiar universe. Rode a comet out to the bounds of the solar system, flowed beyond the frigid Styx guarding Pluto, further than Proxima Centauri, through the dense hot belly of the Milky Way on toward expanding Andromeda and the start of time.
Saturday, November 30, 2002
November 30, 2002 4:21 PM Joe Coluccio
Dreams of Extraterrestrials – Version 1.0.0.0
Farmer Johnstone and his wife Betsy, who first contacted the Far Fumbling Fab from Eridani False Sun Seven said, “Well, hell, I just naturly assumed they was beaners from the border crossing so I put ‘em to work pickin’ peaches.”
“They did have a kinda cunning silvery glint in their eyes, which was as many colored as the rainbow in a wet sky” said Betsy, “Their skin was real scaly, but it was packed in some kind of sardiny grease. I told Farmer he should pay ‘em a little more than minimum, because workers is so hard to find at the harvest time. We let ‘em set up housekeepin’ in the far shed.”
“ ’Magine my surprise,” continued Farmer Johnstone, “when I go out to the fields at the end of the week and find that they just shucked their skins! Left them shinin’ in the sun. I was abandoned at high crop with but a couple dozen baskets on the back of the tractor pull and most of the fruit in them with what looked like molding greased up spittle covering the fresh fuzz. Them immigrants was gone like a cool breeze through The Devil’s Valley. And didn’t never come back!”
Xortle chortled. Glad to be unclad. Planet fall and deploy was an arduous task. First contact was almost never fruitful. Several worlds back he had communed for almost two heavy rotation days with what essentially turned out to be as sentient as a blaskit stuffed with alklazone.
The vegetation guardians seemed to have a pleasant demeanor as well as an exceedingly dull wit, but some small sense of purpose. The soft short one with prominent features that appeared to be bound heavy hanging flesh sacks of some dubious biological determination was moved to befriend them. A small bowl of viscous bubbling swampy meat was offered to the Highest Fab who hesitated and then fairly excorporated on the spot. Xortle diplomatically rushed forward so that no gap of being could be perceived. Intelligence is, sighed Xortle, as sentience does.
Summer seed day and the Fab diminished, multirated, then solemnly as was custom moved forward with spreading entropy toward a prominent beaming seat of intelligence which bustled like a hard cardace at the fleming nexus.
Xortle hummed. There was all manner of disruption, molecular, mechanical and metaphysical. Communicative messaging impinged with a brutal gross vengeance. These planetary beings marched on solid ribbons of tar macadam holding dark antannaed contrivances that passed oral squawk to aural squeak, pinching low freq to ever higher modulated signals disposed directly into the atmosphere . Xortle and the Fab were stunned at the prodigious waste. They rode buffeted and confused on a hot shot of boisterous bumptious carrier wave. They bored in. Told stories. Laid the lay. Finally they grew fat, sated and sticky sick of their sullied sailing.
“I understand that you city boys had some kind of trouble.” said Farmer Johnstone.
“Yes,” said Betsy, his wife, “we couldn’t get the cable for about three months. Farmer called and complained but all he got was some whining from the telephone clerk. And, Lord, that terrible high pitched static over the phones was enough to make your ears split. I had to stop payment on the party line.”
“You think it had something to do with them pilgrims to which we showed a kindness?” Farmer scratched the back of his hot rude neck.
“I guess they did come about the time the troubles started.” said Betsy, “The night after those flashes lighted the flanks of Old Hiney’s Mountain.”
“Welp,” said Farmer Johnstone, “your sure welcome to take a peek down to the orchard. You won’t find much though. Had to hire a bunch of no goods and they stripped us blind. The woods is pretty trampled up and full of soup cans.”
Xortle opined. The entire rest of the Fab had dissipated in the aether. He was one of the unlucky ones. The Fab would now be a part of the fabric of the world wide nettled and gnostic grid. It might take a micrum, a sweepstage or longer, but eventually the meaning would be made clear. Communications Interspecies would take place. All you can do is plant the stories sometimes.
“Farmer,” said Betsy one night in the coolness, “do you think our children will have rainbow eyes?”
“Yep,” he said, “they just might.”
Xortle flosticated.
Dreams of Extraterrestrials – Version 1.0.0.0
Farmer Johnstone and his wife Betsy, who first contacted the Far Fumbling Fab from Eridani False Sun Seven said, “Well, hell, I just naturly assumed they was beaners from the border crossing so I put ‘em to work pickin’ peaches.”
“They did have a kinda cunning silvery glint in their eyes, which was as many colored as the rainbow in a wet sky” said Betsy, “Their skin was real scaly, but it was packed in some kind of sardiny grease. I told Farmer he should pay ‘em a little more than minimum, because workers is so hard to find at the harvest time. We let ‘em set up housekeepin’ in the far shed.”
“ ’Magine my surprise,” continued Farmer Johnstone, “when I go out to the fields at the end of the week and find that they just shucked their skins! Left them shinin’ in the sun. I was abandoned at high crop with but a couple dozen baskets on the back of the tractor pull and most of the fruit in them with what looked like molding greased up spittle covering the fresh fuzz. Them immigrants was gone like a cool breeze through The Devil’s Valley. And didn’t never come back!”
Xortle chortled. Glad to be unclad. Planet fall and deploy was an arduous task. First contact was almost never fruitful. Several worlds back he had communed for almost two heavy rotation days with what essentially turned out to be as sentient as a blaskit stuffed with alklazone.
The vegetation guardians seemed to have a pleasant demeanor as well as an exceedingly dull wit, but some small sense of purpose. The soft short one with prominent features that appeared to be bound heavy hanging flesh sacks of some dubious biological determination was moved to befriend them. A small bowl of viscous bubbling swampy meat was offered to the Highest Fab who hesitated and then fairly excorporated on the spot. Xortle diplomatically rushed forward so that no gap of being could be perceived. Intelligence is, sighed Xortle, as sentience does.
Summer seed day and the Fab diminished, multirated, then solemnly as was custom moved forward with spreading entropy toward a prominent beaming seat of intelligence which bustled like a hard cardace at the fleming nexus.
Xortle hummed. There was all manner of disruption, molecular, mechanical and metaphysical. Communicative messaging impinged with a brutal gross vengeance. These planetary beings marched on solid ribbons of tar macadam holding dark antannaed contrivances that passed oral squawk to aural squeak, pinching low freq to ever higher modulated signals disposed directly into the atmosphere . Xortle and the Fab were stunned at the prodigious waste. They rode buffeted and confused on a hot shot of boisterous bumptious carrier wave. They bored in. Told stories. Laid the lay. Finally they grew fat, sated and sticky sick of their sullied sailing.
“I understand that you city boys had some kind of trouble.” said Farmer Johnstone.
“Yes,” said Betsy, his wife, “we couldn’t get the cable for about three months. Farmer called and complained but all he got was some whining from the telephone clerk. And, Lord, that terrible high pitched static over the phones was enough to make your ears split. I had to stop payment on the party line.”
“You think it had something to do with them pilgrims to which we showed a kindness?” Farmer scratched the back of his hot rude neck.
“I guess they did come about the time the troubles started.” said Betsy, “The night after those flashes lighted the flanks of Old Hiney’s Mountain.”
“Welp,” said Farmer Johnstone, “your sure welcome to take a peek down to the orchard. You won’t find much though. Had to hire a bunch of no goods and they stripped us blind. The woods is pretty trampled up and full of soup cans.”
Xortle opined. The entire rest of the Fab had dissipated in the aether. He was one of the unlucky ones. The Fab would now be a part of the fabric of the world wide nettled and gnostic grid. It might take a micrum, a sweepstage or longer, but eventually the meaning would be made clear. Communications Interspecies would take place. All you can do is plant the stories sometimes.
“Farmer,” said Betsy one night in the coolness, “do you think our children will have rainbow eyes?”
“Yep,” he said, “they just might.”
Xortle flosticated.
Monday, November 25, 2002
Monday, November 25, 2002 6:36 PM Joe Coluccio
A Little Jargon here, a little Jargon there and pretty soon you are talking serious Exclamation!
First things, as the philosophers say, first. Or was it the carpenters, or the democrats, perhaps it was the Confusions. In any case I heard it somewhere and it seemed oh so elegant and right!
I believe in Integration. (What does Mac Davis mean when he says he believes in music, or there is a radio station in town that says it is where the music matters, what?) But seriously. I don’t mean to say that I can’t accept differentiation. I can and often strip things down until their constituent elements reverberate with contradiction, ambiguity and segregation. I, myself, shake the rattled role of indeterminate and naked separation. But, when the course is clear, the stars navigate the night, I sail invariably to the shores of that which is whole. It’s just the way I am.
I find that Jargon splits my soul. I am, it turns out, a Jack of all Trades and Master of None of any in Particular.
So when I walk into a Home Depot and someone wants to rabbet his joints, I’m okay, really! Big hairy guys and trendy petite overhauled women, displaying paint smears and swatches of gaily colored fabric, gazing longingly at a radial arm saw with enough power to cut a compound miter through a live Sequoia, or a square tabled router that will cove a piece of flat trim stock with the ease of a knife spreading warm butter on a scone. I gasp. It gives me pleasurable pause.
I move to a science fiction connection on the internet and find that NESFA has published not only the entire short works of Frederic Brown but five of his novels have been anthologized as well. Or not only the Lensman, but the Skylark have been reissued in trade paperback facsimile edition. With the mere mysterious click of a mouse I find that same Frederic Brown has his complete detective fiction published in uniform edition as well as an unknown series by sf’er Robert Sheckley. My eyes tear as the BEM’s blast the moxy from the shamus in me. “I’m a private dick,” says Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker. Hmmm, we kinda related, says the streetwalker, “I’m a public pussy.”
I have a priori discovered that I have a posteriori an itch. It seems my Weltanschauung doesn’t much allow for the Zeitgeist. Or is it that Zeitgeist became embroiled in my Weltanschauung? In any case Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Or to ask it far less succinctly can there be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Ontologically speaking, of course.
It turns. I can name that tune in one demisemiquaver. First declension nouns dative case end in eta or long alpha. James is Joyous because Jung was easily Freuded. You have to have a check valve in the hot gas line when you relieve to an intermediate pressure. Ted Williams has a .344 lifetime batting average. Disney’s multiplane camera has been outstripped by CGI. Wotan is a Rhine Osiris. A trope is a tripe is a trap.
Problem and solution. It integrates in me. And, man, are my arms ever tired.
I just flew in from Cleveland.
A Little Jargon here, a little Jargon there and pretty soon you are talking serious Exclamation!
First things, as the philosophers say, first. Or was it the carpenters, or the democrats, perhaps it was the Confusions. In any case I heard it somewhere and it seemed oh so elegant and right!
I believe in Integration. (What does Mac Davis mean when he says he believes in music, or there is a radio station in town that says it is where the music matters, what?) But seriously. I don’t mean to say that I can’t accept differentiation. I can and often strip things down until their constituent elements reverberate with contradiction, ambiguity and segregation. I, myself, shake the rattled role of indeterminate and naked separation. But, when the course is clear, the stars navigate the night, I sail invariably to the shores of that which is whole. It’s just the way I am.
I find that Jargon splits my soul. I am, it turns out, a Jack of all Trades and Master of None of any in Particular.
So when I walk into a Home Depot and someone wants to rabbet his joints, I’m okay, really! Big hairy guys and trendy petite overhauled women, displaying paint smears and swatches of gaily colored fabric, gazing longingly at a radial arm saw with enough power to cut a compound miter through a live Sequoia, or a square tabled router that will cove a piece of flat trim stock with the ease of a knife spreading warm butter on a scone. I gasp. It gives me pleasurable pause.
I move to a science fiction connection on the internet and find that NESFA has published not only the entire short works of Frederic Brown but five of his novels have been anthologized as well. Or not only the Lensman, but the Skylark have been reissued in trade paperback facsimile edition. With the mere mysterious click of a mouse I find that same Frederic Brown has his complete detective fiction published in uniform edition as well as an unknown series by sf’er Robert Sheckley. My eyes tear as the BEM’s blast the moxy from the shamus in me. “I’m a private dick,” says Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker. Hmmm, we kinda related, says the streetwalker, “I’m a public pussy.”
I have a priori discovered that I have a posteriori an itch. It seems my Weltanschauung doesn’t much allow for the Zeitgeist. Or is it that Zeitgeist became embroiled in my Weltanschauung? In any case Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Or to ask it far less succinctly can there be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Ontologically speaking, of course.
It turns. I can name that tune in one demisemiquaver. First declension nouns dative case end in eta or long alpha. James is Joyous because Jung was easily Freuded. You have to have a check valve in the hot gas line when you relieve to an intermediate pressure. Ted Williams has a .344 lifetime batting average. Disney’s multiplane camera has been outstripped by CGI. Wotan is a Rhine Osiris. A trope is a tripe is a trap.
Problem and solution. It integrates in me. And, man, are my arms ever tired.
I just flew in from Cleveland.
Sunday, November 17, 2002
Sunday, November 17, 2002 6:39 PM Joe Coluccio
Working Paper #1
I never metaphor I didn’t like.
I admit that even by my own standards I am perverse. When I hear a rule turning to concrete law, I don't merely fly swat it, but I take to nuclear armament. Bombard the thing into its constituent quarks. So, occasionally, for my own good health, I review all the rules that I have to live by, personal and societal and give them a good laugh. That is the basis for my comedy. It may be the basis for all comedy. In the remarkably astute words of Professor Wagstaff, Huxley College, (appropriately contra Darwin) "Whatever it is I am against it."
I have been reading that Plato banned poets from his Republic. And that Aristotle argued for them. One because they were imitators of the ideal, the other because they were imitators of the ideal. Now this ideal is an idea that I am roundly enamored of. And I mostly tip my hat to Aristotle even though I find his endless classification more tedious than the sparkle of Socrates beating his colleagues into a fluffy soufflé during dialogue.
I, despairingly, do not have the temperament or the skills of a philosopher. I, hopefully, have the soul, or at least the spleen, of a poet. (Wouldn't want to live in your old Republic anyhow, Mr. Plato!) But I am forced, by my own superego, if by nothing else to confront my self aggrandized aesthetic. So, poetically, if not philosophically, the following is where I quick stand.
All that I do know and see resides in the word.
Simple, no?
I cannot move on without a consideration of those who I consider my antecedents. If they know up in that big laughing Elysium in the sky, they must look, a smile on their wine red dribbling lips, askance and aghast. Hell, you should stop here and go read them and leave this blogging trail blaze in the deeps of the woods where it belongs among the sheltering pines.
Although I love to death, Groucho and his kin, and Abbot and his Costello; Steve Allen once said that Harry Ritz was the funniest man alive; I don't get it; I nod off to the Stooges; hunger for Harold Lloyd, grudgingly acknowledge Chaplin and marvel at Buster Keaton, these, friends, were not primarily writers.
Turn your gaze instead to the works of S.J. Perelman. They sit before me as I write. I need only mention titles like Carry Me Back to Old Pastrami; Is There and Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House; And Thou Beside Me, Yacketing in the Wilderness; and of course; Captain Future, Block That Kick, to give you a major dose of comedic genius. Perelman left America for England, like old Thomas Stearns Eliot who wasn’t that much for a laugh (Head full of straw, alas), because, unlike T.S. and his now frustratingly ambitious Cats, he couldn't any longer find funny articles in the newspapers to feed his wild imagination. It is a stance in which I have long been in sympathy and agree with the whole of my heart and several other sensitive portions of my body. As a note in passing, you should know that S.J's. brother-in-law and friend was Nathaniel West who hardly wrote anything funny after Day of the Locusts.
Turn your gaze, sorry for all this head swinging, to Robert Benchley, part of the Algonquin Crown Stable of American Wit. Who has been known to say "A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down." and whose The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928) is one of the funniest and most biologically informative works I have ever seen. I should warn those of you with young children that although this short would definitely carry at least an "R" had our rating system, which allows us to watch a person get cut in half from the abdomen by a laser sited automatic pistol, but shuns as obscene the vision of a mother’s naked breast feeding an infant, been in effect in those days. Some of the more exploratory and sexy Polyp stuff is pretty gamy leaving me to propose the definite possibility of a NC-17. Certainly a Quadruple X, banning it to the Garden Theater on the North Side. Nay, I say, it is better to pick up the VHS in the hot little back room of your local video renter. Fore warned, c’est á dire!
I should mention Thurber and Parker and Max Schulman and Jean Shepard and Mark Twain and Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollet and Stephen Leacock and Alexander Wollcott and certainly George S. Kaufman, who once begged people back stage during a Marx brothers performance to be quiet because he thought he actually heard a line performed by the Marxes in one of his plays that he had written, and a panoply of others. There is great comedy out there that didn't come from the meager infested minds of those who inhabit Hollywood today.
Now comes the working part, in part.
Here is the fruitful beginning of Joe’s unwritten (now written) Rules of Comedy. I open my mind for your careful perusal.
The limits to my comedy are not length of time. There are those who would relegate comedy to the fast quip, the sorry AM morning joke. To them I simply say, Hah!
I almost never mention bodily parts, although I think people running around on the stage smacking each other with various sized and colored fake penises would be a scream, and flatulence for comedic effect. I save those for my more dramatic moments.
Topical and political observations are verboten! Notice I use the German here for totalitarian emphasis.
Never write after dinner and you are tired. Which I very am now.
Working Paper #1
I never metaphor I didn’t like.
I admit that even by my own standards I am perverse. When I hear a rule turning to concrete law, I don't merely fly swat it, but I take to nuclear armament. Bombard the thing into its constituent quarks. So, occasionally, for my own good health, I review all the rules that I have to live by, personal and societal and give them a good laugh. That is the basis for my comedy. It may be the basis for all comedy. In the remarkably astute words of Professor Wagstaff, Huxley College, (appropriately contra Darwin) "Whatever it is I am against it."
I have been reading that Plato banned poets from his Republic. And that Aristotle argued for them. One because they were imitators of the ideal, the other because they were imitators of the ideal. Now this ideal is an idea that I am roundly enamored of. And I mostly tip my hat to Aristotle even though I find his endless classification more tedious than the sparkle of Socrates beating his colleagues into a fluffy soufflé during dialogue.
I, despairingly, do not have the temperament or the skills of a philosopher. I, hopefully, have the soul, or at least the spleen, of a poet. (Wouldn't want to live in your old Republic anyhow, Mr. Plato!) But I am forced, by my own superego, if by nothing else to confront my self aggrandized aesthetic. So, poetically, if not philosophically, the following is where I quick stand.
All that I do know and see resides in the word.
Simple, no?
I cannot move on without a consideration of those who I consider my antecedents. If they know up in that big laughing Elysium in the sky, they must look, a smile on their wine red dribbling lips, askance and aghast. Hell, you should stop here and go read them and leave this blogging trail blaze in the deeps of the woods where it belongs among the sheltering pines.
Although I love to death, Groucho and his kin, and Abbot and his Costello; Steve Allen once said that Harry Ritz was the funniest man alive; I don't get it; I nod off to the Stooges; hunger for Harold Lloyd, grudgingly acknowledge Chaplin and marvel at Buster Keaton, these, friends, were not primarily writers.
Turn your gaze instead to the works of S.J. Perelman. They sit before me as I write. I need only mention titles like Carry Me Back to Old Pastrami; Is There and Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House; And Thou Beside Me, Yacketing in the Wilderness; and of course; Captain Future, Block That Kick, to give you a major dose of comedic genius. Perelman left America for England, like old Thomas Stearns Eliot who wasn’t that much for a laugh (Head full of straw, alas), because, unlike T.S. and his now frustratingly ambitious Cats, he couldn't any longer find funny articles in the newspapers to feed his wild imagination. It is a stance in which I have long been in sympathy and agree with the whole of my heart and several other sensitive portions of my body. As a note in passing, you should know that S.J's. brother-in-law and friend was Nathaniel West who hardly wrote anything funny after Day of the Locusts.
Turn your gaze, sorry for all this head swinging, to Robert Benchley, part of the Algonquin Crown Stable of American Wit. Who has been known to say "A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down." and whose The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928) is one of the funniest and most biologically informative works I have ever seen. I should warn those of you with young children that although this short would definitely carry at least an "R" had our rating system, which allows us to watch a person get cut in half from the abdomen by a laser sited automatic pistol, but shuns as obscene the vision of a mother’s naked breast feeding an infant, been in effect in those days. Some of the more exploratory and sexy Polyp stuff is pretty gamy leaving me to propose the definite possibility of a NC-17. Certainly a Quadruple X, banning it to the Garden Theater on the North Side. Nay, I say, it is better to pick up the VHS in the hot little back room of your local video renter. Fore warned, c’est á dire!
I should mention Thurber and Parker and Max Schulman and Jean Shepard and Mark Twain and Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollet and Stephen Leacock and Alexander Wollcott and certainly George S. Kaufman, who once begged people back stage during a Marx brothers performance to be quiet because he thought he actually heard a line performed by the Marxes in one of his plays that he had written, and a panoply of others. There is great comedy out there that didn't come from the meager infested minds of those who inhabit Hollywood today.
Now comes the working part, in part.
Here is the fruitful beginning of Joe’s unwritten (now written) Rules of Comedy. I open my mind for your careful perusal.
The limits to my comedy are not length of time. There are those who would relegate comedy to the fast quip, the sorry AM morning joke. To them I simply say, Hah!
I almost never mention bodily parts, although I think people running around on the stage smacking each other with various sized and colored fake penises would be a scream, and flatulence for comedic effect. I save those for my more dramatic moments.
Topical and political observations are verboten! Notice I use the German here for totalitarian emphasis.
Never write after dinner and you are tired. Which I very am now.
Monday, November 11, 2002
Monday, November 11, 2002 6:09 PM Joe Coluccio
I go to look for America,
On a train from the North down to Copenhagen, a young man entered the railroad car with a flourish. He had on a charcoal gray overcoat that looked for the world to me like a cape flourished by Dracula on a brisk flap, evening, Carpathian Mountains. He imperiously removed it, folded it, set it on the seat next to him with a soft and practiced elegance. He then withdrew a fine black leather covered volume out of his dark tailored jacket interior breast pocket. It was a work of Goethe writ in Gothic German script. His controlled stable manner made me uncomfortable. I sulked in my fleece lined folk singer rebellious tan winter coat, the odor and gummy feel of too many hours traveling in a land that I had little hope of understanding. Ratiocination and will fled my being, sucked from me like bleeding sap. I was miniscule, damn near invisible, against the plush seat wishing for some sleep, some resemblance of relief. The cars clacked out of the station, Holstebro, I think and the shut night down businesses echoing familiar after hour’s commercial lights passed, with strange long names spelled in curling fantasy Danish letters. It added to my growing sense of alienation. The Young Man continued reading Young Werther, occasionally looking out into the dark landscape, paying scant attention to me.
A Christmas Service, late Eve night at the Duquesne Chapel, my cousins around me. I have been absent from the catholic church since the days of kneeling old St. Joes in Verona the Latinate Mass. Confused I listened to the perfectly understandable and unbelievable prosaic English, born of some English odious King James rhythm . O the oblivion of chanting custom, I stood as others stood. I echoed words in a perfect pantomime of blessed beatitude. Before bread breaking wine drinking, the priest said something completely unexpected, he asked each of us to give a sign a peace (be with you) to any other around us. A family, directly in front of me, matron mother and patter eternis, a college son clothed in a charcoal gray great coat and elegant manner and daughter, turned and kissed one another. Complete and naturally. I feebly shook hands, my weak hands with cousins and collegians, squeaked something that lilted peacelike in the incense air. The mass continued without me. World without end.
My father's mother, severe woman with her hair gray drawn up in a bun, long black sack dress to the tops of her black and uncomfortable shoes cooking spinach in a large pot on the stove watching a black and white tv match-up between Haystacks Calhoun and Gorgeous George. She roots for the one in the white shorts, always, no matter. My father is scolding her in Italian. Ma, you can't only eat spinach. You gotta eat something else. I have no idea what he is saying. She shrugs her obstinate shoulders. I don't know if she realizes I'm alive. Her face reveals little emotion. She reminds me of an Indian Chief with her wrinkled handsome face. I wonder, finally, now what wisdom, what strength, what love was in her.
A clipping service, he says, we run a clipping service. You would be in charge of these women clipping newspaper and magazine articles. A clipping service? How could such an idea never even occur to me. Do you think you can handle it, says the guy with a moustache and a striped shirt as we look out over the Tenderloin, Market Street down near the bus station. It don't pay all that much. Sure, I say, not at all sure. Who do you clip things for? I ask. Movie stars, politicians, football players. Lots a people, we clip 'em and then paste 'em on these sheets. Big half octave pale brown sheets and then send 'em off. A world of information. I don't get the job instead go to work for a cleaning and tailor's supply house a 12 th Street just off Broadway, Oakland California.
David Lawrence Convention Center. I enter and look at all the people seated in the lobby scribbling pencil stubs the crossword puzzles. The wind is considerably taken out of my billowing sails. Ooof! My wife has managed to get me a place in the Jeopardy try-outs. Far worse this is than any college admissions. I tentatively sit on a pinned cushion until we are called to an upper floor and ushered into what looks like every class room in which I have taken a test. Desk with side boards to set our papers upon. We are handed the sheets and told that if we miss more than five we will not be part of the program. Up a notch or two the mercury of my anxiety level goes. The test is absurdly hard and aimlessly trivial at the same time. I recognize that Clara Peller said where's the beef, but miss the name of Charles Revson’s book. Silly me. Scores tallied I am accelerating once again in my car outside the David Lawrence Convention Center on Penn Avenue.
and find ravioli, meatballs and thank god vino!
I go to look for America,
On a train from the North down to Copenhagen, a young man entered the railroad car with a flourish. He had on a charcoal gray overcoat that looked for the world to me like a cape flourished by Dracula on a brisk flap, evening, Carpathian Mountains. He imperiously removed it, folded it, set it on the seat next to him with a soft and practiced elegance. He then withdrew a fine black leather covered volume out of his dark tailored jacket interior breast pocket. It was a work of Goethe writ in Gothic German script. His controlled stable manner made me uncomfortable. I sulked in my fleece lined folk singer rebellious tan winter coat, the odor and gummy feel of too many hours traveling in a land that I had little hope of understanding. Ratiocination and will fled my being, sucked from me like bleeding sap. I was miniscule, damn near invisible, against the plush seat wishing for some sleep, some resemblance of relief. The cars clacked out of the station, Holstebro, I think and the shut night down businesses echoing familiar after hour’s commercial lights passed, with strange long names spelled in curling fantasy Danish letters. It added to my growing sense of alienation. The Young Man continued reading Young Werther, occasionally looking out into the dark landscape, paying scant attention to me.
A Christmas Service, late Eve night at the Duquesne Chapel, my cousins around me. I have been absent from the catholic church since the days of kneeling old St. Joes in Verona the Latinate Mass. Confused I listened to the perfectly understandable and unbelievable prosaic English, born of some English odious King James rhythm . O the oblivion of chanting custom, I stood as others stood. I echoed words in a perfect pantomime of blessed beatitude. Before bread breaking wine drinking, the priest said something completely unexpected, he asked each of us to give a sign a peace (be with you) to any other around us. A family, directly in front of me, matron mother and patter eternis, a college son clothed in a charcoal gray great coat and elegant manner and daughter, turned and kissed one another. Complete and naturally. I feebly shook hands, my weak hands with cousins and collegians, squeaked something that lilted peacelike in the incense air. The mass continued without me. World without end.
My father's mother, severe woman with her hair gray drawn up in a bun, long black sack dress to the tops of her black and uncomfortable shoes cooking spinach in a large pot on the stove watching a black and white tv match-up between Haystacks Calhoun and Gorgeous George. She roots for the one in the white shorts, always, no matter. My father is scolding her in Italian. Ma, you can't only eat spinach. You gotta eat something else. I have no idea what he is saying. She shrugs her obstinate shoulders. I don't know if she realizes I'm alive. Her face reveals little emotion. She reminds me of an Indian Chief with her wrinkled handsome face. I wonder, finally, now what wisdom, what strength, what love was in her.
A clipping service, he says, we run a clipping service. You would be in charge of these women clipping newspaper and magazine articles. A clipping service? How could such an idea never even occur to me. Do you think you can handle it, says the guy with a moustache and a striped shirt as we look out over the Tenderloin, Market Street down near the bus station. It don't pay all that much. Sure, I say, not at all sure. Who do you clip things for? I ask. Movie stars, politicians, football players. Lots a people, we clip 'em and then paste 'em on these sheets. Big half octave pale brown sheets and then send 'em off. A world of information. I don't get the job instead go to work for a cleaning and tailor's supply house a 12 th Street just off Broadway, Oakland California.
David Lawrence Convention Center. I enter and look at all the people seated in the lobby scribbling pencil stubs the crossword puzzles. The wind is considerably taken out of my billowing sails. Ooof! My wife has managed to get me a place in the Jeopardy try-outs. Far worse this is than any college admissions. I tentatively sit on a pinned cushion until we are called to an upper floor and ushered into what looks like every class room in which I have taken a test. Desk with side boards to set our papers upon. We are handed the sheets and told that if we miss more than five we will not be part of the program. Up a notch or two the mercury of my anxiety level goes. The test is absurdly hard and aimlessly trivial at the same time. I recognize that Clara Peller said where's the beef, but miss the name of Charles Revson’s book. Silly me. Scores tallied I am accelerating once again in my car outside the David Lawrence Convention Center on Penn Avenue.
and find ravioli, meatballs and thank god vino!
Monday, November 04, 2002
Monday, November 04, 2002 6:26:21 PM Joe Coluccio
Good night, Mrs. Cohen, wherever you are.
I was sitting, comme l'habitude, as the French, who irreconcilably adore Jerry Lewis, say, sipping hard caffeinated coffee and absorbed in a dream of writing that I was pledging before God, the Holy Roman Empire and Truth, Justice, an American way of living, at a coffee bistro in the environs of Squirrel Hill, when I noticed, on the sidewalk outside a flashing dark haired beautiful woman. She entered and I exited all thought and gazed at her. She was in her fifties, I suppose, dressed casually, a pleasant visage as she looked in the nooks and crannies for, well... as it turned out a fetchingly pretty blond woman. They ordered coffee and sat in a booth on the other side of the shop from me.
In the ninth grade at Seneca Junior High School, (the place is now rebuilt as an old folks home is called Seneca something to do with assisted living. Sits on the crest of Saltsburg Road, a hard climb up from its nascence on Verona Road and a million miles from Saltsburg, PA. My own Aunt Mary on my father's side lived the remainder of her Alzheimer existence there with a smile on her face that made those who visited jealous of the world's harsher reality.), my Home Room, as well as my English teacher, was Carole Cohen. Dark hair that danced around her neck, dark eyes that penetrated more than I could ever hope to hide. I was (and am) hopelessly, in love with Mrs. Cohen. I am sure that I am not the only one that was so affected; 'cause I could hear the eyes of teacher's click as she clicked down the hollow hallow halls. But their adoration, like the French and Jerry Lewis was of the more coarse and sensual kind. Eventually I married her. More about that in a moment.
I have wished for two things in my life. A. I wanted, from first glance at the night splendor of the sky to be an astronomer. I would even at this very late moment throw it all over, if I was invited to Mt. Palomar. All my heroes have been astronomers. B. I have wanted to write. Both desires are not that different and have to do with inner reaches. I was, in that year of the ninth grade, under the thrall of Leon Uris. (Maybe Harry Browne, Richard Tregaskis, certainly Edward L Beach.) I thought that Battle Cry was the most astounding and important novel ever written.
Mrs. Cohen gave us an assignment to write something creative. I wrote about a platoon of marines on some godforsaken Pacific island. The ending was some pleasing trick that is lost in the web filled rafters of my consciousness. After correcting my spelling of Sergeant (see Carole I remember) Mrs. Cohen gave me a relatively glowing grade and some validating criticism. My friend, Phil Trafican, and I would meet at the end of the day in our Home Class Room and talk to Mrs. Cohen as she prepared for the following day. She encouraged us in our writing and in our intellectual quests. One weekend she invited us to her apartment to meet her brother, who was a writer.
Beechwood Boulevard. I can almost remember the building when I pass the apartment complex on the street which has made the Guinness Book of Records because it crosses (must be Catholic) itself so many times. I thought it strange to invade the habitat of teacher away from the relationship of classroom. Were they then just common people after all? This intimate glimpse proved that Mrs. Cohen didn't live anywhere near the corner of Valhalla and Mount Olympus. I don't remember the apartment much, it was small, tight and cultured. A studio piano, books proper on their shelves. Clean. We drank soda, her brother showed us his work, we talked large and small and eventually returned home.
She cried one day as we discussed the Holocaust in class and despaired at the wasted loss of life and the good that was snuffed out of the world. How many Einsteins died at the hands of the Nazis? We were assigned an essay. Two days later she read a paper written by Frank Cerra that pointed out the flaw in her argument. How many Hitlers were killed, asked Frank? She praised Frank for his good thinking. I don't remember what I wrote but have yet to come grips with the true evil that can be so manifest by you and me.
I vowed to dedicate my first book to Mrs. Carole Cohen, wherever she was. She was one of the first and one of the few that saw something in me. Oh, yes, my first wife had dark hair and black flashing eyes. We lived a kind of reverse Abby's Irish Rose marriage which embraced both the invisible Elijah and the less than probable Saint Nick. Ravioli, kreplach, what's the difference (a little tomato sauce and little chicken broth).
The woman at the coffee shop? I walked past her booth. We smiled.
Ah, how schmaltz can tickle the heart!
Good night, Mrs. Cohen, wherever you are.
I was sitting, comme l'habitude, as the French, who irreconcilably adore Jerry Lewis, say, sipping hard caffeinated coffee and absorbed in a dream of writing that I was pledging before God, the Holy Roman Empire and Truth, Justice, an American way of living, at a coffee bistro in the environs of Squirrel Hill, when I noticed, on the sidewalk outside a flashing dark haired beautiful woman. She entered and I exited all thought and gazed at her. She was in her fifties, I suppose, dressed casually, a pleasant visage as she looked in the nooks and crannies for, well... as it turned out a fetchingly pretty blond woman. They ordered coffee and sat in a booth on the other side of the shop from me.
In the ninth grade at Seneca Junior High School, (the place is now rebuilt as an old folks home is called Seneca something to do with assisted living. Sits on the crest of Saltsburg Road, a hard climb up from its nascence on Verona Road and a million miles from Saltsburg, PA. My own Aunt Mary on my father's side lived the remainder of her Alzheimer existence there with a smile on her face that made those who visited jealous of the world's harsher reality.), my Home Room, as well as my English teacher, was Carole Cohen. Dark hair that danced around her neck, dark eyes that penetrated more than I could ever hope to hide. I was (and am) hopelessly, in love with Mrs. Cohen. I am sure that I am not the only one that was so affected; 'cause I could hear the eyes of teacher's click as she clicked down the hollow hallow halls. But their adoration, like the French and Jerry Lewis was of the more coarse and sensual kind. Eventually I married her. More about that in a moment.
I have wished for two things in my life. A. I wanted, from first glance at the night splendor of the sky to be an astronomer. I would even at this very late moment throw it all over, if I was invited to Mt. Palomar. All my heroes have been astronomers. B. I have wanted to write. Both desires are not that different and have to do with inner reaches. I was, in that year of the ninth grade, under the thrall of Leon Uris. (Maybe Harry Browne, Richard Tregaskis, certainly Edward L Beach.) I thought that Battle Cry was the most astounding and important novel ever written.
Mrs. Cohen gave us an assignment to write something creative. I wrote about a platoon of marines on some godforsaken Pacific island. The ending was some pleasing trick that is lost in the web filled rafters of my consciousness. After correcting my spelling of Sergeant (see Carole I remember) Mrs. Cohen gave me a relatively glowing grade and some validating criticism. My friend, Phil Trafican, and I would meet at the end of the day in our Home Class Room and talk to Mrs. Cohen as she prepared for the following day. She encouraged us in our writing and in our intellectual quests. One weekend she invited us to her apartment to meet her brother, who was a writer.
Beechwood Boulevard. I can almost remember the building when I pass the apartment complex on the street which has made the Guinness Book of Records because it crosses (must be Catholic) itself so many times. I thought it strange to invade the habitat of teacher away from the relationship of classroom. Were they then just common people after all? This intimate glimpse proved that Mrs. Cohen didn't live anywhere near the corner of Valhalla and Mount Olympus. I don't remember the apartment much, it was small, tight and cultured. A studio piano, books proper on their shelves. Clean. We drank soda, her brother showed us his work, we talked large and small and eventually returned home.
She cried one day as we discussed the Holocaust in class and despaired at the wasted loss of life and the good that was snuffed out of the world. How many Einsteins died at the hands of the Nazis? We were assigned an essay. Two days later she read a paper written by Frank Cerra that pointed out the flaw in her argument. How many Hitlers were killed, asked Frank? She praised Frank for his good thinking. I don't remember what I wrote but have yet to come grips with the true evil that can be so manifest by you and me.
I vowed to dedicate my first book to Mrs. Carole Cohen, wherever she was. She was one of the first and one of the few that saw something in me. Oh, yes, my first wife had dark hair and black flashing eyes. We lived a kind of reverse Abby's Irish Rose marriage which embraced both the invisible Elijah and the less than probable Saint Nick. Ravioli, kreplach, what's the difference (a little tomato sauce and little chicken broth).
The woman at the coffee shop? I walked past her booth. We smiled.
Ah, how schmaltz can tickle the heart!
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Thursday, October 31, 2002 7:03:04 PM
Perhaps I have, once again, reflexively embarrassed myself.
When there is nothing to do, which is to say, when I truly wish that there was nothing to pursue, when I wish my life consisted of going to work, cooking and eating a decreasingly caloric meal and stretching myself the length of my entire body on the length of my bed under the length of my covers, washed and cleaned at least weekly I add with my finger on my nose, and relaxing with a deep sigh as the muscles lose tension in my legs and my stomach and the back of my neck melt into a more than normal amorphous lump and click, I perform the ritual power to the TV, and , click, the receiver set to stun me with sub woofer and sensualaround sound and, clickity clickity, a last quick run up and down the two hundred or so assortment of cable and broadcast channels which manage in all their variety of form to achieve remarkable homogeneity and settle invariably on some light full of froth and fluff , an occasional disturbing dash, even mellifluous music in the strum drang and strife of life, the romantic comedy.
I wonder lazily supine!
Wouldn't a happy chase through my video library be better than this endless digital search across movie channels? Still how many times can I unsheathe the videotape cover of Cary Grant suddenly going all gay and watch Bringing Up Baby? I find myself oddly sexually attracted to Susan. Imagine my horror the other night while watching Duck Soup for more times than the placing the rings in the Tower of Hanoi to realize that I wanted nothing more than to settle down in a cleanly vacuumed picket fenced cottage with Margaret Dumont. Something most definitely is adolescent gumming up the works in the waning years of my middle age.
So I watch on HBO and Showtime and The Movie Channel and Starz and Encore (how I ended with the whole platinum package I leave for another time) what passes for romantic comedy in this day and age, the teen angst boy meets girl or increasingly more common the boy meets boy or girl meets girl film. I watch until they turn mean spirited, then I spirit myself away to another channel and give another set of young folks a chance to charm me. Occasionally there is a gem that sets right with my mood and its own integrity.
I laugh at all the right spots. A tear is always on the brink of my eyelid at the denouement when they meet at the airport because he or she is on their way to Paris or Madrid or London and decide that fate and perhaps the discomfort of traveling coach must drive them together in a passionate embrace. Finis. Music soars; usually a soft acoustic rock flat picked steel stringed guitar kind of melody. They're happy. I'm ecstatic! Sated I usually can fall asleep until the sound of screams from the Kansas Windmill Massacre or Die, Scream and Laugh in Terror inserts itself into my dream and wide awake I'm at the remote in search of video love which turns in the deep hours of the morning into soft core sleek and toned naked bodies rubbing with no idea of where genitalia should reside in the coital act.
Face it. I reflect (Once again Reflexive) you are mushy, hopelessly and helplessly mired in the idea of preliminary infatuation. And face it I do. Not much of a one for mature relationships. I freely admit it. I am it turns out as my parents prognosticated sadly shaking their collective heads and wagging their fingers a dreamer. I buy these tales of innocent love wholesale and whole cloth.
Morning noon and nighttime too all I do is dream of you the whole day through.
Perhaps I have, once again, reflexively embarrassed myself.
When there is nothing to do, which is to say, when I truly wish that there was nothing to pursue, when I wish my life consisted of going to work, cooking and eating a decreasingly caloric meal and stretching myself the length of my entire body on the length of my bed under the length of my covers, washed and cleaned at least weekly I add with my finger on my nose, and relaxing with a deep sigh as the muscles lose tension in my legs and my stomach and the back of my neck melt into a more than normal amorphous lump and click, I perform the ritual power to the TV, and , click, the receiver set to stun me with sub woofer and sensualaround sound and, clickity clickity, a last quick run up and down the two hundred or so assortment of cable and broadcast channels which manage in all their variety of form to achieve remarkable homogeneity and settle invariably on some light full of froth and fluff , an occasional disturbing dash, even mellifluous music in the strum drang and strife of life, the romantic comedy.
I wonder lazily supine!
Wouldn't a happy chase through my video library be better than this endless digital search across movie channels? Still how many times can I unsheathe the videotape cover of Cary Grant suddenly going all gay and watch Bringing Up Baby? I find myself oddly sexually attracted to Susan. Imagine my horror the other night while watching Duck Soup for more times than the placing the rings in the Tower of Hanoi to realize that I wanted nothing more than to settle down in a cleanly vacuumed picket fenced cottage with Margaret Dumont. Something most definitely is adolescent gumming up the works in the waning years of my middle age.
So I watch on HBO and Showtime and The Movie Channel and Starz and Encore (how I ended with the whole platinum package I leave for another time) what passes for romantic comedy in this day and age, the teen angst boy meets girl or increasingly more common the boy meets boy or girl meets girl film. I watch until they turn mean spirited, then I spirit myself away to another channel and give another set of young folks a chance to charm me. Occasionally there is a gem that sets right with my mood and its own integrity.
I laugh at all the right spots. A tear is always on the brink of my eyelid at the denouement when they meet at the airport because he or she is on their way to Paris or Madrid or London and decide that fate and perhaps the discomfort of traveling coach must drive them together in a passionate embrace. Finis. Music soars; usually a soft acoustic rock flat picked steel stringed guitar kind of melody. They're happy. I'm ecstatic! Sated I usually can fall asleep until the sound of screams from the Kansas Windmill Massacre or Die, Scream and Laugh in Terror inserts itself into my dream and wide awake I'm at the remote in search of video love which turns in the deep hours of the morning into soft core sleek and toned naked bodies rubbing with no idea of where genitalia should reside in the coital act.
Face it. I reflect (Once again Reflexive) you are mushy, hopelessly and helplessly mired in the idea of preliminary infatuation. And face it I do. Not much of a one for mature relationships. I freely admit it. I am it turns out as my parents prognosticated sadly shaking their collective heads and wagging their fingers a dreamer. I buy these tales of innocent love wholesale and whole cloth.
Morning noon and nighttime too all I do is dream of you the whole day through.
Monday, October 28, 2002
Monday, October 28, 2002 5:52:11 PM
Meshuga is the Word of the Day
I subscribe, via e-mail to two or three word of the day services, one of which is a foreign language mot du jour in four differing languages, including Portuguese. I treat these services as a kind of oracle, reminiscent of your daily horrorscope or perhaps on a more unconscious level the I Ching, minus yarrow stalks or coin divination.
How appropriate that Mushuga should turn up on the penultimate day of a Meshuga week. Tonight I am in Cleveland, tomorrow after a ten o'clock meeting I will, the Meshuga Gods of Ammonia willing, head my fine conveyance toward Pittsburgh and home.
(So that no one is left behind I include here the definition as given by yourDicionary.com
Today's Word:
Meshuga (Adjective)
Pronunciation: [mê-'shU-gê]
Definition 1: Affectionate) Crazy, nutty, absent-minded.)
Further:
A crazy girl is meshuggeneh
while
A crazy boy is meshuggener
Nu? Can a week be crazy, nutty or absent-minded. Seems far to mild to me as I sit here drinking wine, eating organic blue corn tortilla chips and trying to let the tension seep away. Sick of body and troubled of mind.
Al Lerner, the owner of the Cleveland Brown's, passed away a few days ago and today while I was returning from a rush journey to purchase a fifty foot Cat 5 RJ45 network cable, which turned out to not be the problem, traffic at the corner of Richmond and Chagrin started to back up to Omaha. As cars u-turned and honked the congestion ahead began to clear to my sight and stimulated my consciousness. I saw a police car pull in front of the traffic light and block the intersection. A very long, slow convoy of expensive automobiles with black flags that I just knew were not the Jolly Roger gained entry to the cemetery that opened right, adjacent the corner. All sorts of evil imagery began to fill my mind.
I didn't get caught, went my irreasoning, in such an onslaught when Art Rooney, the chief of the Steelers, died. This Cleveland-Pittsburgh football rivalry dies hard even in the mind of someone who is hardly a fan of the sport any longer. How dare they hold up traffic for a funeral. They should arrange for these thing to happen at 2 in the morning not 2 in the afternoon. Didn't they realize that I had to get back with my network cable? Eventually a kind of sanity returned. RIP Al. Like I say Meshuga!
At the job site, we have not only the garble of the failed communication cable, which is now working like a charm, which is to say that if you swing a black cat by the tail in a graveyard, (maybe the funeral was a message to me, like the word of the day) and whisper the incantation mene mene tekel upharsin, a direct and significant connection will be made, but the mystery of the Missing Ammonia.
We pumped liquid ammonia into the Receiver, moved it by hose, pipe and pressure difference to both the Medium Temperature Flash Cooler and the Low Temperature Liquid Recirculating Accumulator, started a Compressor to pumping. At first the liquid level in the Receiver which disappeared at a shockingly quick interval, came back. Hooray! Then it left again. Somewhere lying in wait out in the system. Don't you just love that refrigeration talk. Makes you believe that I know something about the arcane arts of thermodynamics, eh? Meshuga! I know.
Somewhere in the afternooon my biorhythms started to wane. My head stuffed (with straw, alas), my nose congested, my body down down down. The result of a week in and out of the cold and heat, in and out of the aggrssion and tension, a week of down peak up peak. The constant expansion and contraction of hope and despair has left me exposed and possibly physically sick. I head to a drug store for a flu cure, but am afraid to take it because I had a couple glasses of wine.
Meshuga!
Suggested usage says WOTD.
"I may be meshuga but I'm not an idiot,"
Oh yeah?
Meshuga is the Word of the Day
I subscribe, via e-mail to two or three word of the day services, one of which is a foreign language mot du jour in four differing languages, including Portuguese. I treat these services as a kind of oracle, reminiscent of your daily horrorscope or perhaps on a more unconscious level the I Ching, minus yarrow stalks or coin divination.
How appropriate that Mushuga should turn up on the penultimate day of a Meshuga week. Tonight I am in Cleveland, tomorrow after a ten o'clock meeting I will, the Meshuga Gods of Ammonia willing, head my fine conveyance toward Pittsburgh and home.
(So that no one is left behind I include here the definition as given by yourDicionary.com
Today's Word:
Meshuga (Adjective)
Pronunciation: [mê-'shU-gê]
Definition 1: Affectionate) Crazy, nutty, absent-minded.)
Further:
A crazy girl is meshuggeneh
while
A crazy boy is meshuggener
Nu? Can a week be crazy, nutty or absent-minded. Seems far to mild to me as I sit here drinking wine, eating organic blue corn tortilla chips and trying to let the tension seep away. Sick of body and troubled of mind.
Al Lerner, the owner of the Cleveland Brown's, passed away a few days ago and today while I was returning from a rush journey to purchase a fifty foot Cat 5 RJ45 network cable, which turned out to not be the problem, traffic at the corner of Richmond and Chagrin started to back up to Omaha. As cars u-turned and honked the congestion ahead began to clear to my sight and stimulated my consciousness. I saw a police car pull in front of the traffic light and block the intersection. A very long, slow convoy of expensive automobiles with black flags that I just knew were not the Jolly Roger gained entry to the cemetery that opened right, adjacent the corner. All sorts of evil imagery began to fill my mind.
I didn't get caught, went my irreasoning, in such an onslaught when Art Rooney, the chief of the Steelers, died. This Cleveland-Pittsburgh football rivalry dies hard even in the mind of someone who is hardly a fan of the sport any longer. How dare they hold up traffic for a funeral. They should arrange for these thing to happen at 2 in the morning not 2 in the afternoon. Didn't they realize that I had to get back with my network cable? Eventually a kind of sanity returned. RIP Al. Like I say Meshuga!
At the job site, we have not only the garble of the failed communication cable, which is now working like a charm, which is to say that if you swing a black cat by the tail in a graveyard, (maybe the funeral was a message to me, like the word of the day) and whisper the incantation mene mene tekel upharsin, a direct and significant connection will be made, but the mystery of the Missing Ammonia.
We pumped liquid ammonia into the Receiver, moved it by hose, pipe and pressure difference to both the Medium Temperature Flash Cooler and the Low Temperature Liquid Recirculating Accumulator, started a Compressor to pumping. At first the liquid level in the Receiver which disappeared at a shockingly quick interval, came back. Hooray! Then it left again. Somewhere lying in wait out in the system. Don't you just love that refrigeration talk. Makes you believe that I know something about the arcane arts of thermodynamics, eh? Meshuga! I know.
Somewhere in the afternooon my biorhythms started to wane. My head stuffed (with straw, alas), my nose congested, my body down down down. The result of a week in and out of the cold and heat, in and out of the aggrssion and tension, a week of down peak up peak. The constant expansion and contraction of hope and despair has left me exposed and possibly physically sick. I head to a drug store for a flu cure, but am afraid to take it because I had a couple glasses of wine.
Meshuga!
Suggested usage says WOTD.
"I may be meshuga but I'm not an idiot,"
Oh yeah?
Friday, October 25, 2002
Friday, October 25, 2002 6:24:03 PM Joe Coluccio
CO2 sublimates - from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid state - Dry ice
Cleveland.2:32 PM
Pallet jacks with containers of dry ice maneuver their way from a island depository of mist and sublimation in the center of the new dock floor into a freezer abandoned of any mechanical refrigeration. The fog filled warehouse air beams from the high intensity discharge lamps twenty or so feet above the newly cleaned and damp floor. Most definitely, Dorothy, this isn't Kansas anymore. There is more work and more life in this refrigerated bedlam than I have ever seen. Fork lifts snake around flotillas of scissors jacks carrying workers from the pipe insulator trade, the electricians, the pipe fitters, the sprinkler workers, the steel erectors and the rack builders. I walk beside a row of large gondola cardboard containers loaded with jumbo pumpkins. The single word Jack-O-Latern is striped diagonally across the front of one box, another has a Halloween pretty scary cartooned orange and black All Hollows Eve Scene. The propylene glycol filled temporary refrigeration air handlers add a constant white noise hiss. Air blows in terrible torrents from them. It is colder in here than in the rain fall filled world outside.
In the engine room, a surprising changed ambiance without the constant shrill of rotating dual lobbed screw compressors, two crews of welders are cutting, welding, fittings and pipe. They climb off their lifts and scramble among the confusion of piping. We are in some primeval mechnical jungle with the slight smell of ammonia and motor oil and ozone. The steel metal whir of portaband saw biting in to pipe, sprarks from a cutting torch and the deep powerful crack as an arc is struck - the welding rod in the stinger intermingles the molecules of the rod and the pipe into a solid presence. On the floor we look up.
On the loading dock, a 300 yard strip of concrete fronted by truck dock doors that lead to motorless trailers waiting to be filled, thirty or forty workes on pallet jacks pushing cartons of tomatoes, pumpkins, eggs, grapes, leaf lettuce, cheese, pomegranites, apples golden and red delish, pears and plump possibilites, glide like gondaliers on the Grand Canal, around the obstructions of construction work. As I walk, freightened, wary, ( I know one of these bastards is going to roll right over my foot) the more apt metaphor of bumper cars at an amusemet park pops into my mind. I can feel the chill throught my blue and red winter jacket. This constant movement from the autumn low of the outside to the mechanical heat of the compressor room to the artificial lower temperature of the refrigerated warehouse to the electric heat of our job trailer is wicking me weak. Both metaphoric and physcial toll is beating at me.
We wait for gas bound vessels to empty themselves to the tanker outside. Then a flurry of work. Then we wait again. It's much like rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. The day passes hot to cold to hot again. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.
Oh well I guess there's always Tara.
CO2 sublimates - from a solid to a gas without passing through the liquid state - Dry ice
Cleveland.2:32 PM
Pallet jacks with containers of dry ice maneuver their way from a island depository of mist and sublimation in the center of the new dock floor into a freezer abandoned of any mechanical refrigeration. The fog filled warehouse air beams from the high intensity discharge lamps twenty or so feet above the newly cleaned and damp floor. Most definitely, Dorothy, this isn't Kansas anymore. There is more work and more life in this refrigerated bedlam than I have ever seen. Fork lifts snake around flotillas of scissors jacks carrying workers from the pipe insulator trade, the electricians, the pipe fitters, the sprinkler workers, the steel erectors and the rack builders. I walk beside a row of large gondola cardboard containers loaded with jumbo pumpkins. The single word Jack-O-Latern is striped diagonally across the front of one box, another has a Halloween pretty scary cartooned orange and black All Hollows Eve Scene. The propylene glycol filled temporary refrigeration air handlers add a constant white noise hiss. Air blows in terrible torrents from them. It is colder in here than in the rain fall filled world outside.
In the engine room, a surprising changed ambiance without the constant shrill of rotating dual lobbed screw compressors, two crews of welders are cutting, welding, fittings and pipe. They climb off their lifts and scramble among the confusion of piping. We are in some primeval mechnical jungle with the slight smell of ammonia and motor oil and ozone. The steel metal whir of portaband saw biting in to pipe, sprarks from a cutting torch and the deep powerful crack as an arc is struck - the welding rod in the stinger intermingles the molecules of the rod and the pipe into a solid presence. On the floor we look up.
On the loading dock, a 300 yard strip of concrete fronted by truck dock doors that lead to motorless trailers waiting to be filled, thirty or forty workes on pallet jacks pushing cartons of tomatoes, pumpkins, eggs, grapes, leaf lettuce, cheese, pomegranites, apples golden and red delish, pears and plump possibilites, glide like gondaliers on the Grand Canal, around the obstructions of construction work. As I walk, freightened, wary, ( I know one of these bastards is going to roll right over my foot) the more apt metaphor of bumper cars at an amusemet park pops into my mind. I can feel the chill throught my blue and red winter jacket. This constant movement from the autumn low of the outside to the mechanical heat of the compressor room to the artificial lower temperature of the refrigerated warehouse to the electric heat of our job trailer is wicking me weak. Both metaphoric and physcial toll is beating at me.
We wait for gas bound vessels to empty themselves to the tanker outside. Then a flurry of work. Then we wait again. It's much like rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again. The day passes hot to cold to hot again. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.
Oh well I guess there's always Tara.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Wednesday, October 23, 2002 6:23:29 PM Joe Coluccio
There's a chill in the air, I hope.
I vowed, sometime ago, never to write anything topical in the Blog I steered clear of 9/11,12/25 and Columbus Day, whenever that was. But true to my word, I break my word, and frequently. What's a rule if you can stamp on it with the hob nails of your boots.
Tonight I write about 10/23/02, which was rudely pushed back from 10/16/02 and puts me for yet another week looking forward to another weekend in Cleveland Ohio. I write about, gasp, work! What, did you expect a sage explication of the middle east from me? A rant against terrorism? I'll give you a glimpse of my thinking. The reason there is terror instead of awe in the world is because politicians (left, right and central) are people who play at the scatological notions of political and sociological theory and try to convince us that they are creating a fine produce of yield instead of just creating more baseless muck. In short, don't like 'em, don't trust 'em. The poseurs!
This is the story. There are more than 10 million molecules in an ammonia refrigeration system! And we don't want one single story to escape to tell the tale. Ammonia, NH3, is a mighty fine and efficient refrigerant. God made it that way. But what God gives on the one hand God (notice how skillfully I avoided the issue of God's gender. I figure God is all genders! Maybe I should be a politician.) taketh away with the other. 'Cause ammonia, tho' not poisonous, can in concentrations take the breath away from you until you pass on, or somewhat worse, I think, but no less fatal, can under conditions of very high concentration, explode! KaBoom!
The company that I work for and have for the last seventeen years is involved in the renovation of a large cold storage plant, not three miles from this lovely motel room, in Cleveland, OH. And same uses the efficient NH3 as a refrigerating fluid. Roughly 14,000 pounds of it.
The rub is that we have to remove all 14000 pounds from a couple miles of pipe and some large vessels before we can open up the lines and weld a whole new section into the system. We started removal today about noon.
We have been here since July, installing new High Temperature Suction, High Pressure Liquid, Low Temperature Recirculating Suction, Low Temperature Recirculating Liquid, Hot Gas Defrost Lines, hanging new Evaporator Coils, setting a new Flash Cooler, installing a Liquid Transfer System, (I know you don't know what those things are, Hell, I hardly know, but if you use them in casual refrigeration conversation they will give you a certain cach¾ and perhaps a knowing grin from some thermodynamic engineering type.) And our day of reckoning has begun.
The plant has been cooled temporarily (for they cannot for one minute be out of business, the importance of the food chain is signifying) with very large propylene glycol chilling coils that blow you half way to the Far East when you cross in front of them. A large tanker and a large pumping truck sit in front of the engine room and are sucking the ammonia life blood out of the plant. Tomorrow with some luck we start our surgery. Performed with oxygen acetylene cutting torches and then stitched back together with welding devices that spark and spray the air with a sweet smell of ozone. Like the Medusa staring into the sparks will probably turn you to stone, but at the very least give you an uncomfortable ultraviolet eye flash.
We are all grimly aware of the precautions that must be taken. And it is setting me personally on edge. Which is why I break my hard and fast rule. It's either that or down to a State Store to find a large bottle of the cure. But then I wouldn't be all that sharp tomorrow.
If you have a small whiff of a faint Windex kind of smell that comes from eastern region of the Middle West...well, I might not be writing here Friday. I may be answering a whole lot of questions!
There's a chill in the air, I hope.
I vowed, sometime ago, never to write anything topical in the Blog I steered clear of 9/11,12/25 and Columbus Day, whenever that was. But true to my word, I break my word, and frequently. What's a rule if you can stamp on it with the hob nails of your boots.
Tonight I write about 10/23/02, which was rudely pushed back from 10/16/02 and puts me for yet another week looking forward to another weekend in Cleveland Ohio. I write about, gasp, work! What, did you expect a sage explication of the middle east from me? A rant against terrorism? I'll give you a glimpse of my thinking. The reason there is terror instead of awe in the world is because politicians (left, right and central) are people who play at the scatological notions of political and sociological theory and try to convince us that they are creating a fine produce of yield instead of just creating more baseless muck. In short, don't like 'em, don't trust 'em. The poseurs!
This is the story. There are more than 10 million molecules in an ammonia refrigeration system! And we don't want one single story to escape to tell the tale. Ammonia, NH3, is a mighty fine and efficient refrigerant. God made it that way. But what God gives on the one hand God (notice how skillfully I avoided the issue of God's gender. I figure God is all genders! Maybe I should be a politician.) taketh away with the other. 'Cause ammonia, tho' not poisonous, can in concentrations take the breath away from you until you pass on, or somewhat worse, I think, but no less fatal, can under conditions of very high concentration, explode! KaBoom!
The company that I work for and have for the last seventeen years is involved in the renovation of a large cold storage plant, not three miles from this lovely motel room, in Cleveland, OH. And same uses the efficient NH3 as a refrigerating fluid. Roughly 14,000 pounds of it.
The rub is that we have to remove all 14000 pounds from a couple miles of pipe and some large vessels before we can open up the lines and weld a whole new section into the system. We started removal today about noon.
We have been here since July, installing new High Temperature Suction, High Pressure Liquid, Low Temperature Recirculating Suction, Low Temperature Recirculating Liquid, Hot Gas Defrost Lines, hanging new Evaporator Coils, setting a new Flash Cooler, installing a Liquid Transfer System, (I know you don't know what those things are, Hell, I hardly know, but if you use them in casual refrigeration conversation they will give you a certain cach¾ and perhaps a knowing grin from some thermodynamic engineering type.) And our day of reckoning has begun.
The plant has been cooled temporarily (for they cannot for one minute be out of business, the importance of the food chain is signifying) with very large propylene glycol chilling coils that blow you half way to the Far East when you cross in front of them. A large tanker and a large pumping truck sit in front of the engine room and are sucking the ammonia life blood out of the plant. Tomorrow with some luck we start our surgery. Performed with oxygen acetylene cutting torches and then stitched back together with welding devices that spark and spray the air with a sweet smell of ozone. Like the Medusa staring into the sparks will probably turn you to stone, but at the very least give you an uncomfortable ultraviolet eye flash.
We are all grimly aware of the precautions that must be taken. And it is setting me personally on edge. Which is why I break my hard and fast rule. It's either that or down to a State Store to find a large bottle of the cure. But then I wouldn't be all that sharp tomorrow.
If you have a small whiff of a faint Windex kind of smell that comes from eastern region of the Middle West...well, I might not be writing here Friday. I may be answering a whole lot of questions!
Monday, October 21, 2002
Monday, October 21, 2002 6:47:28 PM Joe Coluccio
Naked for the world to see if only they knew...
I try to journal every day. On weekends I treat myself to a jaunt to this coffee shop, that. and sit with a exotic flavored bagel and a strange brewed coffee. Some places, it turns, are better constructed for the writing experience.
I immediately scratched any fast food establishment. They all smelled with the lush sins of frying bacon and sausage and played very loud warbling teen divas, while building contractors that didn't want to stand in the way of the early customers at the 7-11 with cups of scolding coffee and squalid talk, jostled and mulled like lost cattle in line. "Hey, Shirley would you put two creams in my coffee this morning. Yesterday you only gave me one! Watch out dick wad you almost made me spill my coffee. So, Shirl, we on for this weekend or what?"
I tried the more trendy $7.00 cup of coffee places (I felt for the price they should at least toss in the china cup), but well dressed good smelling office workers would start queues in entirely irrational sections of the shop and cause such a confusion upon the people serving that it wasn't good for the order that resides in my soul. And the only thing to eat were gooey pastries and dried lumps of trendy sugared bread.
A few true trendy were better than others. I settled. Some urban some suburban. A pattern developed and my adventurous days of disastrous discovery were over. I went I saw I wrote.
At first, I was a timid soul, who would find a booth at the rear of the establishment, open my laptop computer which has a screen the length and breath of a combat aircraft carrier deck, stick my nose behind the heavy lit pixilated active matrix and write delicious forbidden thoughts about the tortured workings of my psyche.
I realized that I might as well be in my basement behind a wall of books (I sit here now) and moved into the morning action. My outlook brightened. People buzzed about me. I described them and made small stories about them. Took note of their garb and realized that people wore different kinds of clothes. A fact, as reflected by stagnant wardrobe, that surprised the pants off me.
As I became a regular, now familiar folks would stop by and greet me. The talk mostly revolved around the laptop. "I was gonna git one like that, you know for stocks and stuff." When I brought my Pocket PC outfitted with a fold away keyboard, I caused quite a stir. "Where do you get something like that? Are you on the internet? I have a camp up north and something small like that would be great. How long do the batteries last?"
Finally one cold Saturday morning, an old guy, less hair than me, took a seat across the table. "You're writing a book aren't you?" His eyes piercing me as if to divine out of my very essence the type of "book" I was writing. I said, "No, just doing some work." Aha! "What kind of business are you in?" "Commercial Refrigeration" I said sensitive, hoping he wouldn't tell me that the refrigerator in his garage wasn't working and what did I think was the problem. I quickly clarified, "You know warehouses and supermarkets, that kind of thing." "Not stocks and bonds?" "Nope!" Just doing some work!
And then I was alone. When the journal works, it is remarkable! It is raw and plain and frank. I know that I am capable of hiding some very unpleasant sides of myself. I also know that I am capable of causing dense doubt with revealed motives true and imagined. It is a slippery thing this working within. And often, after an intense session I will look up and see where I am. I look out over the store, into the parking lot, out on to the road. 'How is it,' I think, 'that I can sit here on display for the whole world to see. No need of xray vision. I have just taken my clothes off and turned my skin inside out. There is nothing unrevealed. And yet, people in cars on foot sitting at tables take no notice?' It is part of the miracle and leaves me somewhat ashamed, certainly humble, but also a little better off.
In Denmark we ran nude into the snow from the sauna.
Naked for the world to see if only they knew...
I try to journal every day. On weekends I treat myself to a jaunt to this coffee shop, that. and sit with a exotic flavored bagel and a strange brewed coffee. Some places, it turns, are better constructed for the writing experience.
I immediately scratched any fast food establishment. They all smelled with the lush sins of frying bacon and sausage and played very loud warbling teen divas, while building contractors that didn't want to stand in the way of the early customers at the 7-11 with cups of scolding coffee and squalid talk, jostled and mulled like lost cattle in line. "Hey, Shirley would you put two creams in my coffee this morning. Yesterday you only gave me one! Watch out dick wad you almost made me spill my coffee. So, Shirl, we on for this weekend or what?"
I tried the more trendy $7.00 cup of coffee places (I felt for the price they should at least toss in the china cup), but well dressed good smelling office workers would start queues in entirely irrational sections of the shop and cause such a confusion upon the people serving that it wasn't good for the order that resides in my soul. And the only thing to eat were gooey pastries and dried lumps of trendy sugared bread.
A few true trendy were better than others. I settled. Some urban some suburban. A pattern developed and my adventurous days of disastrous discovery were over. I went I saw I wrote.
At first, I was a timid soul, who would find a booth at the rear of the establishment, open my laptop computer which has a screen the length and breath of a combat aircraft carrier deck, stick my nose behind the heavy lit pixilated active matrix and write delicious forbidden thoughts about the tortured workings of my psyche.
I realized that I might as well be in my basement behind a wall of books (I sit here now) and moved into the morning action. My outlook brightened. People buzzed about me. I described them and made small stories about them. Took note of their garb and realized that people wore different kinds of clothes. A fact, as reflected by stagnant wardrobe, that surprised the pants off me.
As I became a regular, now familiar folks would stop by and greet me. The talk mostly revolved around the laptop. "I was gonna git one like that, you know for stocks and stuff." When I brought my Pocket PC outfitted with a fold away keyboard, I caused quite a stir. "Where do you get something like that? Are you on the internet? I have a camp up north and something small like that would be great. How long do the batteries last?"
Finally one cold Saturday morning, an old guy, less hair than me, took a seat across the table. "You're writing a book aren't you?" His eyes piercing me as if to divine out of my very essence the type of "book" I was writing. I said, "No, just doing some work." Aha! "What kind of business are you in?" "Commercial Refrigeration" I said sensitive, hoping he wouldn't tell me that the refrigerator in his garage wasn't working and what did I think was the problem. I quickly clarified, "You know warehouses and supermarkets, that kind of thing." "Not stocks and bonds?" "Nope!" Just doing some work!
And then I was alone. When the journal works, it is remarkable! It is raw and plain and frank. I know that I am capable of hiding some very unpleasant sides of myself. I also know that I am capable of causing dense doubt with revealed motives true and imagined. It is a slippery thing this working within. And often, after an intense session I will look up and see where I am. I look out over the store, into the parking lot, out on to the road. 'How is it,' I think, 'that I can sit here on display for the whole world to see. No need of xray vision. I have just taken my clothes off and turned my skin inside out. There is nothing unrevealed. And yet, people in cars on foot sitting at tables take no notice?' It is part of the miracle and leaves me somewhat ashamed, certainly humble, but also a little better off.
In Denmark we ran nude into the snow from the sauna.
Friday, October 18, 2002
October 18, 2002 7:34 PM Joe Coluccio
Is Fernando Sor?
I don’t have one useful idea in my head to start. So I thought I would think about the fact that I have Andres Segovia playing on the cassette machine. The Legendary, it says Guitar Etudes it says. One side composed by D. Aguado and the other by Fernando Sor.
Now, I have over the years been through almost every guitar method, from Aaron Scherer to Carcassi to Mel Bay. Lately I’ve even been picking my way through a rather pleasing set of books by Christopher Parkening. (My one true Guitar Idol, John Williams, chooses to play rather than instruct). Segovia has, of course, revitalized and made important the Classical Guitar (sorry, Aaron, he insists that it should be called Classic Guitar) in the last and into this century. But I have always found his playing, although precise, to be less than emotionally satisfying.
So when I hear one of the Sor etudes executed, that have haunted and challenged my own playing over the years, by Il Maestro, I think, well, hell, Andres, I can play that as well as you. (I can’t even play it as well as I can). I think what I am responding to is the precision and the lack of emotion that his playing exhibits. Mine on the other hand, when not a terror of failed technique and just plain clumsy, has an emotional connotation that pleases at least me.
I am not a fanatic. I don’t wear gloves (excepting during a severe snow storm or weeding the prickle bush). I keep minimal care, with emery board, my fingernails. The fourth finger on my right hand curls up in a way that is useful to the struggling guitarist in me. I was first base in a pick up softball game on the blacktop playground at Thaddeus Stevens School, a nickel throw from the Eastwood Shopping Center which was a hop skip and a jump from the East Hills Shopping Center. Third base threw hard across the pitchers mound, a bouncing ball that he caught on the heel of his glove. It drilled straight at me and collided with my outstretched finger. Yow! Or something like it. I yelled. “Ow, I broke my finger.” Someone more pissed by the batter rounding second base stated emphatically. “It would really hurt if you broke it!” Kids and their theories! “It really hurts!” I yelled, as the play continued on and around me. Into the next day it throbbed and hooked in a graceful curve upward. Broke it was and broke it remains as I type some forty years later. The consolation is that it puts my finger and sometimes my self into the right attitude.
Oh, let me explain, you neophytes to the world of the Classic Guitar. Every thing, because of the influence is writ in Spanish, ethsepcially the finger, (notice my fine Castilian pronunciation. p = pulgar = thumb, i = indice = index, m = medio = middle (yes, that fickle finger of fate), and finally a = annular = ring finger. I certainly check surreptitiously this digit for a sign of commitment on a woman. Mine yields the pale anguish of two tries and a bad softball throw. (Sometimes c = chico = little finger, Mr. Pinky). P, I, M,A capable to produce a fine Guiliani arpeggio or a Terregan Cancion or a Villa Lobos Brasileiras.
O! Cisco! – O! Pancho!
Is Fernando Sor?
I don’t have one useful idea in my head to start. So I thought I would think about the fact that I have Andres Segovia playing on the cassette machine. The Legendary, it says Guitar Etudes it says. One side composed by D. Aguado and the other by Fernando Sor.
Now, I have over the years been through almost every guitar method, from Aaron Scherer to Carcassi to Mel Bay. Lately I’ve even been picking my way through a rather pleasing set of books by Christopher Parkening. (My one true Guitar Idol, John Williams, chooses to play rather than instruct). Segovia has, of course, revitalized and made important the Classical Guitar (sorry, Aaron, he insists that it should be called Classic Guitar) in the last and into this century. But I have always found his playing, although precise, to be less than emotionally satisfying.
So when I hear one of the Sor etudes executed, that have haunted and challenged my own playing over the years, by Il Maestro, I think, well, hell, Andres, I can play that as well as you. (I can’t even play it as well as I can). I think what I am responding to is the precision and the lack of emotion that his playing exhibits. Mine on the other hand, when not a terror of failed technique and just plain clumsy, has an emotional connotation that pleases at least me.
I am not a fanatic. I don’t wear gloves (excepting during a severe snow storm or weeding the prickle bush). I keep minimal care, with emery board, my fingernails. The fourth finger on my right hand curls up in a way that is useful to the struggling guitarist in me. I was first base in a pick up softball game on the blacktop playground at Thaddeus Stevens School, a nickel throw from the Eastwood Shopping Center which was a hop skip and a jump from the East Hills Shopping Center. Third base threw hard across the pitchers mound, a bouncing ball that he caught on the heel of his glove. It drilled straight at me and collided with my outstretched finger. Yow! Or something like it. I yelled. “Ow, I broke my finger.” Someone more pissed by the batter rounding second base stated emphatically. “It would really hurt if you broke it!” Kids and their theories! “It really hurts!” I yelled, as the play continued on and around me. Into the next day it throbbed and hooked in a graceful curve upward. Broke it was and broke it remains as I type some forty years later. The consolation is that it puts my finger and sometimes my self into the right attitude.
Oh, let me explain, you neophytes to the world of the Classic Guitar. Every thing, because of the influence is writ in Spanish, ethsepcially the finger, (notice my fine Castilian pronunciation. p = pulgar = thumb, i = indice = index, m = medio = middle (yes, that fickle finger of fate), and finally a = annular = ring finger. I certainly check surreptitiously this digit for a sign of commitment on a woman. Mine yields the pale anguish of two tries and a bad softball throw. (Sometimes c = chico = little finger, Mr. Pinky). P, I, M,A capable to produce a fine Guiliani arpeggio or a Terregan Cancion or a Villa Lobos Brasileiras.
O! Cisco! – O! Pancho!
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
Wednesday, October 16, 2002 7:06 PM Joe Coluccio
Give me your ‘umble poor, your ‘umble pie and your ‘umble bee!
Ever seen a movie called Les Enfants du Paradis, a creation of Michel Carné. Ever seen a movie called The Grapes of Wrath, a word creation of John Steinbeck a film creation of John Ford? Ever seen a movie called It Happened One Night, a film creation of Frank Capra? (Or for that matter any of the Capra Corn movies, yes including It’s A Wonderful Life) I have a friend that insists that there is a dark side to George Bailey, as evidenced on the night when bumbling Uncle Billy, puts the Bailey fortune into the hands of mean old Mr. Potter. George is cruel to his children, his wife in ways that show that they are not solitary incidents in old George’s life. George Bailey, child beater? wife molester? I don’t buy it, but then I am really not very much attuned to the twentieth century zeitgeist.
Or how about read Gorky’s the Lower Depths or seen every Russian farmer pee into the radiator of every tractor in Russia from Pudovkin to Eisenstein. The collective runs on the urine of the population. Or dallied a day or two with the East End Kids, the Dead End Kids, the Bowery Boys et al. It is true Populist Stuff and I enroll and endorse all of it. (Except for George Bailey as Psychopath, of course).
I, after all is said and done, come from the underbelly of the people. Look at Pietro DiDonato and Chirst in Concrete, a volume given to me by my father. Look at the fat but well intentioned leanings of Mario Puzo. Look at East Liberty and Larimar Avenue on the cusp of flight to suburban heaven and ultimate societal buffoonery. Look at A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The Divine Right of Kings indeed. Twain and Sir Boss were right on the money. Screw Arthur and Odysseus and Aeneas until they become mensch!
The people are revolting!
Indeed they are, but they are my revolting people. Every revolting molecule of them. It makes me laugh that the hollow halls of the academy chase after left politics in a righteous world. They wouldn’t know deprivation if it hit them in the face.
Hell, real people compromise their principals every day of their lives just to get by. Nobility comes from the acceptance of life, politics and the way things are sposed to be in the face of earning a living an in some cases putting that ethnic rich and inexpensive fare on the table.
Which brings me to my point. I have always known who the real thieves are. They are not people who steal a crust of bread, or even a color TV. Nope, my friends, these are just the people who go to jail. The pricks, as I have said earlier, are in charge. To them the mantle of injustice and the American way.
Hoorah for the failed Uncle Billy! Who was there to help him through his ignominy? George was off collecting kudos for his good works. Frederic, corrupt to the end, plays to the riled Children of the Paradise. Christians, in particular, take note!
Give me your ‘umble poor, your ‘umble pie and your ‘umble bee!
Ever seen a movie called Les Enfants du Paradis, a creation of Michel Carné. Ever seen a movie called The Grapes of Wrath, a word creation of John Steinbeck a film creation of John Ford? Ever seen a movie called It Happened One Night, a film creation of Frank Capra? (Or for that matter any of the Capra Corn movies, yes including It’s A Wonderful Life) I have a friend that insists that there is a dark side to George Bailey, as evidenced on the night when bumbling Uncle Billy, puts the Bailey fortune into the hands of mean old Mr. Potter. George is cruel to his children, his wife in ways that show that they are not solitary incidents in old George’s life. George Bailey, child beater? wife molester? I don’t buy it, but then I am really not very much attuned to the twentieth century zeitgeist.
Or how about read Gorky’s the Lower Depths or seen every Russian farmer pee into the radiator of every tractor in Russia from Pudovkin to Eisenstein. The collective runs on the urine of the population. Or dallied a day or two with the East End Kids, the Dead End Kids, the Bowery Boys et al. It is true Populist Stuff and I enroll and endorse all of it. (Except for George Bailey as Psychopath, of course).
I, after all is said and done, come from the underbelly of the people. Look at Pietro DiDonato and Chirst in Concrete, a volume given to me by my father. Look at the fat but well intentioned leanings of Mario Puzo. Look at East Liberty and Larimar Avenue on the cusp of flight to suburban heaven and ultimate societal buffoonery. Look at A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The Divine Right of Kings indeed. Twain and Sir Boss were right on the money. Screw Arthur and Odysseus and Aeneas until they become mensch!
The people are revolting!
Indeed they are, but they are my revolting people. Every revolting molecule of them. It makes me laugh that the hollow halls of the academy chase after left politics in a righteous world. They wouldn’t know deprivation if it hit them in the face.
Hell, real people compromise their principals every day of their lives just to get by. Nobility comes from the acceptance of life, politics and the way things are sposed to be in the face of earning a living an in some cases putting that ethnic rich and inexpensive fare on the table.
Which brings me to my point. I have always known who the real thieves are. They are not people who steal a crust of bread, or even a color TV. Nope, my friends, these are just the people who go to jail. The pricks, as I have said earlier, are in charge. To them the mantle of injustice and the American way.
Hoorah for the failed Uncle Billy! Who was there to help him through his ignominy? George was off collecting kudos for his good works. Frederic, corrupt to the end, plays to the riled Children of the Paradise. Christians, in particular, take note!
Monday, October 14, 2002
Monday, October 14, 2002 6:26 PM Joe Coluccio
There’s something here happening and I’m damned if I know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?
The summers that I worked at Beighley Hardware and Tool (58 through 60 or so), Souse Side Picksburgh, Penn-syl-van-eye-ay! could not help but form me.
There was Jimmy the driver who was shortly off to be a flyboy in the Air Force. There was lovely snapping eyed Anita, dark and dancing, a small black mole, right slightly below her bowed mouth, adding to the overall grand attraction of her face and spectacular packed body. Jim Mackey, old gray and frail, slightly palsied as he took the wetted tape from the dispenser and magically cemented a cardboard box into a shipping container. There was curled mustached Mr. Cowan, always clean and too well cologned, who was the first person ever to own a Volkswagen. We giggled as his bulk fit with difficulty in an auto that we had trouble believing would ever manage the daunting hills of Pittsburgh. Look at the gas and brake peddles! Too small to make the thing move! There was balding, kindly Mr. Kress, who looked like Frederic March in Inherit the Wind, whose son was going to school to be a shoe maker. There was the boss’s daughter, who was tall, hair severely drawn back over her head, precariously attractive at a thin and swaying six foot. There was Mr. Taylor the book keeper, who practiced the arcane arts of book keeping in his every life. There was Old Suspendered Man and Bespectacled Son Menges who owned the place and lived in a big house off Negley Hill. There was Elmer who sounded like a frog and had more personality than a jump jive DJ. There was sultry Leigh, short clipped light hair and much more woman than I have ever seen. There was my old man. There was me. And there was Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones had been a Marine. And I thought he was about the greatest person that I had ever met. He had fought against the slant eyed yellow menace gooks in the war. I pictured him on Guadalcanal as the naval ships fled to safety. I pictured him storming the beaches of Tarawa. I pictured him raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi. But he never really spoke of the war. Surely he had been there on the USS Missouri for the signing. For all I know he was a supply clerk in Wilkinsburg, PA. His silence added to the spice.
And oy! the insider talk I would hear about women. Between Elmer and Jimmy and Mr. Jones and My old man. It made all my nascent passions solid and gold. Though I was the butt of some humor, it still made me a quite a man, just being within ear shot of that masculine conversation.
One day, I was back among the shelves arranging something, I heard bean counter Taylor lecturing Jones. “You know what your problem is Jones?” said Taylor, about to show his deep wisdom. No sound from Mr. Jones. “You’re not enough of a prick!” said Taylor. I was first annoyed and then incensed. What was wrong, Mr. Dirty Nefarious Know-It-All Accountant, with being a nice guy, I thought, with being a hero, someone for…me...to look up to?
It struck me. This real world. As I thought it through I knew that Dick Jones was doomed. He just plain wasn’t a prick. It made me sad. Not for the Joneses. It is the sad end American business (eh, Mr. Enron. Mr. WorldCom, Mr. GE). The pricks are in charge.
Flee the years! Take me to 1976 when I worked for a company called Marchase Refrigeration. I had occasion to call Standard Machinist Company. A place where I knew Dick Jones had gone after the Hardware went out of business. I asked for him.
A weak voice came over the phone. “Mr. Jones,” I said, years of warmth for the man in my voice, “how are you?” I explained who I was. He asked after my father. I told him that he was just fine. And asked again. “It’s really great to talk to you. How have you been?”
And he proceeded to tell me.
His wife has just passed away. He was feeling ill most of the time. The only reason he was still working was he couldn’t afford to quit. The medical bills, you know? It was tearing, this conversation, something from me. Not his fault I know. Just my stupid expectations, my royal dreams. I finally said goodbye. Mentioned I would like to see him some day. Goodbye it was.
Semper Fideles, my victorious friend!
There’s something here happening and I’m damned if I know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?
The summers that I worked at Beighley Hardware and Tool (58 through 60 or so), Souse Side Picksburgh, Penn-syl-van-eye-ay! could not help but form me.
There was Jimmy the driver who was shortly off to be a flyboy in the Air Force. There was lovely snapping eyed Anita, dark and dancing, a small black mole, right slightly below her bowed mouth, adding to the overall grand attraction of her face and spectacular packed body. Jim Mackey, old gray and frail, slightly palsied as he took the wetted tape from the dispenser and magically cemented a cardboard box into a shipping container. There was curled mustached Mr. Cowan, always clean and too well cologned, who was the first person ever to own a Volkswagen. We giggled as his bulk fit with difficulty in an auto that we had trouble believing would ever manage the daunting hills of Pittsburgh. Look at the gas and brake peddles! Too small to make the thing move! There was balding, kindly Mr. Kress, who looked like Frederic March in Inherit the Wind, whose son was going to school to be a shoe maker. There was the boss’s daughter, who was tall, hair severely drawn back over her head, precariously attractive at a thin and swaying six foot. There was Mr. Taylor the book keeper, who practiced the arcane arts of book keeping in his every life. There was Old Suspendered Man and Bespectacled Son Menges who owned the place and lived in a big house off Negley Hill. There was Elmer who sounded like a frog and had more personality than a jump jive DJ. There was sultry Leigh, short clipped light hair and much more woman than I have ever seen. There was my old man. There was me. And there was Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones had been a Marine. And I thought he was about the greatest person that I had ever met. He had fought against the slant eyed yellow menace gooks in the war. I pictured him on Guadalcanal as the naval ships fled to safety. I pictured him storming the beaches of Tarawa. I pictured him raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi. But he never really spoke of the war. Surely he had been there on the USS Missouri for the signing. For all I know he was a supply clerk in Wilkinsburg, PA. His silence added to the spice.
And oy! the insider talk I would hear about women. Between Elmer and Jimmy and Mr. Jones and My old man. It made all my nascent passions solid and gold. Though I was the butt of some humor, it still made me a quite a man, just being within ear shot of that masculine conversation.
One day, I was back among the shelves arranging something, I heard bean counter Taylor lecturing Jones. “You know what your problem is Jones?” said Taylor, about to show his deep wisdom. No sound from Mr. Jones. “You’re not enough of a prick!” said Taylor. I was first annoyed and then incensed. What was wrong, Mr. Dirty Nefarious Know-It-All Accountant, with being a nice guy, I thought, with being a hero, someone for…me...to look up to?
It struck me. This real world. As I thought it through I knew that Dick Jones was doomed. He just plain wasn’t a prick. It made me sad. Not for the Joneses. It is the sad end American business (eh, Mr. Enron. Mr. WorldCom, Mr. GE). The pricks are in charge.
Flee the years! Take me to 1976 when I worked for a company called Marchase Refrigeration. I had occasion to call Standard Machinist Company. A place where I knew Dick Jones had gone after the Hardware went out of business. I asked for him.
A weak voice came over the phone. “Mr. Jones,” I said, years of warmth for the man in my voice, “how are you?” I explained who I was. He asked after my father. I told him that he was just fine. And asked again. “It’s really great to talk to you. How have you been?”
And he proceeded to tell me.
His wife has just passed away. He was feeling ill most of the time. The only reason he was still working was he couldn’t afford to quit. The medical bills, you know? It was tearing, this conversation, something from me. Not his fault I know. Just my stupid expectations, my royal dreams. I finally said goodbye. Mentioned I would like to see him some day. Goodbye it was.
Semper Fideles, my victorious friend!
Friday, October 11, 2002
Friday, October 11, 2002 8:31 PM Joe Coluccio
10-24 UNC or 10-32 UNF some threads of my life.
Jim Mackey was a gray haired man who came to work in denim overhauls and a Casey Jones railroad engineer’s cap and carried his lunch down from the streetcar tracks in a black half cylindrical metal box.
In the summers, fifth, sixth, seventh grades I would go to work with my father. South 6th and Bingham Streets, one block north of East Carson Street. Souse Side Picksburgh Penn-syl-van-eye-ey, Hey! We ate lunch and breakfast at Sarah’s before she became famous and the word yuppie was whispered, certainly before she disappeared into South Side legend, a block on the right passed the wonder of the 10th Street suspension bridge.
The place was called Beighley Hardware and Tool. The less than presumptuous block building stands today and houses a similar business called Plant Services. Long time competition Standard Machinist four blocks toward the Smithfield Street Bridge on the lower levels of the Terminal Building and Lappe Supply the other side of the original Birmingham Bridge have long been retired to mechanical heaven.
My old man would take my mother to work, Mayflower Coffee Shop across from Rosenbaum’s next to the Loew’s Penn Theatre which had honest to god knights in shining mail jousting at you on the way to the basement men’s room. Downtown Pittsburgh was vibrant with smoke, grime and life. Then he would cross the Smithfield Street Bridge, stop at the Triangular Service station and talk to Bill who would hawk tobacco on the cement while he pumped gas and then take me to work. Sometime afterward he would go on his way making sales calls.
Jim would come in about fifteen minutes after I was settled in with a loping loose limbed gate and stop in front of the scarred desk that sat in a dark corner of the shipping dock and place the contents of his lunch box in a drawer, place the box under the desk and say, “Good morning, sonny!” with a grin that was sincere but looked as fake as his teeth. Then he would walk over to the plywood and two by four shipping table that lined the entire front wall of the room and start his days work.
He would grunt, mumble and hum as he worked and click tongue to his teeth over a back ordered shipment that would be met with his kind but stern disapproval. “Don’t have those Allen Hex Keys. Can’t ship this yet” Jim was a Zen master of repetition. We hadn’t had those damn Allen Hex Keys for two weeks and weren’t expecting them for another two, but every morning he would lift the merchandise that was neatly placed atop a goldenrod copy of the shipping order and intone the same lines with the same inflection, move on to the next order and categorize the missing portions of the order, offer comment to the gods of freight. Jim Mackey taught me everything I know about shipping and receiving (which is considerable). I mumble and hum as I ship or receive, make the incantation of the back order and swear. I learned the swearing from my old man who took strings of invective to altogether new heights and delights.
Lunch time. Jim would retrieve his cup from the desk and walk down the steps to the bathroom and fill it with hot tap water. As he poured the instant coffee powder into the cup he would say, and I mean everyday he would say, looking up at me to be sure I was paying attention, “You know, sonny, once in a café I saw a sign that said, ‘Don’t laugh at our coffee you may be old and weak yourself some time.” Then he would laugh and sit down to eat his pasteboard sandwich prepared by Mrs. Mackey, who I never met, but imagined must look as kindly as Mrs. Claus of the Pole, and soften it with luke warm ersatz instant caffeine as he chewed thoughfully with ersatz teeth.
Mid afternoon mid week, I was given a task that has set a weird reverberation of order and fitness to my entire life. At the beginning of the week the company would get a request for cadmium plated nuts, bolts, machine screws, hex head cap screws, you name it. I would pull the order, literally hundreds of little hundred count boxes packed into two or three large containers. The driver then took them to a tin plater over on Butler Street. Round about Wednesday they would return. The technique of plating the hardware demanded that my neat stacks of boxes, would be carelessly emptied into a metal basket and placed in some electrolytic bath that would coat all with dazzling cadmium plate. The driver upon triumphant return would set the sad empty boxes looking dead on the floor and pour the glittering hardware, more silver that Solomon’s, in a large chaotic pile in the center of the table. It was my job to separate count and place them back into boxes.
I can still pick a 10-32 National Fine x ¾” round head machine screw out of a stack of similar length oval head 10-24 pan head 6-40 hex head ¼ - 20 screws nuts and bolts. My mind would groove. I would start to whistle. Jim would mumble, hum, grunt then say, “Say, sonny, I knew a man who blew his teeth out whistling too hard.”
He was a fine man of habit to whom I now raise my glass! I’ve still got my teeth.
10-24 UNC or 10-32 UNF some threads of my life.
Jim Mackey was a gray haired man who came to work in denim overhauls and a Casey Jones railroad engineer’s cap and carried his lunch down from the streetcar tracks in a black half cylindrical metal box.
In the summers, fifth, sixth, seventh grades I would go to work with my father. South 6th and Bingham Streets, one block north of East Carson Street. Souse Side Picksburgh Penn-syl-van-eye-ey, Hey! We ate lunch and breakfast at Sarah’s before she became famous and the word yuppie was whispered, certainly before she disappeared into South Side legend, a block on the right passed the wonder of the 10th Street suspension bridge.
The place was called Beighley Hardware and Tool. The less than presumptuous block building stands today and houses a similar business called Plant Services. Long time competition Standard Machinist four blocks toward the Smithfield Street Bridge on the lower levels of the Terminal Building and Lappe Supply the other side of the original Birmingham Bridge have long been retired to mechanical heaven.
My old man would take my mother to work, Mayflower Coffee Shop across from Rosenbaum’s next to the Loew’s Penn Theatre which had honest to god knights in shining mail jousting at you on the way to the basement men’s room. Downtown Pittsburgh was vibrant with smoke, grime and life. Then he would cross the Smithfield Street Bridge, stop at the Triangular Service station and talk to Bill who would hawk tobacco on the cement while he pumped gas and then take me to work. Sometime afterward he would go on his way making sales calls.
Jim would come in about fifteen minutes after I was settled in with a loping loose limbed gate and stop in front of the scarred desk that sat in a dark corner of the shipping dock and place the contents of his lunch box in a drawer, place the box under the desk and say, “Good morning, sonny!” with a grin that was sincere but looked as fake as his teeth. Then he would walk over to the plywood and two by four shipping table that lined the entire front wall of the room and start his days work.
He would grunt, mumble and hum as he worked and click tongue to his teeth over a back ordered shipment that would be met with his kind but stern disapproval. “Don’t have those Allen Hex Keys. Can’t ship this yet” Jim was a Zen master of repetition. We hadn’t had those damn Allen Hex Keys for two weeks and weren’t expecting them for another two, but every morning he would lift the merchandise that was neatly placed atop a goldenrod copy of the shipping order and intone the same lines with the same inflection, move on to the next order and categorize the missing portions of the order, offer comment to the gods of freight. Jim Mackey taught me everything I know about shipping and receiving (which is considerable). I mumble and hum as I ship or receive, make the incantation of the back order and swear. I learned the swearing from my old man who took strings of invective to altogether new heights and delights.
Lunch time. Jim would retrieve his cup from the desk and walk down the steps to the bathroom and fill it with hot tap water. As he poured the instant coffee powder into the cup he would say, and I mean everyday he would say, looking up at me to be sure I was paying attention, “You know, sonny, once in a café I saw a sign that said, ‘Don’t laugh at our coffee you may be old and weak yourself some time.” Then he would laugh and sit down to eat his pasteboard sandwich prepared by Mrs. Mackey, who I never met, but imagined must look as kindly as Mrs. Claus of the Pole, and soften it with luke warm ersatz instant caffeine as he chewed thoughfully with ersatz teeth.
Mid afternoon mid week, I was given a task that has set a weird reverberation of order and fitness to my entire life. At the beginning of the week the company would get a request for cadmium plated nuts, bolts, machine screws, hex head cap screws, you name it. I would pull the order, literally hundreds of little hundred count boxes packed into two or three large containers. The driver then took them to a tin plater over on Butler Street. Round about Wednesday they would return. The technique of plating the hardware demanded that my neat stacks of boxes, would be carelessly emptied into a metal basket and placed in some electrolytic bath that would coat all with dazzling cadmium plate. The driver upon triumphant return would set the sad empty boxes looking dead on the floor and pour the glittering hardware, more silver that Solomon’s, in a large chaotic pile in the center of the table. It was my job to separate count and place them back into boxes.
I can still pick a 10-32 National Fine x ¾” round head machine screw out of a stack of similar length oval head 10-24 pan head 6-40 hex head ¼ - 20 screws nuts and bolts. My mind would groove. I would start to whistle. Jim would mumble, hum, grunt then say, “Say, sonny, I knew a man who blew his teeth out whistling too hard.”
He was a fine man of habit to whom I now raise my glass! I’ve still got my teeth.
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
October 9, 2002 6:12 PM
I’m inclined to knockwurst.
Mozart for the Mind is the name of the CD that I picked up at a thrift store today for $3.95. A steal? More than likely for the owners of the thrift. As I waited in line for people with gads of clothes, stripping them madly from the hangers, as clerks tallied yellow and green and red and purple tags marked with thick magic marker numbers that blurred into a large ink blot that caused no end of bickering, I read the liner notes.
The University of California at Irvine, I paraphrase, the document lies far away and to the North on my desk at work, discovered via a survey (and who was it that (you really have to ask) formulated such a study?) that people who listen to Mozart for ten minutes prior to an examination were brighter by a marked degree than those who managed some relaxation exercises or those who merely sat I silence for the measured time.
I rushed back to my work station and placed the CD anxiously into the player high above my desk. Ahh, the marvelous strains of Wolfgang wafted over the office and immediately I could see the effects. I finally understood E=MC2. Several others began recited Shakespearean soliloquies, the Gettysburg Address (552 Lincoln Way, sorry I just couldn’t….), A listing of all the Supreme Court Justices in order of their birth dates, astounding Stock Market prognostications, Cordon Bleu recipes, need I go on? (I hope not because they are becoming strikingly less original and most certainly less funny.)
Alas, I did not wait in the line long enough to read all the liners notes for several paragraphs later it is revealed that the effect is as temporary as the azalea blooms in spring or mosaic of turning leaves in autumn. I am playing Symphony No. 41 C-Major KV 551 “Jupiter” at this moment to try to retrieve my earlier insight into the Einsteinian Universe. But it is lost!
Damn that Mozart!
It did start me to wondering. Why, I said, Mozart. Why not for example Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida? Or The Three Liddle Fisheeze that thwam and thwam all over the dam? Or, for those who like lighter fare, The Ten Thousand and One Melanchrino Strings’ version of Eleanor Rigby?
There is no obvious answer as to why a Mozart opus trims and straightens our brain waves. The final paragraph of the liner notes explains that this survey developed a theory that has become known as The Mozart Effect. Stunned, I realize that there are probably millions of Americans, deep in the hollars and back woods that still pronounce Mozart Mose-art. I will lobby Washington. A funded project aimed at educating those in the deep dark piney forests soused on moon alcohol. Traveling trucks with large speakers atop, like you see once in a while in 50’s science fiction epics, dedicated to playing the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro or dare I say it, Serenade in G-Major KV 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusick.
My mother’s boss at the Mayflower Coffee Shop (As you ramble on through life, dear Brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole!) where she worked (downtown next to what is now Heinz Hall that spews out more classically than just Mozart on a Friday night, you betcha), when I was just a young whipper snapper, used to tell me he loved classical music.
“Why just last night,” he would say, “I was listening to Beethoven’s Refrain from Spitting!”
I’m inclined to knockwurst.
Mozart for the Mind is the name of the CD that I picked up at a thrift store today for $3.95. A steal? More than likely for the owners of the thrift. As I waited in line for people with gads of clothes, stripping them madly from the hangers, as clerks tallied yellow and green and red and purple tags marked with thick magic marker numbers that blurred into a large ink blot that caused no end of bickering, I read the liner notes.
The University of California at Irvine, I paraphrase, the document lies far away and to the North on my desk at work, discovered via a survey (and who was it that (you really have to ask) formulated such a study?) that people who listen to Mozart for ten minutes prior to an examination were brighter by a marked degree than those who managed some relaxation exercises or those who merely sat I silence for the measured time.
I rushed back to my work station and placed the CD anxiously into the player high above my desk. Ahh, the marvelous strains of Wolfgang wafted over the office and immediately I could see the effects. I finally understood E=MC2. Several others began recited Shakespearean soliloquies, the Gettysburg Address (552 Lincoln Way, sorry I just couldn’t….), A listing of all the Supreme Court Justices in order of their birth dates, astounding Stock Market prognostications, Cordon Bleu recipes, need I go on? (I hope not because they are becoming strikingly less original and most certainly less funny.)
Alas, I did not wait in the line long enough to read all the liners notes for several paragraphs later it is revealed that the effect is as temporary as the azalea blooms in spring or mosaic of turning leaves in autumn. I am playing Symphony No. 41 C-Major KV 551 “Jupiter” at this moment to try to retrieve my earlier insight into the Einsteinian Universe. But it is lost!
Damn that Mozart!
It did start me to wondering. Why, I said, Mozart. Why not for example Ina-Gadda-Da-Vida? Or The Three Liddle Fisheeze that thwam and thwam all over the dam? Or, for those who like lighter fare, The Ten Thousand and One Melanchrino Strings’ version of Eleanor Rigby?
There is no obvious answer as to why a Mozart opus trims and straightens our brain waves. The final paragraph of the liner notes explains that this survey developed a theory that has become known as The Mozart Effect. Stunned, I realize that there are probably millions of Americans, deep in the hollars and back woods that still pronounce Mozart Mose-art. I will lobby Washington. A funded project aimed at educating those in the deep dark piney forests soused on moon alcohol. Traveling trucks with large speakers atop, like you see once in a while in 50’s science fiction epics, dedicated to playing the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro or dare I say it, Serenade in G-Major KV 525 Eine Kleine Nachtmusick.
My mother’s boss at the Mayflower Coffee Shop (As you ramble on through life, dear Brother, whatever be your goal. Keep your eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole!) where she worked (downtown next to what is now Heinz Hall that spews out more classically than just Mozart on a Friday night, you betcha), when I was just a young whipper snapper, used to tell me he loved classical music.
“Why just last night,” he would say, “I was listening to Beethoven’s Refrain from Spitting!”
Monday, October 07, 2002
Monday, October 07, 2002 6:30 PM
L’histoire just ain’t what it used to be
In Pittsburgh, when I was a kid, was this enticing bit of television that came on just about supper time, called the Early Show. (The Late Show came at 11:15 PM after the news with Bill Burns) The Early show was always a movie, mostly by Warner Brothers (I still thrill when I see that logo and hear the deep brash brass herald that accompanies it), cut to within an inch of its life so that commercials could fill out the hour. The deal was we could watch TV and eat dinner if, (a.) we were sick or (b.)there was some educational value displayed. Being a rather robust child, it is here that I learned most of the history of the world.
I have often thought that it would be a delicious way to teach a history course and am happy to see that The History Channel does such a thing with a war movies and a panel of experts to tell how the actual events tally with the theatrical recreation.
I, for one, always believe the movie. I know this is controversial, but it is also incontrovertible. Remember the old saying, when you want the facts read non-fictional (in olden days a newspaper might even approach the facts), but if you want the truth read fiction.
Several months ago in a funk I picked up Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. I remember Ivanhoe (more about that noble knight later) with some fondness and decided to read about Richard Coeur De Lion. Saladin the Saracen king comes off better.
The Early Show circa 1958 The Crusades(1935) with Henry Wilcoxon as Richard Lion Heart and Ian Keith as Saladin. Loretta Young as the yucky love interest. King of the Occident and King of the Orient meet in a tent somewhere in the holy land. Richard, smug as English Royalty, shows his might by setting a steel mace across a couple tables, then takes his big heavy sword and with a mighty thwack cuts the solid metal bar in two. Saladin shows proper surprise and respect and then takes a very delicate piece of silk, tosses it in to the air. It floats on the currents of the hot desert air. As it descends he pulls his curved sword from its jeweled scabbard and holds the very sharp business end up. The silk slowly passes over the blade and is cut in two as it settles to the earth. Now, who is cooler?
The same scene to my utter joy appears in The Talisman. Having looked it up in some internet database I now know that one of the screenwriters for this Cecil B. Demille debacle (the film lost money) was none other than Harold Lamb and was based on his book The Crusade: Iron Men And Saints. I figure Lamb got it from Scott.
An aside: Ivanhoe. You have your choice between Elizabeth Taylor, who, granted, is a Jewess and will cause you a great deal of disfavor, and Joan Fontaine, who is thin lipped and lily white but will cause your countrymen to flock to your aid Sorry, Walter, I pick Elizabeth and move to Israel after I lose the foreskin. So, I never said the Early Show was perfect history!
I love Harold Lamb. He is an historical author who is almost lost to history. I love Kenneth Roberts, another forgotten gem. And Rafael Sabatini, ditto. And Alan Eckert, who Tak au bon Dieu, is still on bookstore shelves but shunned by scholars. Lamb-The Crusades, Sabatini-Captain Blood, Scaramouche and the Sea Hawk, Roberts – Northwest Passage, a movie and or book with a journey so grueling that I cannot either read or watch again for the extreme difficulties and struggles that I would have to endure along with the characters.
And Thomas Costain, Mika Waltari, Frank Yerby, James Streeter, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, Edison Marshall, Garland Raork, F Van Wyck Mason, Walter D. Edmonds, Ben Ames Williams and…. the unnamed others I discovered during the hours of the early show and then at the library on Saturday morning. Y’all live in the basement with me and my mind!
I thought I was gonna write about Errol Flynn and John Wayne this evening. Boy am I surprised!
L’histoire just ain’t what it used to be
In Pittsburgh, when I was a kid, was this enticing bit of television that came on just about supper time, called the Early Show. (The Late Show came at 11:15 PM after the news with Bill Burns) The Early show was always a movie, mostly by Warner Brothers (I still thrill when I see that logo and hear the deep brash brass herald that accompanies it), cut to within an inch of its life so that commercials could fill out the hour. The deal was we could watch TV and eat dinner if, (a.) we were sick or (b.)there was some educational value displayed. Being a rather robust child, it is here that I learned most of the history of the world.
I have often thought that it would be a delicious way to teach a history course and am happy to see that The History Channel does such a thing with a war movies and a panel of experts to tell how the actual events tally with the theatrical recreation.
I, for one, always believe the movie. I know this is controversial, but it is also incontrovertible. Remember the old saying, when you want the facts read non-fictional (in olden days a newspaper might even approach the facts), but if you want the truth read fiction.
Several months ago in a funk I picked up Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. I remember Ivanhoe (more about that noble knight later) with some fondness and decided to read about Richard Coeur De Lion. Saladin the Saracen king comes off better.
The Early Show circa 1958 The Crusades(1935) with Henry Wilcoxon as Richard Lion Heart and Ian Keith as Saladin. Loretta Young as the yucky love interest. King of the Occident and King of the Orient meet in a tent somewhere in the holy land. Richard, smug as English Royalty, shows his might by setting a steel mace across a couple tables, then takes his big heavy sword and with a mighty thwack cuts the solid metal bar in two. Saladin shows proper surprise and respect and then takes a very delicate piece of silk, tosses it in to the air. It floats on the currents of the hot desert air. As it descends he pulls his curved sword from its jeweled scabbard and holds the very sharp business end up. The silk slowly passes over the blade and is cut in two as it settles to the earth. Now, who is cooler?
The same scene to my utter joy appears in The Talisman. Having looked it up in some internet database I now know that one of the screenwriters for this Cecil B. Demille debacle (the film lost money) was none other than Harold Lamb and was based on his book The Crusade: Iron Men And Saints. I figure Lamb got it from Scott.
An aside: Ivanhoe. You have your choice between Elizabeth Taylor, who, granted, is a Jewess and will cause you a great deal of disfavor, and Joan Fontaine, who is thin lipped and lily white but will cause your countrymen to flock to your aid Sorry, Walter, I pick Elizabeth and move to Israel after I lose the foreskin. So, I never said the Early Show was perfect history!
I love Harold Lamb. He is an historical author who is almost lost to history. I love Kenneth Roberts, another forgotten gem. And Rafael Sabatini, ditto. And Alan Eckert, who Tak au bon Dieu, is still on bookstore shelves but shunned by scholars. Lamb-The Crusades, Sabatini-Captain Blood, Scaramouche and the Sea Hawk, Roberts – Northwest Passage, a movie and or book with a journey so grueling that I cannot either read or watch again for the extreme difficulties and struggles that I would have to endure along with the characters.
And Thomas Costain, Mika Waltari, Frank Yerby, James Streeter, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, Edison Marshall, Garland Raork, F Van Wyck Mason, Walter D. Edmonds, Ben Ames Williams and…. the unnamed others I discovered during the hours of the early show and then at the library on Saturday morning. Y’all live in the basement with me and my mind!
I thought I was gonna write about Errol Flynn and John Wayne this evening. Boy am I surprised!
Friday, October 04, 2002
October 4, 2002 7:20 PM
It is the end of another week. All is right with the world. My firewire hard drive reads the hours.
Two feelings, begin and end time have been with me my life. Would I be a different person without them?
First, the absolute freedom when I leave my travail be it school or work of a Friday evening. There are two absolutely blank days with all sorts of possibility open before me. Mostly I blow it. I spend the evening sucking at images on the TV. Not this weekend I vow. The sirens call seductively. I tie myself to a mast.
The next morning starts with promise. Breakfast (a flavored bagel or two lately) over a large coffee. Early. While coaches of basketball tennis baseball volleyball majorettes youth groups car washes bring their throngs to the table for good cheers and advice. While weekend contractors struggle, work boots tar smudged jeans a pocked tee shirt, to make plans for another day of drudgery. While old italian guys reminisce the morning about Billy and Jimmy and Jeanie and Antony. While stern lipped mothers explain the rules to their daughters. While casually dressed folk read the newspaper and blow aimlessly over cups of smoke encircled beverage. While good natured employees look longingly at the next in line, tongs extended, hands at the ready. The world abuzz. The world accepted. The world of Saturday morning. The day wears on.
Afternoon at the cooking shows, afternoon at the bocce courts, afternoon at the malls, bistros and throbbing business that we manage to avoid quite nicely most weekdays. Afternoon at the luncheon counter. Afternoon at the movies. Afternoon at the ball park. After noon of the nap. And evening falls, sweet smelling.
I don’t travel very far on Saturday evening. Listen to Garrison Keeler. Manage to keep my fingers off the remote control. Try to catch the reading that has eluded alluded me. Try not to nod off too early, while Miles or Ornette or Sonny or Charlie or John or Andres or Sharon stick to the walls in the background. Dream of long swelling B flat melodies and the mountains of the moon or Cygnus X1.
Til Sunday morn blooms. My mother, hard heels clacking on the kitchen floor, preparing to meet her God, found after years of teeth gnashing, my son stirring to his weekend job and I desultory, wondering, what should I. Awaken? Or just close my eyes for another 10 minutes or an hour? Freedom is dwindling. I sip. I eat.
Maybe the movie I didn’t see yesterday, maybe a trip to the book store, maybe I’ll even watch a meaningless football game and nap fitfully. To afternoon passes.
Number Two. Circa 1954 the evening brought Ed Sullivan and his show of shows, my uncle would yell across the front porch to his daughter Molly look the dancers. Opera singers would be sung. Ed would clap his hands. Senor Wences and Toppo Gigo would entwine themselves and smack the Sullivan lips. Followed o! too quickly by John Daly, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf sometimes Ricky Ricardo, sometimes Harry Morgan and the mystery guest that would please sign in. Oh my God is it really Victor Borge or Spring Byington? If I beat my brother to the bathtub I was able, clean and uncomfortable, to watch the whole of What’s My Line. UNTIL that awful moment when John would turn over all the cards, because time was up, the game was over. Like the march to the Guillotine was the march to the beds in our room at the rear of the house with crickets singing over the unfinished patio.
Reprise. The present the Game Show Channel. A bath, a show, a bed, a sleep!
This weekend will be different. Honest!
It is the end of another week. All is right with the world. My firewire hard drive reads the hours.
Two feelings, begin and end time have been with me my life. Would I be a different person without them?
First, the absolute freedom when I leave my travail be it school or work of a Friday evening. There are two absolutely blank days with all sorts of possibility open before me. Mostly I blow it. I spend the evening sucking at images on the TV. Not this weekend I vow. The sirens call seductively. I tie myself to a mast.
The next morning starts with promise. Breakfast (a flavored bagel or two lately) over a large coffee. Early. While coaches of basketball tennis baseball volleyball majorettes youth groups car washes bring their throngs to the table for good cheers and advice. While weekend contractors struggle, work boots tar smudged jeans a pocked tee shirt, to make plans for another day of drudgery. While old italian guys reminisce the morning about Billy and Jimmy and Jeanie and Antony. While stern lipped mothers explain the rules to their daughters. While casually dressed folk read the newspaper and blow aimlessly over cups of smoke encircled beverage. While good natured employees look longingly at the next in line, tongs extended, hands at the ready. The world abuzz. The world accepted. The world of Saturday morning. The day wears on.
Afternoon at the cooking shows, afternoon at the bocce courts, afternoon at the malls, bistros and throbbing business that we manage to avoid quite nicely most weekdays. Afternoon at the luncheon counter. Afternoon at the movies. Afternoon at the ball park. After noon of the nap. And evening falls, sweet smelling.
I don’t travel very far on Saturday evening. Listen to Garrison Keeler. Manage to keep my fingers off the remote control. Try to catch the reading that has eluded alluded me. Try not to nod off too early, while Miles or Ornette or Sonny or Charlie or John or Andres or Sharon stick to the walls in the background. Dream of long swelling B flat melodies and the mountains of the moon or Cygnus X1.
Til Sunday morn blooms. My mother, hard heels clacking on the kitchen floor, preparing to meet her God, found after years of teeth gnashing, my son stirring to his weekend job and I desultory, wondering, what should I. Awaken? Or just close my eyes for another 10 minutes or an hour? Freedom is dwindling. I sip. I eat.
Maybe the movie I didn’t see yesterday, maybe a trip to the book store, maybe I’ll even watch a meaningless football game and nap fitfully. To afternoon passes.
Number Two. Circa 1954 the evening brought Ed Sullivan and his show of shows, my uncle would yell across the front porch to his daughter Molly look the dancers. Opera singers would be sung. Ed would clap his hands. Senor Wences and Toppo Gigo would entwine themselves and smack the Sullivan lips. Followed o! too quickly by John Daly, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf sometimes Ricky Ricardo, sometimes Harry Morgan and the mystery guest that would please sign in. Oh my God is it really Victor Borge or Spring Byington? If I beat my brother to the bathtub I was able, clean and uncomfortable, to watch the whole of What’s My Line. UNTIL that awful moment when John would turn over all the cards, because time was up, the game was over. Like the march to the Guillotine was the march to the beds in our room at the rear of the house with crickets singing over the unfinished patio.
Reprise. The present the Game Show Channel. A bath, a show, a bed, a sleep!
This weekend will be different. Honest!
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
Wednesday, October 02, 2002 6:53 PM
Hari Selden is Dune but not forgotten
It is my habit to read several books at a time. Which leads to interesting discussions, remember the time that old Flem Snopes (quite a name, Bill) caught Hans Castorp crossing the River Styx?
I am reading three, count ‘em, three science fiction classics in various guises and under varied posthumous authorship. At a large retail book shop this weekend I weakened. Purchased for 30% off the cover price the latest web of Dune, The Butlerian Jihad. The beginnings of all, the Bene Gesserit, The Guild, Arrakis, the Harkonnens, the Atriedes.
Last summer I read, with growing dismay and more and more pain Frank Herbert’s entire saga. After the first and magnificent Dune, it is definitely a downhill romp traveling an ever steeper uphill path. The story line passes strange into the plain unpleasant. I picked up the Prelude to Dune novels, Brian Herbert (the son) and Kevin Anderson, breezed through House Atreides with some interest, but stopped dead after a chapter or two of House Harkonnen (not really a fault of the book, jes’ little ole me) and have House Corinno sitting on the shelf along with the raucous jeers of many a neglected volume as I move from room to room in the middle of the night. I have read with some interest the first 50 or 60 pages of this new so-called legends (Butlerian Jihad – Volume 1) trilogy.
Never satisfied with a subject that reveals way too much I moved on to the Prelude to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. Strangely called by the then older and mutton chopped Doctor, Prelude to Foundation, an intimate portrait of Hari Selden in the years that he formulated “psychohistory” The three Foundation novels did not leave me panting for more on my initial perusal. My second reading was only slightly more friendly. (An aside: I was recently pleased by some of Asimov’s musings in his Guide to Shakespeare; the good Doc actually gave me some interesting information and insight). On I will to Foundation’s Edge, I think. The whole series chronology is mucked up because Isaac insists on including his Robot novels in the timeline. The three B’s of science fiction have added to the confusion, Greg Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin, each contributing a volume in the Second Foundation Trilogy, unless of course another B wants to join in for a fourth. Oh no maybe they will continue in alphabetical order..A for Asimov, B for etc…)
This strange call for synthesis in the last days of writing also affected Robert A. Heinlein, who decided to include everyone and every fiction in his last (and mostly unreadable) novels. The Beast of the Apocalypse becomes 666 to the 666th power parallel universes. Sherlock Holmes, Julius Caesar, Flem Snopes, D’Artagnan, Winston Churchill, and Isabel Archer meet Michael Valentine Smith, Lorenzo Smythe and Lazarus Long. (River World (Philip Jose Farmer) another trilogy that has swelled to five or more, was a river along whose banks everyone who ever lived resided, Mark Twain and Mussolini some of the heroes) (Is this just a science fiction trend or does it reside in Yoknapatawpha County as well?) Perhaps this is why I have enjoyed reading such a constant mélange of genre and form. Am I longing for my end synthesis?
I start my four or fifth re-reading of Stranger in a Strange Land. My first in 9th grade French class buried under the Allons Mes Amis textbook (or was that Dune?). Poor Heinlein, libertarian and gracious soul, was plagued by long haired sixties Manson looking gurus who showed up at his Colorado Springs home looking to grok and share water. Must have been a trial!
At least Stranger has no prequel or sequel although the uncut edition has been released. However by working within his later synthetic ideal, he has made the longest series of all. His “future history” is not only the bulk of all his work, but all human endeavor. I will be a long time on this reading trail.
I have all but abandoned TV. (Watch Tech TV and schmaltz romance movies on the weekends and sometimes fall asleep like a puppy dog satisfied with the ersatz ticking of his mother’s heart). I look in the weekly entertainment magazine of the newspaper longing for a movie. After I darken my seeking finger with newspaper ink pressing passionately down the list of theaters and times, I usually shrug and decide to stay home. Hollywood has been taken over by screenwriters who believe that foreshadow, special effect and subtext pass for visual and story. Misguided. Stage plays and live music cost more than my disposable income can bear. I write, but le bon dieu and I know how much satisfaction that affords.
In the third century of the greater galactic era Joe warped off to Andromeda Galaxy. He said he went out after a bag of chocolate flavored rice cakes….
Hari Selden is Dune but not forgotten
It is my habit to read several books at a time. Which leads to interesting discussions, remember the time that old Flem Snopes (quite a name, Bill) caught Hans Castorp crossing the River Styx?
I am reading three, count ‘em, three science fiction classics in various guises and under varied posthumous authorship. At a large retail book shop this weekend I weakened. Purchased for 30% off the cover price the latest web of Dune, The Butlerian Jihad. The beginnings of all, the Bene Gesserit, The Guild, Arrakis, the Harkonnens, the Atriedes.
Last summer I read, with growing dismay and more and more pain Frank Herbert’s entire saga. After the first and magnificent Dune, it is definitely a downhill romp traveling an ever steeper uphill path. The story line passes strange into the plain unpleasant. I picked up the Prelude to Dune novels, Brian Herbert (the son) and Kevin Anderson, breezed through House Atreides with some interest, but stopped dead after a chapter or two of House Harkonnen (not really a fault of the book, jes’ little ole me) and have House Corinno sitting on the shelf along with the raucous jeers of many a neglected volume as I move from room to room in the middle of the night. I have read with some interest the first 50 or 60 pages of this new so-called legends (Butlerian Jihad – Volume 1) trilogy.
Never satisfied with a subject that reveals way too much I moved on to the Prelude to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. Strangely called by the then older and mutton chopped Doctor, Prelude to Foundation, an intimate portrait of Hari Selden in the years that he formulated “psychohistory” The three Foundation novels did not leave me panting for more on my initial perusal. My second reading was only slightly more friendly. (An aside: I was recently pleased by some of Asimov’s musings in his Guide to Shakespeare; the good Doc actually gave me some interesting information and insight). On I will to Foundation’s Edge, I think. The whole series chronology is mucked up because Isaac insists on including his Robot novels in the timeline. The three B’s of science fiction have added to the confusion, Greg Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin, each contributing a volume in the Second Foundation Trilogy, unless of course another B wants to join in for a fourth. Oh no maybe they will continue in alphabetical order..A for Asimov, B for etc…)
This strange call for synthesis in the last days of writing also affected Robert A. Heinlein, who decided to include everyone and every fiction in his last (and mostly unreadable) novels. The Beast of the Apocalypse becomes 666 to the 666th power parallel universes. Sherlock Holmes, Julius Caesar, Flem Snopes, D’Artagnan, Winston Churchill, and Isabel Archer meet Michael Valentine Smith, Lorenzo Smythe and Lazarus Long. (River World (Philip Jose Farmer) another trilogy that has swelled to five or more, was a river along whose banks everyone who ever lived resided, Mark Twain and Mussolini some of the heroes) (Is this just a science fiction trend or does it reside in Yoknapatawpha County as well?) Perhaps this is why I have enjoyed reading such a constant mélange of genre and form. Am I longing for my end synthesis?
I start my four or fifth re-reading of Stranger in a Strange Land. My first in 9th grade French class buried under the Allons Mes Amis textbook (or was that Dune?). Poor Heinlein, libertarian and gracious soul, was plagued by long haired sixties Manson looking gurus who showed up at his Colorado Springs home looking to grok and share water. Must have been a trial!
At least Stranger has no prequel or sequel although the uncut edition has been released. However by working within his later synthetic ideal, he has made the longest series of all. His “future history” is not only the bulk of all his work, but all human endeavor. I will be a long time on this reading trail.
I have all but abandoned TV. (Watch Tech TV and schmaltz romance movies on the weekends and sometimes fall asleep like a puppy dog satisfied with the ersatz ticking of his mother’s heart). I look in the weekly entertainment magazine of the newspaper longing for a movie. After I darken my seeking finger with newspaper ink pressing passionately down the list of theaters and times, I usually shrug and decide to stay home. Hollywood has been taken over by screenwriters who believe that foreshadow, special effect and subtext pass for visual and story. Misguided. Stage plays and live music cost more than my disposable income can bear. I write, but le bon dieu and I know how much satisfaction that affords.
In the third century of the greater galactic era Joe warped off to Andromeda Galaxy. He said he went out after a bag of chocolate flavored rice cakes….
Monday, September 30, 2002
September 30, 2002 6:42 PM
The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.
I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.
I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.
Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.
IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!
One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.
By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.
The fires are damped; the smoke has thinned, clear sailing ahead. Look yonder! Freedom when we pass the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis.
I cleaned my basement this weekend. A small corner with deep piles of unnecessary books and accumulated papers (now stacked up near the street for tomorrow’s trash pick-up). Deep behind a bookshelf that leans like it belongs to German expressionist set, tables stacked with appliances, cups, glasses and utensils, a wine rack, there now lies a clear desk in the midst of a secret garden for wrapping myself, when several inches of blizzard snow are berating us from the west, and writing. It is autumn and soon the chill will chase me from the patio or my handy dandy summer made picnic table down near the woods where the West Nile Virus breeds.
I cleaned with a terrible crick in my back which has developed into creak enough to make me writhe in protest when I sit too long this way, or that. Post prandially I applied myself to this dark corner, popped a Martin Denny cassette into the player and now I sit as Quiet Village takes me, macaws and other jungle birds, down the river. My stomach, not unlike Charlie Olnutt's gurgles from the mounds of tomatoes that I piled into my salad. I hope that I don’t have to pass the Queen through a swampy mass of leeches. Why? You may well ask, Martin Denny? Some may even ask, who Martin Denny? Well it is terribly tacky, and although I don’t have any tiki lamps or bamboo evident in my décor (not a single purple mottled green delighted drink with an umbrella stir, not a saried maiden to relieve the tension of the day (I guess maybe such a maiden might well increase my blood pressure, negating the effects of all those lovely drugs that I take in the morning), but I do have Martin and his band of cawing musicians, with piccolo skratchers, chop blocks, triangles, tambourines, tambale bells and crashers filling my ears with the exotic strains of Hawaiian music (Aloha Oy!) and flattening my alpha rhythms to a dream like enough state that I can write irreverent and irrelevant forever.
Lackzoom (less Foley who was oozing from an attack of poison ivy) met last Friday at the Squirrel Cage. We, Marc, Dean, Phil and I, tossed down a couple pitchers and ate in the modified Lackzoom style that a couple heart attacks and delicate stomachs can now allow. We asked the waitress for a sampling of fine snack that adorned the back wall of the bar. We look too mature, too sedate, not a tattoo or piercing adorning us, the poor young thing took us seriously. So we guided her through a menu of gently baked not fried pretzels, sour cream and dazzle chips, we stopped short at the Pork Rinds. Times and physiologies just ain’t what they used to be. Let me explain.
IN THE OLD DAYS, After a performance we would unwind up at this Squirrel Hill Bistro. I can now state with great objectivity that you would never find anyone sitting close to us because our heritage would show, the guardedness of a Greek after hours club, the secret bitter sweetness of a Jewish religious ceremony, the raucous rambling of an Irish wake and the obstinate enrollment rites of Cosa Nostra. In short, we managed through the entire snobbery of our family camaraderie to be an almost totally unbearable group. Tolerable only to ourselves. We would laugh! Talk about the show and before the owners decided that they had enough and would toss us on to Forbes Avenue we would manage to eat Lackzoom style!
One of every snack from behind the counter, opened and poured on the table, mingled with the puddles of booze, beer, plastic bag and cigarette ashes in a frightful volcanic mound. In we would dive. Grabbing handfuls of the most redolent prepared snacks ever created by our western intellectual tradition. Yelling above the incessant beat of the juke box, talking over the mutters of neighboring tables, joking freely, discussing the universe of comedy discourse, making a bubbling boiling world, oblivious to the secondary world of our dulling senses. Sometimes the waitress got it, some times she didn’t. That was part of the grand blast! The other customers steered a course around us to the balcony seats or the rest rooms in the rear next to the pin ball machines, which still smell of the same urinal cakes.
By these tasty chips we are in hock to Senor Wences once again.